David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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It’s Working That’s Essential

May 10, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Trying to identify who is (and isn’t) “an essential worker” is the wrong game to be in today. As the current upheavals are making plain: all workers are essential workers.  

Everyone who wants to work in America should be able to do so because:
 
– the economy depends on all workers, and not just somebody’s idea about who is essential and who is not;
 
– economically, strong families and communities depend upon wage earners and the kinds of livelihoods that generate those wages; and
 
– psychologically, the well-being of families and communities derives from their members feeling like they are (or can grow up to be) productive members of these basic social groups. 
 
As a result, if a country like the US is to thrive, its democratic institutions must ensure that the benefits of capitalism and hard work flow not only to the “factory owners” but also to everyone who wants to work in those “factories” and in the communities that sustain them.
 
During the bloodletting of American jobs over the past 8 weeks, the government has tried to cobble together a safety net of small business loans, stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits to protect the workforce. But every day that passes makes these efforts seem more like a fool’s errand. For tens of millions of American workers, these stop-gap measures are failing them and the anxious testimony about their daily struggles is heart-breaking proof. A labor market that was already teetering before March 1 has begun to collapse.
 
Over the past 50 years, the US has put economic growth (championed by the Right) and victim compensation for those that a growing economy fails to help (the band aids championed by the Left) at the center of government policies that most affect workers. As if there weren’t enough proof already, the Covid-19 crisis has revealed the bankruptcy of this approach for all but a wealthy few. It’s long past the time to make the economic welfare and psychological wellbeing of every American worker our national priority.
 
In the great rebuilding that lies ahead, it’s the ability to work, to support ourselves “with the fruits of our labor,” and to feel like we’re contributing to our families and communities that is essential. That means we’ll need to start treating all workers in America like they’re essential workers.

Empty the Old Glass & Help Fill a New One

Over Easter, a young Episcopal priest in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn delivered a sermon called “The World is Empty Now. How Should We Fill It?”  His impassioned plea later appeared in The New York Times, which is where I read it.

Father Paulikas heralded the remarkable opportunity that’s been presented by a time when the old ways of living and working seems to be vulnerable (or breaking down altogether) and new ones that are more durable and humane can not only be imagined but also realized if we have the courage to do so. 

Physically isolated and emptied of our usual lives, we are being forced to face ourselves in a way that few alive today ever have before… Having emptied ourselves, what do we really want to fill our world with once it is time to rebuild?

After the crucifixion on Friday, we’re in the empty tomb on Saturday, he said, daring to hope for the resurrection on Easter Sunday. In other words, this empty but hopeful time is an opportunity to ask basic questions about how we want to live and work tomorrow. 

What does it say about our economy that it depends on the labor of people whose lives we are willing to sacrifice? Do we want to continue participating in an exhausting economic system that crumbles the instant it is taken out of perpetual motion? And what is the virtue of a desire for constant accumulation of wealth and goods, especially when they come at the cost of collective welfare and equality? These are not just policy questions. They are spiritual concerns that come into view with sharp clarity in the emptiness around them.

Since this is where we find ourselves, what should we do about it?

It Starts With Deciding What’s Most Important and All the Other Things That Aren’t

 While accepting that our top and lesser priorities might be different, I tried to puzzle through the process for myself a couple of times last year as it relates to my jobs as a writer, arbitrator, citizen and member of a community where difficult choices between one thing and another always have to be made. 

In a January, 2019 post, I’d recently finished Edmund Phelp’s Mass Flourishing and had just read Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. I found myself in broad agreement with how each of them viewed the challenges confronting workers today and at least some of their proposals for addressing them. 

Phelps argued that for America to flourish, its workers need to flourish by taping into their native resourcefulness—the kind of free enterprise that’s been blossoming here and there since this novel coronavirus pushed us into a corner. Prior to 1970, the vast majority of workers flourished as entrepreneurs and small business owners, Phelps argued, tapping into their creativity at the front end of their work and their feelings of accomplishment at the backend for sustenance.

By giving us an opportunity to demonstrate our capabilities, work allows us to realize our potential, be proud of our abilities to provide for ourselves and our families, be similarly proud of what we’re making or doing, and be more confident when facing the future because we feel that we have a stake in it and that it is not merely ‘happening to us.’ When enough individual workers flourish like this, Phelps argues, an economy overall flourishes.

