Alienation at Work

Old friends seemed to fade away. It wasn 't in my makeup to work at building friendships in or out of business hours.

—An entrepreneur, quoted in DAVID E. GUMPERT and DAVID P. BOYD,

"The Loneliness of the Small-Business Owner"

It may never have occurred to you that you can experience loneliness at work. You probably think of loneliness primarily in terms of your personal relationships (or lack of them), and you associate it with the bad feelings you sometimes have when you are physically alone. Often loneliness at work is harder to recognize than is loneli-ness in your personal life simply because you work in the company of others. You see people interacting with each other throughout the workday—you interact with them, too—and no one seems lonely. The feedback gap seems to be filled.

Yet it is important to reflect a bit on this idea of feeling lonely

^ a crowd because a common place to feel lonely in a crowd is at work. Even though others nearby seem to have the potential to fill your feedback gap, you can feel depressed and sad in their company.

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For some reason you do not thrive on the feedback that comes from them. Perhaps their input is meaningless to you—these are not peo-ple you particularly care about. Or you may not be ready for their feedback because it is not really the kind of feedback you want right now. Being lonely in a crowd is especially difficult for people who do not understand the principle of the feedback gap: If you erroneously believe that togetherness should heal your loneliness and if you still feel lonely even when company is clearly available, you will blame yourself for your sadness. Clearly, such self-blame will not increase your positive solitude.

It is sometimes hard to get in touch with the fact that you are feeling lonely in a crowd, and it is especially difficult at your job. Many of us put on our business role along with our business suit, hiding our true selves and our true feelings, even from ourselves. Sometimes the role you play is so habitual that you do not recognize your own loneliness. Yet, there are many reasons why, in the business environ-ments in which we work, people often fail to receive the feedback that they need.

The word business itself is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word bysig, which means "to be occupied and/or diligent." Business actu-ally does mean busyness—filling the feedback gap with activity. Some business is fulfilling, and some is not. As we have already seen, filling the feedback gap indiscriminately—as with popular music or with meaningless television programs—leads to increasing your loneli-ness rather than to reducing it. Busyloneli-ness, activity merely for its own sake, is counterproductive to self-fulfillment. Many people know this intuitively. Americans' intense interest in entrepreneurship and small business is one indication of people's strong need to find meaningful work for themselves.

The detrimental effects of busyness are usually subtle. Keepii busy can keep you preoccupied and superficially happy. You rn recognize only vaguely that the work you do is meaningless to y(

personally; or that because you are so busy, you are accumulatu

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months and years of unfulfilling activity; or that your relationships at work are superficial.

Because you are busy, you may simply not have considered that there are better ways to fill the feedback gap. Most people hope to live meaningful lives. They want to grow and to develop themselves, to enjoy the world around them, to contribute to the well-being of their family and friends, to alleviate the distress that they see around them in their communities and in the world. But it seems to most of us, too, that there is always a lot of business to be accomplished.

Sometimes we let this business dominate our daily lives. Busy people may get sidetracked from their life goals.

We cannot forget, either, that business is also about making money. In our capitalist society a primary goal of a business is to create as much money as possible so that the people who earn it can then use it to pursue meaningful lives. Unfortunately, to earn their living, many people do work that is otherwise meaningless to them, and if anything in life is a challenge, it is spending eight hours every day putting off who you really are. It is hard to put off really living until you receive your paycheck, to put off meeting your own needs until the office closes. When you do work that is personally meaning-less, you can easily become lonely for yourself. In a job that has little meaning to you, for as many hours a day as you work you will be split off from yourself. You will become one more alienated worker.

In fact, one of the biggest problems in business today is the creation of meaningful work. Everyone knows that too many jobs are dull or stressful, but often the jobs cannot be changed without hinder-ing productivity.

American businesses have not done a good job of encouraging People to find the meaning that does exist in their work. Yet, if you believe in your company's mission and your own job contributes to that mission, no matter what your job is, it is important. Every job that contributes to the welfare of the company is valuable. Whether

•t is as an accountant or janitor, production worker or president, each

eniployee is necessary for the smooth functioning of the whole. But

we Americans seldom point this fact out. In our business culture we

einphasize competition, rather than cooperation, and we measure

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personal value by the amount of money that is made. In the end, the contribution of the guy who makes a lot of money turns out to be

"meaningful," while the contribution of the guy who makes only a little money does not. Besides, our attitude is that the little guy can easily be replaced. No wonder it is difficult for many people to enjoy their jobs—jobs whose meaning to the company is often obscure and in which their own goals, the meanings they wish to pursue, are certainly not important.

