dissatisfied?

August 21, 2008 at 2:32 am (communication, creativity, culture, education, psychology, sociology, trends)

Consider the following aspects of job satisfaction.

1) The EMOTIONAL (i.e. people are doing work they personally enjoy and when they know that the outcome of their work is meaningful)

2) The SOCIAL (when one works with people one likes and respects, where feedback is appropriate, and where the motivation to perform is positive)

3) The PHYSICAL (whether it be manual labor that is not abusive or about a comfortable, easily accessible office for a white-collar worker)

4) The FINANCIAL (I realize how subjective the phrase “well-paid” is; but let’s say that “well” implies a cool savings of at least a fifth of monthly pay.)

I have a feeling that a strong fulfillment of just one or two of the above could lead a person to say they are pretty satisfied at their job overall. For example, let’s say you are getting remunerated at a high level; that might negate the ill effects of all other aspects. Or for example, if you aren’t, but you adore your colleagues, you may grin and bear the fact that you don’t absolutely love your work either. This might be a tad simplistic, but you get the drift…

And yet, the percentage of people who are extremely dissatisfied at their jobs these days is spectacular. Well, why?

It would be easy to primarily blame issues with the last factor on the list – inadequate compensation is indeed a major concern in most economies today. But how about we focus on the first two for a bit.

The kind of work you choose to do obviously influences to a great extent how much you enjoy your work. Do your aptitude and abilities match your profession? If not, you are probably not alone. People are often socially pressured to take up jobs they are doomed to dislike. Many of us have heard things like: “Don’t do music, you won’t get a job doing that!” or “Where’s the money in studying art?” or “Whatever would you do with a degree in language when you grow up?”

Sir Ken Robinson has given a remarkable speech (Do schools kill creativity?) on what the consequences of discouraging kids from their natural affinities are. I do not blame society for putting pressure on their children to become engineers and accountants. I see that the advice is well-intentioned – but it is not necessarily right. And what ends up happening is the creation of a world where people are not synched up with their jobs, which then contributes significantly to job dissatisfaction – and ultimately reduces commitment and productivity at personal and organizational levels.

The issue above is a huge one and needs much attention. Even so, let’s say you chose to do what you want to, or even if you chose to do what you can at least tolerate doing. Unfortunately, there’s a bigger hurdle that often creeps up. Typically, after the initial novelty of a work place has worn away, you begin to grapple with a work culture that is far from ideal.

It’s not often that workplaces elicit the kind of sentiment that companies like Google do…

More on work culture in an upcoming post.

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how to track well-being

January 22, 2008 at 9:06 pm (culture, india, psychology, sociology, the world)

