THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK

And Your Work Style

This is an experiential workshop, so much of the focus will be on the learning through discussion rather than lecture. The following are summing of the main points of the workshop.

INTRODUCTION

History has shown that the nature of work is in a constant process of change. As civilisations grow and develop the requirement for labour grows and develops with it. This is obvious when we are talking about low technology civilisations such as ancient Egypt and the Mayan civilisation, but lets think a little closer to home.

At the turn of the last century there was still a reasonable sized population of people who were unable to read or write. Yet, they were still able to be gainfully employed. In fact, there was a whole class of workers, called a scribe, dedicated to this reasonable size population of people who were unable to read or write.

So how were illiterate individuals able to be employed? Nowadays if you cannot read or write you are virtually unemployable! What has happened that is different? What has happened in the last 100 years to make that different? The answer is obvious, and the nature of work has changed in keeping with the change of our civilisation. So, lets get even closer to home?

Who in 1980 would have considered the profusion of personal computers into everyday life as it is today? Who would have considered the development of the Internet? Who would have considered that our standard of living and quality of life is not determined by how hard we work, but the dollar exchange rate!

These and other factors all change the nature of work. We are all workers, but we can only work when we know what to do, and how we should do it, when we work.

So clearly the nature of work has changed. In fact, the nature of work is always changing. And that is the point of this course, coping with the nature of change in work. Lets do an exercise to identify the changing nature of work in our work today.

EXERCISE: On the whiteboard, the list all of the examples of changes in work that you can think of, that have occurred in your office.

RECOGNITION

So, what do we do about the nature of work and how it changes? It is all well and good to discuss the nature of change in work, and to look at it from an historical perspective, but what can you do to see it coming? How can we recognise it when work changes for us? How do we see that change?

Obviously, there is no set answer. It is a matter of learning the skill to recognise subtle changes as they occur in the workplace, and unlearning the skill of habitually ignoring those subtle changes. Lets think about this because this is very important.

Everybody is very good at ignoring subtle changes. In fact, this occurs so much that in psychology we even have name for it. It's called habituation.

HABITUATION

Habituation is a person's ability to filter out repetitive, non salient stimuli so that the brain does not waste unnecessary processing power dealing with extraneous stimuli that are not pertinent to the task at hand. Habituation is the ability for all organisms with a central nervous system to be able to get used to a constant stimulus. In English this means you don't consciously notice those things that are the same everyday. In fact, this phenomena also stops you from being consciously aware of tiny variations in those same things that are the same everyday.

With habituation you get used to it.

And this is a problem, because it stopped you from seeing the subtle changes of work. When I ask people about their work I ask them to tell me about it, and they often say “oh, it’s the same old thing”, but in reality no two days are exactly the same! Yet we all fall into the trap of thinking that each day is exactly the same as the previous one.

EXERCISE: lets do a thinking exercise. Try to remember how you got to work today. Think about every minute step that happened from the moment you left your front door. Look at all the detail involved in your journey. Think about all the things that you saw. Think about how you felt at the time (tired, sleepy, hungry, rushed, anxious, irritable, numb). Tell the group how you got to work today.

Look at all of that incredible detail. When you look at that from this perspective it requires an awful lot processing power doesn't it? Yet, before I raised this issue if someone had asked you how to get to work you would have replied, “I drove or took the bus”.

So habituation performs a very real function in our life, but it can also blind us to very subtle changes as well. Who really does notice if we are using too much photocopy paper? Or are we getting more phone calls with long delaying enquiries? Yet these observations are very important to any business because they determine the nature of the work that the business does.

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