What's Happening at Work?
We are hearing more and more how work environments are filled with chaos, fear, anxiety and hesitation. Has that been your experience? We'd like to know. This is all anonymous and we are not going to tell HR or your boss. We just want to get an accurate read of how it is out there and what people are doing. If we develop something that can help folks behave a bit differently, then the workplace will improve and everybody will be happier!
You can help us out by entering a description of what you think the typical large workplace is like these days and /or what behaviors you see? Use imagery words that really give us a feel for what it is like to be in that environment, perhaps list some behaviors and actions that you see people doing because of the current economic environment - like they show up late for work, are short with each other, work on their resume all day or play solitaire while waiting for the next round of layoffs...
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My life ended in Jan., 1996. That's when I left a job with a staff - we worked as a team, each to his/her own best capacity, and got a huge amount done. It was also fun. We laughed a lot, we're friends 13 years later. It was wonderfully enriching and creative.
Then jobs got 're-engineered' - we sat in cubicles, we were 'empowered' to do our own clerical tasks. That's why I have five college degrees - to fix the copier and spend my days filling out time sheets, expense reports, backing up disks . . .I have never been more bored or frustrated. I left the corporate world for university teaching (at a 50% pay cut) thinking I'd have a more soulful existence, but discovered the 'classroom management' website - 80 hours/year of pushing buttons to upload documents that a student assistant once would have photocopied for me to hand out.
For reasons that would fill more than this webpage, students are overwhelmed, bored and disassociated from traditional teaching but I'm restrained in what I can do to present alternative methods of instruction. So I click a mouse and welcome mortality.
I am reading your book, Innovation at the Speed of Laughter, and love everything you say as it is SO TRUE and I identify with your remarks about how people should be able to work to their own best skills rather than all be cookie-cutter data drones having to do the same thing.
We did that once, as a nation, when some were bosses and some were support staff; you could have a simple, predictable job right out of high school; now my students who are terrified of higher-level work need a college degree 'just' to do support functions, and I have to do my own support functions that I once would have been laughed at as anal and incompetent for thinking they were something I should deal with.
I so long for a chance to feel the creative spark that was once my daily energy boost. I have a few minutes here and there, in a brainstorming session or a chance to role-play for students what it is to be an advertising creative person. But it is basically a dull slog. I live about 30 miles east of St. Paul and wish your improv classes were offered on this side of the river, for instance in community ed - it would be a chance to have some fun in a life gone dead. Or if you wanted to collaborate on a charter school or a university degree that would draw on something other than people sitting in rows . . . I would love to be part of something different.