What Do You Owe Your Boss?

From The Age's Good Weekend supplement
November 9, 2006
www.stephaniedowrick.com

Do you feel entitled to be paid because you are at your workplace - however little you are doing? Have you ever felt entitled to take off yet another Monday because, frankly, your weekend was far too good? What about sending a text message to your boss to say you are not coming to work today - or ever again? Or leaving out crucial information in a report because it required too much effort to collect? Have you ever traded on colleagues' goodwill by doing a lot less than your share? Or looked for a better job in your current employer's time?

Issues around loyalty in the workplace are not new. For all the talk of the good old days, when faithful souls joined a company at 15 and left 40 or 50 years later wiht a hearty handshake and a handsome watch, there have always been workplace tussles relating to loyalty and power. And these issues run in two directions. Loyalty is not just about how long you stay in the same employment. It is also about what happens while you are there: how you are regarded, whether you are respected, how mutual trust and transparency are developed - or undermined.

Employees are also vulnerable to exploitation. When companies restructure, the same demands may be left to far fewer people. In many workplaces, people are pushed to take on significant levels of extra responsibility for no additional rewards. Low-paid employees may be required to attend meetings or training without being paid for that time. Little extras that cost a company virtually nothing may be arbitrarily withdrawn. Training may be inadequate, undermining people's confidence to do their job well. People may be sacked or made redundant by a company that can't afford its employees but can afford directors' bonuses. And of course anyone who works for a boss who is bad-tempered, unpredictable, self-serving or plain incompetent will suffer, sometimes seriously.

Most of us spend at least 40 hours a week at our paid work, sometimes many more. Add travelling time, plus the time we spend thinking about our jobs and extending our skills or recovering from our working day, and a vast chunk of our lives is accounted for. Even when we change jobs often, the dominance work has persists. People routinely describe themselves in work terms: "I'm an accountant." So how we get along with our colleagues and boss, and especially how we feel about ourselves in our workplace rolem has a huge effect on our emotional wellbeing. It also affects our physical health. But when it comes to these contentious issues of loyalty, self-responsibility, co-operation and "entitlement", it is the psychological impact that will be most powerful. Work, along with intimacy and parenting, offers us our best chance to grow up, pushing us to see that our agenda is only one among many and that the world does not begin or end at our own front door.

Giving lip service to an ethical way of working is easy. It requires old-fashioned character, insight and self-respect to translate that into action, to recognise how beneficial it is to think about work with an emphasis on cooperation and fairness. From whichever side of the line you stand, this means applying the golden rule: being the colleague or boss you would most like to have, not making self-serving excuses, owning up to your choices and having enough loyalty to yourself and your own values to recognise how those choices are affecting other people - and shaping the person you yourself are becoming.