For his part, Cass argued that “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity, so it should [also] be the central focus of our public policy.” When we fail to produce enough jobs to serve that objective, the human toll weakens the nation as a whole, and tears its social fabric. To help prove his point, Cass cited studies finding that:

workers never recover economically from unemployment; that men only form families when they have work that can provide for them; that unemployment is a trigger for divorce; and that children have better outcomes when at least one parent is working. Moreover, communities where people are working are more vibrant and tend to attract more investment. In other words, communities filled with workers are good for those living there and good for everyone else too.

Before an April, 2019 post that was called “The Social Contract Around Our Work is Broken,” I’d been reading how Soshana Zuboff distinguished between the pre-1970 American economy and the roughly half-century of work that has followed in one of her essays. From say 1980 to the present, when the benefits that companies gained from pro-business policies failed to “trickle down” to the vast majority of workers, the result has been a yawning wealth gap between the top 10% and all other American workers. But this almost “feudal” system of lords and serfs was hardly inevitable.

American companies after World War II were expected to offer a kind of communal reciprocity that involved hiring the available workers, hiking wages when possible, and sharing their prosperity rather than hoarding it… Zuboff cites [Karl] Polanyi’s post-War study of General Motors not only for the ways that fair labor practices, unionization and collective bargaining preserved ‘the organic reciprocities’ between its workers and owners but also for how much the public appreciated these shared benefits at the time.

The period between 1945 and 1970 featured some glaring social and political divides, but it also saw many companies maintaining “the basic reciprocities” between them and their workers. Unfortunately, it’s a balance we’ve failed to strike since then.  I’d argue that at least some of the human desperation we’ve been hearing during the current economic meltdown stems from the fact that it’s our state and local governments and not the companies we work for that have become the guarantors of our jobs.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A Smile and a Frown

In the debate over who is (and isn’t) “an essential worker,” I saw this posted on-line this week.

It’s pretty funny until you realize that it also depicts the average McDonald’s worker before his status was “elevated” by the current state of emergency. (The rake says it all, don’t you think?)

This week’s news has been loaded with reports about “disposable workers” in farming and meat processing.  We’re hearing about home health workers risking their lives for low pay and seniors who have worked their whole lives moving back with their children because they could never save enough for their retirements. As it relates to work, America’s social contract has failed on nearly every front to safeguard “the basic reciprocities” between our companies and our workers.

In the emptiness of today, we have a chance to re-consider whether this is ok with any of us.

There was a report from the Brookings Institution this week arguing that  “essential” workers should receive “hazard pay” during this health emergency. In a sidebar that included audio were comments from one of these temporarily essential workers. The following is some of what Matt Milzman, a Safeway cashier in Washington D.C., had to say, in the plainest of ways, about what we’ve lost but could regain:

[A]ll of these millionaires and billionaires who run these companies are thinking, how do I maintain my profits? I think there needs to be a fundamental restructuring of how we think and do things in this society that focuses on humanity. The humanity of us in the grocery stores, the humanity of the doctors and nurses in the hospital, the humanity of the people who continue to pick up your trash every day, the humanity of all people in this situation who are going in every day, risking their lives to try and carry on as normal.

If it’s working that’s essential, we should aim to recover the humanity in every job.

This post was adapted from my May 3, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a newsletter each week (and not miss out on any), you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right. 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: democratic capitalism, economic policy, Edmund Phelps, essential workers, Oren Cass, social contract around work, Soshana Zuboff, work, working

The Good Work of Getting What We Need As Patients

December 2, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Since recent posts here and here about work in healthcare—discussing burnout among health professionals, concerns about misuse of patient data, and questions about who is policing our rapidly changing health system—I’ve continued to follow developments in the field.  
 
Over the past few weeks, some of you have also shared your troubled reactions about how work in healthcare has been evolving.
 
The net of these developments is that while there are grounds for alarm about the uses of our health data, its proliferation presents some extraordinary opportunities too. Concepts like “precision medicine” become more realistic as the amount and quality of the data improves. More and better data will also help us to live longer and healthier lives. On the other hand, whether AI and other data-related technologies can enable us to improve the quality of the work experience for millions of healthcare professionals is a stubbornly open question.
 