Contrast this situation to that of the Japanese, who often empha-size to all employees the importance of their jobs. Japanese compa-nies have recently achieved a measure of fame for sending employees to so-called hell camps that train them in harsh discipline and company loyalty through long hours of physical exertion and even deprivation.

Less known is how each employee at these camps is taught to believe in the importance of his or her personal contribution to the whole. In one instance, the employees at a camp were sent into the town around the training center to beg for menial work for the day. If they found work that was too challenging—like bartending—the trainers made them move on to something less interesting, like sweeping. At the end of the day, the students reconvened to discuss their work.

All felt grateful for the opportunity to help someone out. They had enjoyed their work because they had made useful contributions, how-ever small, to the companies that had "hired" them. Of course, the trainers urged the employees—most of whom were beginning a bank-ing career at the entry-level job of teller—to remember these feelbank-ings whenever they get bored in their work: All work, even if it is simple and not well paid, contributes to the general welfare of the company and its people, and, if you adopt this attitude, even menial tasks can be done with joy.1

Why is there alienation at work? One reason is that today work has become highly specialized, a fact that has enhanced productivity but reduced psychological satisfaction. A legal secretary may prepare the forms for a case but never meets the client. A doctor sees a patient only for a few minutes and, often, focuses on only one particu-lar part of the patient's body. Both workers know that their job is less meaningful than it might be because they are not seeing it

through-Another reason for alienation is that in modern times workers

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jre primarily employees, and it is sometimes difficult to fill the feed-back gap in meaningful ways when you are working for someone else.

Mo longer are we a nation of independent farmers and small business-people. Working in a modern corporation, people have less control over the type of work they do, the scheduling of their time, and the design of their personal surroundings. They have little say as to what the overall goals of the company will be.

Of course, you can choose what type of company to work for.

Often today companies are too large and bureaucratic to offer mean-ingful work to most of their employees, so you can choose a smaller firm. You can choose a company whose product you believe to be important or useful. Working as a receptionist for a company that makes a product you like (good food, sports gear, or books) may be better, emotionally speaking, than working as a manager for a com-pany that makes a product that you believe to be harmful (cigarettes).

Also, you can choose to join a management team that you respect.

Unfortunately, companies usually change without consulting their employees. The company may grow so large that your own job seems small and unimportant. Or the company may simply change its mission, assuming that employees' jobs—your job—must change to meet the company's new goals. You may accidentally end up in a job that is no longer meaningful to you.

Companies design their reward systems to increase the behav-iors that they want. At the same time, all companies suppress, in the sense that they fail to reward, behaviors that are not directly in line with their own goals. They are not being malevolent or even nianipulative. Companies are merely being rational in pursuing then-goals. However, rewarding all or even most of your individual goals, talents, and ideas is not in the company's plan, and it never will be.

Most likely, you will be rewarded in relation to how well you meet such corporate goals as producing profits or increasing sales or taking

°n additional responsibilities. Sometimes your monetary rewards will

even be high. But typically, a company will not think of you, or treat

you, as a whole human being. It will ignore large chunks of who you

^—maybe even your creativity, your values, and your initiative, kvery person has to ask herself or himself whether the feedback she

°r he gets at work fills the feedback gap well enough. Does it really

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further your career? Your life goals? Does it make you feel good about yourself? Does it make you feel good to be alive?

The individual for whom there is a close match of company rewards and personal goals is, indeed, fortunate. Sadly, many employ, ees don't find such a match. Because companies reward only a small portion of their potential, these workers feel alienated.

One especially important cause of personal alienation on the job is the inability to express your own moral convictions. Today this area of business concern is receiving a lot of media attention, without, unfortunately, causing much real change. Most companies do not solicit individual employees' opinions on such moral issues as divest-ment of investdivest-ments in South Africa or the impact of the company on the environment. You will not be encouraged to express your opin-ions, and if you do express them you may face punishment. It is not often that you, the whole person, can really contribute to your com-pany's ideas. It is typically the top management's or the stockholders' ideas of morality that dominate.

In our society you are, technically at least, free to leave any particular job. However, this freedom is often illusory. Leaving a job is not as easy as it sounds. If you have roots in the community or if you are older or narrowly skilled or otherwise difficult to place, you will have a hard time finding new work. Economic recessions can affect even the most skilled. Thus, many of us are forced to stay and to try to cope with our alienation. We must live with a feedback gap every working day.