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Here is a thoughtful piece from the Times of India today. By Jay Bhattacharjee, a business and industrial analyst, it comes on the eve of Sarkozy’s visit to India. I thought it made a couple of very valid points - those that corporate India could be truly mindful of at this juncture.
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy may have recently received a lot of media attention for reasons that are not exactly flattering. However, one policy initiative of his seems to have aroused a lot of interest. The Elysee Palace has invited two Nobel laureates, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to advise the French government on a new methodology for calculating national income (NI) and gross domestic product (GDP) that would incorporate non-economic inputs like quality of life and other social indicators.
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This development is a reflection of the deep divide between continental European scholars and the Anglo-Saxon market economy proponents on what constitutes a nation’s well-being. In post-Thatcher Britain and post-Reagan America, the approach to the calculation of a country’s GDP and NI has been based on conventional economic indices. Even allowing for corrections to these figures on account of different price levels (purchasing power parity), the estimates of NI and GDP have not mirrored the approximate levels of national well-being.
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Economist Paul Krugman wrote an article in July 2005 on the relative performance of the French and American economies. He said that the big difference between the two “is in priorities, not performance”. He went on to emphasise that the issue was about “two highly productive societies that have made a different trade-off between work and family time”. He felt there is a lot to be said for the French choice.
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According to OECD data, French productivity, defined as GDP per hour worked, is manifestly higher than the US figure. While admitting that French GDP per capita is well below that of the US, Krugman attributes it to the additional time that French workers spend with their families. Without minimising the problem of higher unemployment in France, he notes that full-time French employees work shorter weeks and enjoy more paid vacations than their American counterparts.
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When we compare typical middle-class families in France and the US, it becomes evident that the French enjoy good schooling (at little cost) and an excellent healthcare system that are not available to American families. The Krugman analysis was taken a step further by an OECD study in 2006. It considered a number of alternative indicators of well-being or even “ill-being”, as it said tongue in cheek. It recognised that GDP, as currently calculated, has many shortcomings, since it does not take into account factors like leisure or the degradation of the environment, or income distribution.
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OECD analysts researched the impact of unconventional variables like these three, as well as other indices of wellbeing like social outcomes of policies and reported happiness. The authors admit that the new variables suffer from various drawbacks, including availability, measurement and crosscountry comparability problems. Nevertheless, they strongly recommend that conventional GDP calculation must be supplemented with other indicators, in order to give a more meaningful nuance to the concept of national welfare.
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Clearly, Sarkozy would like Sen and Stiglitz to carry this research further and possibly create a newer framework for measuring national well-being. During the run-up to his election last year, Sarkozy himself played the Anglo-Saxon card to denigrate his country’s record of creating and maintaining a high quality of life that the rest of the world admired. He was castigated by British commentators who pointed out that 2005 data portrayed the UK quite poorly when it came to critical social indices. While it had overtaken France in per capita GDP, it had approximately 17 per cent of its population living in poverty, compared to 7 per cent in France.
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Sarkozy now realises that he had picked the wrong ammunition during the election campaign. The French people would never buy the Anglo-Saxon model that his fund-raisers had been pushing for. His new advisers may help him to restore some balance in his policymaking.
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For his Indian hosts, will Sarkozy advocate a similar index?

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the origin of wealth

November 12, 2007 at 1:28 am (books, culture, politics, sociology, the world)

I am excited about this book. I read excerpts from it at a bookstore today and did something I don’t usually - bought it without reading any reviews. The title brought to mind two classic books: The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin) and The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith). Intuition served me well; the book by Eric Beinhocker (2006) combines evolution with economics. I’m not sure if it will hold up to expectations (reviews are mixed – I have since looked!) but here are some of the reasons I picked it up.

  • The writing is compelling and nuanced
  • An entire chapter is devoted to how stark right-left politics will soon have to blur (phew!)
  • He seems to argue for the importance of corporate policies that favor many small risks over a few big ones and challenges the omnipotence of the “bottomline” in business (and I think I agree)
  • I want to know more about this term called “punctuated equilibrium” that evolutionists throw about freely
  • His approach seems holistic (it combines sociology, evolution, psychology, math, anthropology, economics…)
  • He digs deep and gets at the historical and philosophical core of his subject matter of “complexity economics”
  • Beinhocker’s a nice name. (It also brings beer to mind somehow.)

So I’ll be off now and will try and update this after I finish reading (or give up on) the book. Good night! In a jetlagged kinda way.

 

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marketing memes

October 22, 2007 at 7:29 pm (advertising, branding, market research, religion, sociology)

Folks in evolutionary studies have this idea of memes. If I understand it right, a meme is the fundamental unit of cultural evolution – like the gene is to biological evolution. Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976, and it seems to have become quite the thang, in academia and out. According to Dawkins, some memes – like genes – will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and mutate.

I see memes as ideas that evolve in to trends – the iPod revolution, for example. It’s like a cultural contagion for better or worse – an idea that leaps from mind to mind. Santosh Desai, a brilliant commentator on popular culture, explains: “A meme is something that is imitative, almost in a reflexive way rather than a cognitive way. Like a tune which gets into your head and refuses to leave. It is possible to infect other people with it. It bypasses the intellect.” Think catchy. Viral marketing and religion are other examples of memes cited by Desai.

Sort of a side note: Dawkins contends that memes can at times be even more powerful than genes and gives the example of celibacy. There’s more on the spread of ideational infections – whether bad or good – in this TED talk by the remarkable Dan Dennett.

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