In this last healthcare-related post for a while, there are two, practical rules of thumb that might give us greater sense of control over how our healthcare data is being used, as well as a couple of ways in which more and better health-related information is already producing better patient outcomes.
 
The good work of getting the healthcare that we need as patients (both for ourselves and for others that we’re caring for) requires healthy doses of optimism as well as pessimism, together with understanding as much as we can about when excitement or alarm are warranted.

Two Rules of Thumb To Inhibit Misuse of Our Medical Data

The first rule of thumb involves insisting upon as much transparency as possible around the uses of our medical information. That includes knowing who is using it (beyond the healthcare provider) and minimizing the risks of anyone’s misuse of it.

Unfortunately, more of this burden falls on patients today. As health systems increasingly look to their bottom lines, they may be less incentivized to protect our personal data streams. And even when our interests are aligned, doctors and hospitals may not be able to protect our data adequately. As I wondered here a couple of weeks ago: “Can these providers ‘master the learning curve’ [of big data-related technologies] quickly enough to prevent sophisticated consultants like Google from exploiting us, or will the fox effectively be running the chicken coop going forward?”

An article last weekend in the Wall Street Journal called “Your Medical Data Isn’t As Safe As You Think It Is” raised a couple of additional issues. As patients, we may be lulled into complacency by the fact that much of our data is rendered “anonymous” (or stripped of our personal identifiers) before it is shared in big databases. But as this article describes at length, “de-identified” data in the hands of one of the tech companies can easily be “triangulated” with other data they already have on you to track your medical information back to you. That means they remain able to target you personally in ways you can imagine and some you cannot.

Moreover, even if it remains anonymous, your medical data “in a stranger’s hands” may still come back to haunt you. As one expert in data sharing observed, companies that monetize personal data currently provide very little information about their operations. That means we know some of the risks to us but are in the dark about others. Of the known risks around data dispersal, you may suddenly find yourself paying higher health-related insurance premiums or barred from obtaining any coverage at all:

Google will be in a good position to start selling actuarial tables to insurance companies—like predictions on when a white male in his 40s with certain characteristics might be likely to get sick and expensive. When it comes to life and disability insurance, antidiscrimination laws are weak, he says. ‘That’s what creates the risk of having one entity having a really godlike view of you as a person that can use it against you in ways you wouldn’t even know.’

Our first rule of thumb as customers in the health system is to insist upon transparency around how our providers are sharing our medical information, along with the right to prevent it from being shared if we are concerned about how it is will be used or who will be using it.
 
The second rule of thumb has always existed in healthcare, but may be more important now than ever. You should always be asking: is my medical information going to be used in a way that’s good for me?  If it’s being used solely to maximize Google’s revenues, the answer is clearly “No.” But if your information is headed for a health researcher’s big data set, you should ask some additional questions: “Was someone like me considered as the study was being constructed so the study’s results are likely to be relevant to me?”  “Will I be updated on the findings so my ongoing treatment can benefit from them?” (More questions about informed consent before sharing your medical data were set forth in another article this past week.) 

Of course, understanding “the benefits to you beforehand” can also help you determine whether a test, drug or treatment program is really necessary, that is, if it’s possible to assess the pros and cons with your doctor in the limited time that you have before he or she orders it.
 
With medical practitioners becoming profit (or loss) centers for health systems that operate more like businesses, the good work of protecting yourself and your loved ones from misuse of your data requires both attention and vigilance at a time when you’re likely to be pre-occupied by a range of other issues.

More and Better Data Is a Cause for Excitement Too

There is an outfit called Singularity University that holds an annual conference each year with speakers who discuss recent innovations in a range of fields. Its staff also posts weekly about the most exciting developments in technology on a platform called Singularity Hub. One of its recent posts and one of the speakers at its conference in September highlight why more and better medical data is also a cause for excitement.
 
To understand the promise of today’s medical data gathering, it helps to recall what medical information looked like until very recently. Most patient information stayed in medical offices and was never shared with anyone. When groups of patients were studied, the research results varied widely in quality and were not always reconciled with similar patient studies. Medicine advanced through peer reviewed papers and debates over relatively small datasets in scholarly journals. Big data is upending that system today.
 
For us as patients, the most exciting development is that more high quality data will give us greater control over our own health and longevity. This plays out in (at least) two ways.
 