Some people try to reduce their alienation at work by making friends in the workplace. Unfortunately, loneliness at work is often complicated, rather than helped, by the kinds of friendships you will discover there. Sometimes it is difficult to make truly close friends at work because the intense competition in your company will keep people apart. When promotions, salary, and interesting jobs are in scarce supply, being in competition with your friends is bound to weaken some relationships. You develop "business friendships," but you seldom find the kind of intimacy in which you share a great deal of yourself.

Also, it makes sense to be wary of intimate on-the-job friend-ships. Close friends at work may seriously, even if inadvertently, hurt

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your career. For example, they might sympathetically mention to someone that you are concerned about a serious health problem in y0ur family—thus, through the inevitable grapevine, alerting the management to your family's tendency toward heart disease. At a certain age, this information could squelch your chances for promo-tion.

If you have puzzled over your inability to make real friends on the job, consider that these pressures make intimacy especially dif-ficult in the workplace. Sadly, being with people all day and not getting close to them will increase your alienation.

Burnout

A variant of job alienation is burnout. Burnout is the kind of loneliness you feel when your job requires you to act one way even though you really feel differently. You burn out when you are forced by circumstances to match your behaviors to the demands of the situation, rather than being allowed to express your true feelings and beliefs. Burnout is actually worse than filling the feedback gap with merely meaningless activities because you are filling it with behaviors you actively disagree with and do not want to do.

There are many situations in which burnout may occur. Some-times people are forced to hide their emotions as, for example, when they feel they must be nice for a while to a customer whom they detest. In other instances a person has to put on an act every minute, all day. For example, a waitress must seem polite, positive, and energetic even if she happens to be feeling surly, negative, and tired.

A funeral attendant may be feeling happy, funny, and expressive, but he has to appear grave and subdued.

If the difference between how people actually feel and how they are forced to act on the job is large or if they must control themselves

°ver a long time, they burn out to a point of depression or anger.

Burnout is especially likely to occur if they disagree that the job really Squires them to put on an act. For instance, whether a flight atten-dant should be required to be polite to an obnoxious passenger is a Matter of considerable debate between attendants and management.

Of course, all jobs require emotional control. This is normal and

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expected. Disney world is famous for creating a dual world of "on stage" and "off stage" for its employees. On stage includes any time the employees are in contact with the public. Off stage exists in employee-only areas—the system of tunnels that underlies Dis-neywcrld. When an employee is on stage, he or she is expected not just to do a job, but to play a role. An employee handbook suggests:

First, we practice a friendly smile at all times with our guests and among ourselves. Second, we use friendly, courteous phrases. "May I help you." . . . "Thank you." . . . "Have a nice day." . . . "Enjoy the rest of your stay," and many others are all part of our daily working vocabulary. [Walt Disney Productions, 1982]2

At McDonald's, desirable traits for people who greet customers in-clude sincerity, enthusiasm, confidence, and a sense of humor.3 For the team that designed the Macintosh computer, Apple Computer chose only those people who expressed great enthusiasm about working on the machine.4

The question is how to distinguish between acceptable and stress-producing roles. At the Mary Kay Ash cosmetics company, salespeople are expected to sing cheerily, "I've got the Mary Kay Enthusiasm" and to take a vow of enthusiasm. The total emotional commitment required can alienate an employee. Quashing their true thoughts and feelings, employees work hard to accept their own acting. Some learn to rationalize their faked enthusiasm as "just part of the job." Other employees, however, are not as successful at adapting. They may not believe that their continual smiles should be part of the job. These employees fake their smiles in bad faith,5 and they are troubled by not being in touch with themselves. They burn out and act out:

A young businessman said to a flight attendant, "Why aren't you smil-ing?" She put her tray back on the food cart, looked him in the eye>

and said, "I'll tell you what. You smile first, then I'll smile." The businessman smiled at her. "Good," she replied. "Now freeze and hold that smile for fifteen hours."1

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This woman is breaking the unspoken rules about how she should act emotionally on the job, and she is annoying her customers in the process. Her alienation from herself is a threat to her employer, and it is a danger to her, for it may lead to both emotional and physical health problems.

Authorities believe that even smiles faked in good faith can lead to health problems. Psychologist Christina Maslach has pointed this out in her work with burned-out professionals.7 The worst problems occur in the helping professions. Burnout happens often among nurses, mental health workers, and physicians. It also occurs among educators of all ranks, and it is significant among people who work in service positions, including salespeople, judges, and referees. The social worker who must extend empathy to every client clearly

In document Positive Solitude (Page 76-93)