The fun, and useful, thing about having a little vacation and time off, is that when you step back from the everyday tasks for a few weeks, other thoughts can be born. When you are not in the eye of the storm, it is easier to think the big thoughts, the new thoughts and the challenging thoughts. This can be about both work and personal life. I’ve been thinking about how we value ourselves and our success when it comes to our work. I also link it to the studies that Gallup does every few years. The report is called State of the Global Workplace and shows that as many as 74% of all respondents in Sweden can be classified as “Mentally checked out”. This means that you are pretty fed up with your work and only do the minimum possible to avoid being criticized. If we have then built up a culture and a system where no one really takes, or is given, personal responsibility, then it means that the 74% do not have to do much at all to avoid criticism. Criticism is absent, because it is always possible to blame others, preferably upwards in the organization. “It’s politics”, “it’s the boss”, or something similar. But back to vacation and leave. In a typical hierarchical organization, we often measure our success in only two aspects: position/title and salary. The first is usually directly related to the second, but it is actually possible in forward-thinking organizations to get a higher salary without having to climb the hierarchy. Otherwise, if you move from being an ordinary employee at the lowest level to becoming a head of unit, you also get a few thousand more in salary. If you then move on to become a head of department, you get a further increase. If you stay at any level, you’ll only get the centrally negotiated salary increases. No wonder then that success at work is measured in our position and our salary. Here we should lift the idea and see that success is so much more than just the success of position and salary. There are other factors that are worth so much more to our overall well-being, which I hope you can see as important in valuing success.
Why not also value:
- Your mental health.
- Your physical health.
- Your joy at work about what you do.
- Your ability to take time off work when needed to balance the so-called ‘life puzzle’.
- Your freedom to control, yourself and with your employees, what to do to create value and how to do it (design your processes)
- Your ability to manage your own working day (process management).
Of course, you can decide for yourself how the above shares are distributed. The distribution varies depending on where you are in life. Sometimes a salary is more important to build up a strong economy, while at other stages of life the opportunity for free time is more valuable. I’ve made a simple tool for you to use if you feel like it. It’s a Google Sheet template that I’m sharing via this link. Weigh the areas:
- Salary
- Position
- Mental health
- Physical health
- Joy
- Freedom
- Own planning
- Self-determination
You then enter your rating between 1 and 10 for the statement in each area. Then the template calculates a weighted score between 1 and 10, where 10 is the best, on how satisfied you feel now with your work situation. If you don’t have a Google account, send me an email and I will send you the tool in Excel instead. With that, I wish you a great summer and encourage you to take the opportunity to think the big, new and challenging thoughts about your work, and maybe other things too. Encourage others too, so that together we can reduce the 74% who are “mentally checked out”. People need to be in the place where they are energized and create value. Not everyone can fit everywhere, but everyone has their place. We need more people with commitment to meet the increasingly challenging future.