In the first instance, big data will give each of us “better baselines” than we have today about our current health and future prospects. According to the Singularity Hub post, companies as well as government agencies are already involved in large-scale projects to:

measure baseline physiological factors from thousands of people of different ages, races, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds. The goal is to slowly build a database that paints a comprehensive picture of what a healthy person looks like for a given demographic…These baselines can then be used to develop more personalized treatments, based on a particular patient.

Although it sounds like science fiction, the goal is essentially “to build a digital twin of every patient,” using it in simulations to optimize diagnoses, prevention and treatments. It is one way in which we will have personalized treatment plans that are grounded in far more accurate baseline information than has ever been available before.
 
The second breakthrough will involve changes in what we measure, moving organized medicine from treatment of our illnesses to avoidance of most illnesses altogether and the greater longevity that comes with improved health. As these developments play out, it could become commonplace for more of us to live well beyond a hundred years.
 
At Singularity University’s conference two months ago, Dr. David Karow spoke about the data we should be collecting today to treat a broad spectrum of medical problems in their early stages and increase our life expectancy. He argues that his start-up, Human Longevity Inc., has a role to play in that future.
 
Four years ago, Karow conducted a trial involving nearly 1,200 presumably healthy individuals. In the course of giving them comprehensive medical checkups, he utilized several cutting edge diagnostic technologies. These included whole-genome and microbiome sequencing, various biochemical measurements and advanced imaging. By analyzing the data, his team found a surprisingly large number of early stage tumors, brain aneurysims, and heart disease that could be treated before they produced any lasting consequences. In another 14% of the trial participants, significant, previously undetected conditions that required immediate treatment were discovered. 
 
Karow’s argument is that we’re “not measuring what matters” today and that we should be “hacking longevity” with more pre-sympomatic diagnoses. For example, if testing indicates that you have the risk factors for developing dementia, you can minimize at least some of those risks now “because of third of the risks are modifiable.” 
 
Every start up company needs its evangelists and Karow is selling “a fountain of youth” that “starts with a fountain of data.”  This kind of personal data gathering is expensive today and not widely available but it gestures towards a future where these sorts of “deep testing” may be far more affordable and commonplace. 
 
We need these promises of more personalized and preventative medicine—the hope of a better future—to have the stamina to confront the current risks of our medical data being monetized and misused long before we ever get there. As with so many other things, we need to hold optimism in one hand, pessimism in the other, and the ability to shuttle between them.

This post was adapted from my December 1, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Building Your Values into Your Work, Continuous Learning Tagged With: baseline health measures, big data, control of your data, data, ethics, health and longevity, health care industry, healthcare, misuse of patient data, pre-symptomatic diagnoses, work, work of being a patient

The Next Crisis Will Be a Terrible Thing to Waste

September 30, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

(photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com @pixels)

We are moving into less settled times both here and in the rest of the world. Several different storms are gathering along the waterfront today:
 
– in politics, with gridlock both breaking down and intensifying over impeachment and the future course for America, in the UK over its relationship with the rest of Europe and what it wants for itself, in the battles between populists and traditionalists elsewhere;
 
– in economics, with weakening global prosperity and the likelihood of a financial pullback that will affect almost all of us as the fundamentals weaken;
 
– in the environment, with increasing alarm over the current effects of global warming, the longer-term outlook for the health of the planet, and state actors’ halting efforts to respond to the challenge; 
 
– in the world order, with a rising China, a demoralized and divided West, and a handful of nations around the edges that are both willing and able to take advantage of the uncertainty; and
 
 – in the prevailing spirit, perhaps the most impressionistic of these storms but potentially the most powerful, as pessimism, alarm, hysteria, backlash and hostility get reduced into urgency in their boiling cauldron—a drive to do something, anything to move off the dime.
 
The silver lining is that chaos, confusion and uncertainty also provide opportunities. When you’re clear about the priorities behind your work, your chances to advance them are always greatest when the storms finally break as long as you’re ready to rebuild the storm-tossed world in the ways that you want. Now is the time for getting ready, because the chances to address our most pressing problems–and the rewards for us and others that can flow from that–may never be greater.
 
When the work we do helps us realize our priorities, it becomes more purposeful and satisfying.  As I argued here last week, in many of our jobs it is both possible and desirable to align our priorities with that job’s broader objectives. Improved health. Greater fairness. A more sustainable way to live. 
 
