Ethos. What is it? One only realises it's missing when it's not there.
I remember it was there when I joined the Local Government Benefits Service in 1988. I was inducted into the ethos of public service by my colleagues. The guiding principle of the Benefits Service was to serve our tenants by getting the benefit due to them paid out as quickly as possible so that they would not be evicted for rent arrears and be made homeless. That was our public duty. It was based on trust and confidentiality and professionalism.
Many of my colleagues at the time were graduates. They joined the public sector as a vocation - a calling to a higher moral purpose than those who went to work in the City or the private sector for the money or the prospect of a more glittery career. Other colleagues had worked their way up from sixteen-year-old filing clerks or similar lower level jobs. They expected to be there till they retired. We all expected to be there for the long term. Most of us lived locally. We felt a sense of pride and importance working for our local council.
The more people we helped the more satisfied we felt. Our efficiency flowed from this ethos.
In those days we had personal caseloads. We got to know the people we were paying benefits to: whether they were vulnerable and needed a visit, whether they needed a quick reminder to inform us of changes in their circumstances or whether they were having trouble getting their student grant. This guaranteed an important element of accountability. We even went to the inconvenience of making emergency cash payments to private tenants if they showed up with a notice to quit to make sure they did not lose the rooves over their heads. As recent graduates we could empathise with their experience of grim flats and dodgy landlords. All private landlords were seen as possible Rachmans.
When we went on strike for better pay and conditions we had one leaflet for our fellow workers and one leaflet for the public to explain why we were striking; more often than not they supported us.
In general we were a close-knit, happy group of employees with a common vision of the service we worked for, good relations with our tenants and a fairly good sense of our value and worth if our employers tried to erode our pay and conditions.
Of course, we could have worked better. There were the usual slackers and idlers and cheats who abused the trust of colleagues. There was undeniably the smug confidence of job security. Performance management could have been tighter but to a large extent as we began gearing up for privatisation in the mid-90's we had pretty much got to where we wanted to be. So we were all the more horrified to be chucked out like carefully farmed fish to the swarming sharks of the private contracting companies.
When did this 'ethos' begin to disappear and how did it start to change the service we offered?
To be continued...
Friday 13 November 2009
Tuesday 10 November 2009
Personal Fulfilment: In the Workplace?
At the recent Battle of Ideas conference work strand ‘The changing meaning of work – from work-life balance to unemployment’, Stephen Overell from the Work Foundation suggested that meaningful work had shifted from the purely economic sense of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ or the broader vocational sense of public service to something more subjective - a quest for personal fulfilment that is not necessarily progressive.
He sees this new inwardness in how we see work as a reflection of the gradual evolution of social values: greater affluence, education, rapid rise in professional and managerial work in the 20th century and a dominant culture of expressive individualism.
Finding satisfaction in one’s work is not new. A job well done, whether it’s stacking shelves, maintaining a well kept filing system or producing a well crafted report can give one immense satisfaction. Having a good employer, likeable colleagues and a nice working environment make work a pleasanter place to be but none of these things provide that sense of fulfilment we seem to crave today.
Craftsmen or artists may come closer to a sense of personal self-expression and fulfilment in what they do. Not long ago, a sense of vocation – a calling to public service – provided an adequate sense of fulfilment for many nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers or civil servants.
So what’s changed?
Stephen Overell sees the loss of meaning increasing since the 1970’s with the decline in the concept of vocation, the ethos of public service and self-sacrifice. Without this meaning can seem ‘self-interested and solipsistic’ and the search for meaning in work today is therefore not necessarily progressive.
I agree with Stephen about the loss of the ethos of public service but I also believe that this is linked to a bigger picture: the narrowing of the public space in which people were able to find fulfilment and meaning beyond the limitations of the workplace.
During the 1980’s and early 1990’s, I and my colleagues were involved in political campaigns: in support of the miners and Irish Freedom, against racism and imperialist wars, for womens rights and abortion on demand. At work we organised around the trade unions in town halls and on picket lines.
Our identities were defined by our political ideals. Personal fulfilment was a collective endeavour.
One may have shuffled papers or stacked shelves at work but outside of work, one could be addressing a rally, organising a march or protest or being interviewed on the television or radio.
Work was a material means to a more fulfilling end. Perhaps we need to recreate our public space with new visions of the society we want and forget about trying to seek personal fulfilment at work.
He sees this new inwardness in how we see work as a reflection of the gradual evolution of social values: greater affluence, education, rapid rise in professional and managerial work in the 20th century and a dominant culture of expressive individualism.
Finding satisfaction in one’s work is not new. A job well done, whether it’s stacking shelves, maintaining a well kept filing system or producing a well crafted report can give one immense satisfaction. Having a good employer, likeable colleagues and a nice working environment make work a pleasanter place to be but none of these things provide that sense of fulfilment we seem to crave today.
Craftsmen or artists may come closer to a sense of personal self-expression and fulfilment in what they do. Not long ago, a sense of vocation – a calling to public service – provided an adequate sense of fulfilment for many nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers or civil servants.
So what’s changed?
Stephen Overell sees the loss of meaning increasing since the 1970’s with the decline in the concept of vocation, the ethos of public service and self-sacrifice. Without this meaning can seem ‘self-interested and solipsistic’ and the search for meaning in work today is therefore not necessarily progressive.
I agree with Stephen about the loss of the ethos of public service but I also believe that this is linked to a bigger picture: the narrowing of the public space in which people were able to find fulfilment and meaning beyond the limitations of the workplace.
During the 1980’s and early 1990’s, I and my colleagues were involved in political campaigns: in support of the miners and Irish Freedom, against racism and imperialist wars, for womens rights and abortion on demand. At work we organised around the trade unions in town halls and on picket lines.
Our identities were defined by our political ideals. Personal fulfilment was a collective endeavour.
One may have shuffled papers or stacked shelves at work but outside of work, one could be addressing a rally, organising a march or protest or being interviewed on the television or radio.
Work was a material means to a more fulfilling end. Perhaps we need to recreate our public space with new visions of the society we want and forget about trying to seek personal fulfilment at work.
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