Are you discontent with your job?
Unfortunately: most of us are. And if you aren't currently, you surely have been a time or two.
Which is an absolute bummer.
Because the biggest problem with a discontented workforce, in my view, isn't the harm it does to an organization's productivity, but the resulting waste in human potential that comes with just getting by, and the unrelenting toll that takes on our spirits.
Look at this. It's disgusting.
The share of workers experiencing job discontent hasn't changed (more or less) for more than two decades. It's hovered around 70% (the % of employees not engaged at work, in Gallup's lingo) for two decades! That's a long, long time! Especially for a problem that is 1) well articulated 2) agreed upon and 3) the focus of real budget dollars.
But it hasn't led to much progress.
As efficient as organizations are at distributing resources to create value in the marketplace, why are they so bad at leveraging human capability (joy, purpose, impact, etc.)?
Organizations are far too good at taking the excitement of starting a new job, or the engagement that comes with working on really interesting problems, or, as is especially the case in healthcare, the human connection that comes with caring for other human beings, and grinding away at it all the way down to job discontent.
Org-wide job discontent is very much an organizational problem while also being very much our problem, and while the ultimate solution arrives in a paradigm shift away from industrialism that doesn't have to be all that far away, the solution (I'm sorry to share) isn't arriving from up top any time soon.
Which is fine, because the advice and solutions for a re-contenting a discontented workforce focus on org-wide or department-level interventions, which is efficient, but leaves out the idea that you, or me, or us may not be best served by interventions conceived in a conference room.
The top-down problem solving approach also ignores the reality that a discontented workforce is actually a feature of how we do things currently, rather than a bug. That our top down approach to everything, no matter how zhuzhed it gets, is actually a major contributor to job discontent. Our system of work leads to job discontent, from the basic frustrations resulting from bureaucratic machinations (a bad boss, back-to-back-to-back meetings, for example) to the all-consuming effects of burnout.
In other words, job discontent is a completely explainable byproduct of how "we" organize and manage work.
Which is not fine, because it isn't changing, at least not until many, many more of us become aware of industrialism's shortcomings.
So for here and for now, what it all amounts to is this: the job discontent problem is ours to solve.
Lest we're cool with discontented workdays and diminished spirits. But who wants to make a career of that?