In other words, it’s tying what you want yourself to almost every job’s higher purposes. Not only does the alignment reduce friction between you and those impacted by your work, it can also produce an esprit de corps with your bosses, co-workers, customers, suppliers and members of the broader community as they support your efforts. You’re experiencing the shared benefits of a productive community while taking home both the pride and satisfaction that comes with it. 
 
Of course, another essential of “good work” is its future focus: anticipating circumstances that might enable you to take bigger-than-usual strides towards realizing common priorities. It is being aware of the obstacles and opportunities today so you are ready to act when the storms break and the lay-of-the-land shifts, weakening those obstacles and providing those with a vision of the future a path for realizing it. That’s because everyone who has weathered the storm wants to put the pieces back together and is unusually receptive to putting it all back together in some better way.
 
Realizing your particular work ethic in times of crisis has almost nothing to do with luck but everything to do with your mindset and plans. It’s having a vision of the better future that you want, keeping your eye on that goal line as the game degenerates into chaos, and, when everyone is finally able to listen, inviting your fellow survivors to help in rebuilding something that you’re convinced will be more durable and sustainable than all of you had before. At such times, aligning your personal priorities with a higher, common purpose will not only be satisfying for you, it can also make changes that seem impossible today, possible tomorrow.
 
My priorities (in search of this broader resonance) would include the following:
 
Thriving workers, families and communities.  Most of us have jobs as citizens of democratic countries with capitalist economies. We regularly make our preferences known by choosing leaders who share our priorities. As citizens during unsettled times, what kinds of change would we support and priorities would we pursue?
 
In large part because “thriving workers” are the foundation for other kinds of positive change (such as reducing income inequality, gaining affordable health-care and safeguarding the environment in our communities), I’ll be looking for leaders with the courage to say they are foregoing other “hot button” reforms to invest in retraining today’s workforce for a more automated world; to support trade buffers so that workers here don’t lose their jobs to cheap foreign labor when they’re compensated more fairly or work under safer conditions; and to support new public policies like bolstering the economic security of low-wage workers by supplementing their incomes through payroll deposits, thereby encouraging their continued work and improving their chances to start building wealth for their families and communities.
 
We don’t hear politicians making hard choices between costly alternatives.  Or willing to make the engines of capitalism more democratically-driven by ensuring that working men and women have a larger seat at the table with business owners. In the wake of the economic storm that’s coming, there will be many citizen-driven opportunities to support leaders who are eager to rebuild the future on the backs of thriving workers, while admitting that to realize that goal means putting many other goals on a back burner. It should also be a bi-partisan issue. As citizens, our focus and support can help them to accomplish this one important thing as the political process bottoms out and it struggles to identify new, common goals.
 
Environmental stewardship. As Alain de Botton argues persuasively (and often amusingly) in The Pleasures & Sorrows of Work it can be difficult to understand the wide-ranging impacts of your paying job given the global supply chains that feed it and the distribution networks that bring your “goods or services” to consumers. Difficult yes, but hardly impossible.  Among many other things, De Botton invites us to learn more about the consequences of our work, both for better and for worse. I’d argue that when we do, we’ll be able to see “how we can work better in the future” in a common light that includes “greater environmental stewardship.”
 
Is the product I’m selling or helping to sell, is the service I’m providing and the ways I’m providing it, improving the health of the planet or reducing it? Raising consciousness in the workplace about an issue like environmental stewardship provides opportunities for alignment with others–including  bosses and even owners—who may share your concerns. The accelerating storm of today’s climate debate and the quest to find our way out of it will likely present many opportunities to change business practices (and even nudge them in groundbreaking directions) where we work. 
 
Righting the balance between people and profits. Connecting your paid work to its wider-world impacts is not just limited to environmental stewardship. As global economies get roiled and we begin to look beyond these upheavals, we can be thinking now about how our jobs can provide greater benefits to us and our communities and not simply about how we can assist business owners in becoming profitable again. To ensure that you and I are not merely helping to restore the profit-dominated status quo after the next recession, we could be learning now how to connect our labor to “more of its fruits” than higher corporate dividends. 
 
