Baldy brainbox Alain de Botton has written a new book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and in it (apparently - haven't read it yet) he rehearses a number of ideas that those of us in employment marketing have been fiddling around with for years. Here's a clip of him speaking what sounds like a well-oiled bunch in Brisbane:
Lots here is familiar: in particular, I'm liking his line that the best employment proposition is worthwhile work. Which, of course, is the idea of recognising that your output always has a significant, and ultimately helpful, purpose.
The cliche illustration of this, beloved by everyone in HR, is that story of the President touring NASA and asking the guy pushing the broom what his job is. (Don't know the story? You'll find it here.)
But it's also quite brilliantly put in the unintentionally camp and silly management textbook Gung Ho!. No job is entirely crap, it argues - follow the chain far enough and you'll see the good in everything. This from an online digest:
The first Gung Ho! secret is the Spirit of the Squirrel. Peggy Sinclair, our heroine, is asked by Andy Longclaw, her mentor, to watch a group of squirrels gathering nuts outside his grandfather's cabin in the woods. When Andy asks her what she thinks about squirrels, she mentions how hard they work. In fact, she says that if everybody at their plant worked as hard as the squirrels, they could turn the situation around quickly.
Why do squirrels work so hard? Peggy learns that squirrels perform worthwhile work. They gather food not only for themselves but also for others for the winter.
This first secret contains three main elements. First, it's important that people know they are making the world a better place. Seldom do we help our people analyze their jobs and look at the end results -- how they improve others' quality of life. People want to make a difference; they want to know they perform important work. The key to making this happen is sharing information with people so they understand why things are done a certain way and what part their work plays in the overall scheme.
Gung Ho! is required reading even though in many ways it's an startlingly poo-ey bit of poo. The basic premise is that a dying native American (Longclaw) teaches a factory boss (Peggy) how to manage via references to the natural environment, making it laugh-out-loud in all the wrong places. For some inexplicable reason it's available on YouTube in Spanish, so you can see what I mean.
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