As I argued last March, administrators of a global education test are using that test to assess independent thinking, collaborative problem-solving and building better communities. On the theory that we “treasure what we measure,” students globally are now building these aptitudes in their classrooms because they will ultimately be tested on them.

By the same token, employers could assess (and reward) their employees–and be assessed themselves–for “aptitudes” beyond profit-making, including their success at tying company productivity to greater community benefits. For example, workers could push their companies to retain them (even with reduced hours) instead of firing them during economic downturns because policies like this maintain stable communities, or to take less profit from a product or service if it will keep a job here instead of losing it to a foreign worker. Moreover, employees who can demonstrate that they have strengthened the company-community bond would be rewarded for doing so. 
 
The groundswell for this broader focus needs to come from forward-looking employees as well as executives and owners, and the time to be thinking about more community-oriented work assessments and broader exercises of corporate responsibility is now.
 
After we’ve weathered the next downturn, are looking for better ways forward and desiring greater corporate accountability for common problems—that’s when you can stand up with your new way to determine economic success.

That’s when you can argue that what’s good for the company needs to be good for the community too, and that the economic fallout might be reduced next time if the broader community were part of the equation from the start.  

That’s when you can gain even more pride and satisfaction than is usually available when you help to solve common, work-related problems, because now you’re helping to humanize the foundations of democratic capitialism itself.

+ + +

We are far enough today from the economic recession that began in 2008 to gain at least a measure of historical perspective.  Two new books are arguing that Barrack Obama was so eager to restore economic stability and the health of the American banking industry that he failed to “use” this crisis (as FDR had used the Depression) to seek fundamental—and to these authors—necessary changes to the country’s economic policies. 
 
For example, in the course of re-building America’s way out of the last recession, they observe that Obama (like Clinton before him) never challenged the economic imbalance between the corporations and ordinary working people that had been a hallmark of the Democratic Party from the 1930s through the 1980s. When it came to punishing wrongdoing, Obama refused to insist that the bankers who had profited from the bubble they had created in the housing market be held accountable. When it came to economic initiatives like the Affordable Care Act, he favored market solutions over government policies and direct interventions (unlike the alphabet soup of initiatives during the Thirties or The Great Society programs of the Sixties).
 
According to Reed Hundt’s Crisis Wasted (out last April) and Matt Stoller’s Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (coming in mid-October), Obama sought to preserve the pro-business status quo rather than rectify the economic imbalance that disadvantaged workers, families and communities while benefiting the American business owners who held (and continue to hold) a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth.
 
I agree with them that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and that the last one was a string of opportunities neither taken nor pursued. None of us should be willing to waste the next one.

+ + +

I’m defining a “crisis” here as a ground-deep unsettling of prior certainties. A political/economic/environmental/moral crisis tends to prove that “the ways we used to do it” are no longer working and, for a brief window of attention and opportunity, regular people are willing to explore (and even support) both different and better ways forward. It’s why from the perspective of our work, we need to be ready with arguments, data, plans, hope and visions for the better world that each of us wants when that window finally opens.
 
We don’t need to agree on the changes. (The bold-faced objectives above just happen to be some of mine). But I’d argue that all of us need to be active parts of the conversation, even when it’s full of anxiety and has a fevered pitch. Because it’s when your work really can “change the world” and when the personal satisfactions and sense of purpose that come with it can be similarly transformative.  
 
In 2016, a group of forward thinkers who were clustered around the University of Sussex in the UK created educational materials for anyone who is interested in seizing the opportunities of a world in flux. Those materials begin with powerful examples from history where:
 
– radical changes occurred in disruptive times that would not have been possible otherwise;
 
– to nearly everyone’s surprise, immediate changes were accepted by the public fairly rapidly; and 
 
– longer-term improvements followed, with some expected and others exceeding expectations.
 
The Sussex materials also describe how, in a host of practical ways, change-agents can capitalize on the opportunities crisis presents and maintain forward momentum. 
 
There is a broader discussion of their approach and a link to additional materials here.  If you’re interested in readying yourself to take full advantage of the opportunities after our gathering storms break and the re-building begins, I think you’ll find their approach empowering. 
 
Our work can always be aligned with deep motivations and high purposes, but the rewards are never more satisfying than when you’re helping to build a better world out of one that may be ending.

This post was adapted from my September 29, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work, Building Your Values into Your Work, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: balance between people and profits, crisis wasted, economic policy, employer and employee assessment, environmental stewardship, opportunity during crisis, priorities, rebuilding, thriving workers, work, working

Making Our Jobs as Big (or as Small) as Possible

September 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We bring our priorities into our work–making it more purposeful and satisfying–by using our capabilities more deliberately and by demonstrating our values when we do our jobs.

Our basic “capabilities” include our personal autonomy (or the drive to realize our gifts) and our generosity (or encouraging the autonomy of others who are touched by our work, from co-workers to bosses, customers, suppliers and the broader community that supports our efforts). 

Our “values” are moral intuitions (or feelings) that frame our experiences and help us decide how we should respond to them. Examples include freedom, fairness, equality, personal security, an ordered life or the sanctity of living things. For each one of us, some values more than others provide quick, intuitive signals that guide us as we try to figure out how to interact with the world around us. 

Work is more satisfying when it engages our capabilities and serves our values, because they are among our most basic priorities. 

When talking about these ideas, people often ask me: “On a practical level, how do I align my priorities with the work that I do everyday?”  It’s often followed by a second question: “What if my employer’s priorities are different from mine—won’t this put us at odds with one another?”  My quick answers are as follows. 

Alignment of personal priorities with job priorities usually comes down to your mindset: how you see yourself in that job. Is it doing the bare minimum, “staying within your lines” and keeping your eye on the clock so you can leave for home after you’ve put in your time OR do you pour yourself into that job, finding opportunities for your priorities either within or right along side the priorities of whomever you’re working for? In other words, how hard are you trying to find more satisfaction in every job that you do?

Sometimes these alignments are nearly impossible, as in my recent post about gig-economy workers at Uber and Amazon. At each of these companies, the capabilities of their ride-hailing and delivery drivers are being exploited instead of respected. Uber’s and similar companies’ business models depend on offloading as much risk and cost onto their workers as possible. These workers’ recourse? They have to look to governments (like California’s) to safeguard their basic priorities on the job, leave those jobs altogether, or tamp down these basic drives because their economic necessities override the personal costs. 

On the other hand, in many jobs it is both possible and desirable to align your priorities with those of your employers and others who benefit from your work. It is what organizational psychologists have called “job-crafting.”  When you bring a suitable mindset to your job—when you ask, “how much instead of how little can I make out of it?”—many jobs become opportunities to build more satisfaction, and even fulfillment, into your hours spent working.

After elaborating on job-crafting and my own take on it, I’ll share some fateful testimony from two practitioners of “this highly practical art” from an interview I overheard while on the road earlier this week.

The Opportunity to Job-Craft More Rewards Into Your Work

Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale’s School of Management was talking about job crafting on a terrific podcast called Hidden Brain this week. I hadn’t heard this episode, but a regular reader wrote me about it (thanks Joe!) and listening reminded me of how long so-called industrial psychologists (who study our behaviors and expectations around work) have been tinkering with the boundaries of our jobs and the perceptions we bring into them.
 
Take (as Wrzesniewski did) a janitorial job cleaning a hospital. Let’s also assume two different men filling that job:  I’ll call them J and B. Both were hired to show up at regular times and keep the floors and available surfaces in their parts of the hospital clean. With the tools and working hours available, they can clean everything they’re responsible for in their 5-day workweeks. The following Monday, J and B each start the same circuit over again.
 
Let’s assume that J always does what’s expected of him without complaint, but rarely does more than is required. Viewing his job as a paycheck, he’s hardly fulfilled by it. Instead of satisfaction at the end of a workday, he’s more likely to feel a tinge of resentment, that it’s beneath him to clean up after other people, but he needs the income so he puts up with the indignity and has done so for twenty years. J rarely interacts with the hospital staff or patients, although he understands that keeping the place clean contributes to the overall mission of the hospital, which is to help people to stay alive and hopefully get well.
 
B couldn’t see his job more differently. Feeling that he’s part of a team improving patient outcomes, B regularly makes a point to give a cheerful word to patients he’s noticed have few visitors, will go the extra mile to clean parts of his area that no one else seems to be getting to, and gives staff members he’s known for much of his working life words of encouragement when he senses that they’re feeling down. Unlike J, B connects his job to something bigger than himself—promoting the health of everyone who is around him everyday—and goes home with both satisfaction and pride that he’s contributed to the hospital’s mission along with a paycheck from it. 
 
B accomplished this by “job-crafting” the way he sees his work and the importance of it in the broader scheme of things. From my perspective on work, he has also engaged both his capabilities and his values when it comes to service and community in order to gain additional rewards from it. As podcast host Shankar Vedantum put it, there are people who quit their jobs when they win the lottery and others who still want to work. B might keep working because the rewards he brings home aren’t just monetary ones. 
 
After 25 years of studies in the psychology journals—from scholars like Arnold Bakker, Maria Tims and Justin Berg as well as Wrzesniewski—there seem to be three different approaches that workers take when “crafting their jobs.” Sometimes they rearrange how they characterize their job responsibilities, emphasizing certain aspects over others. Is a chef simply cooking a meal that her customers will keep paying for or is it far more important to her that she’s creating plates that are pleasing to the eye and producing delightful experiences for friends who keep coming back? One is a successful economic exchange while the others are more than just that.
 
A second approach focuses not on the end product but the interactions that help to produce it along the way. Instead of B deriving meaning from making the floors shine, he finds it in those interactions with patients, visitors and staff along the way.
 
The last approach is how you see yourself on the job. J would say, “I am a janitor” or define himself apart from this job altogether if asked “what do you do?” B on the other hand might say proudly, “I am an ambassador for the university health system, creating an environment that promotes the healing process,” and really mean it.
 
In a post from last February, I made an argument that uses terminology from economics and ethics instead of psychology to try and prove a similar point. When you take responsibility for your job satisfaction and don’t expect somebody else to provide it, you act like a stakeholder instead of an employee.  Because job satisfaction is important to you, you collaborate to solve work-related problems that involve everyone (co-workers, suppliers etc.) and everything (like the communities and environments) that your work impacts. The compensations that follow are always more than the paycheck attached to your job description, because you’re consistently investing your effort into yielding a more satisfying job experience by addressing what’s important to you and to others.

I’m Bringing You More Than Tomorrow’s Weather

In a week that was dominated by students demanding that older generations take bolder steps to ensure that they have a livable planet in their future, it’s worth noting that most people still fail to recognize that rapid global warming is one of the most important problems confronting them. Until a proper majority engages with this problem politically, policy makers will simply avoid taking the necessary actions. Perhaps no American workers see the need to engage more of the public—while also having the ability to engage people effectively–than the men and women who bring tomorrow’s weather to millions of people who have little scientific background or knowledge in their communities.
 
When I overheard on the radio a conversation with two meteorologists a couple of days ago, it was clear that these weather reporters (along with increasing numbers of their colleagues) are engaging the public on the imperatives of climate change by grounding their daily reports or 5-day forecasts in statistical evidence that goes back (or extends forward) 20 or even 100 years where they and their viewers live. 
 
They might ask: how many unusually hot days did we use to have in July or unusually destructive storms in September, and how many are we having now–before providing the relevant numbers. These men and women are accustomed to explaining climate-related information to non-scientists—so they’ve already developed more skills and gained more trust than perhaps anyone, in any other line of work, when it comes to placing the recent developments involving weather and climate in a meaningful, scientific context. Moreover, by sticking to hard data and avoiding political “calls to arms,” they are building audience knowledge and engagement while maintaining their impartiality.
 
When these meteorologists make the deliberate effort to locate today’s weather in a much larger story (instead of just sticking with whether their listeners need to bring umbrellas to work tomorrow), they are “job crafting” or “taking responsibility for common, work-related problems” far beyond the media contracts that they’ve negotiated. In other words, they could easily “get by with less” but refuse to do so. Both interviewees made clear how much providing a broader context for their weather reports was enhancing their job satisfaction. It was also clear how much of an impact they and a growing number of their colleagues are having when they engage the public with a problem that has long been too difficult for most non-scientists to understand.
 
Mike Nelson, the chief meteorologist at ABC 7 in Denver, and Amber Sullins, in the same role at ABC 15 in Phoenix, both see themselves as providing this bridge. Each realized that they needed to locate their weather reports in a climate-change context when they were confronted with new generations (Sullins having a daughter and Nelson a grand child). Nelson explained that even with only a few minutes on air, telling a broader or deeper story than tomorrow’s weather “is not as difficult as you might think.” If he knows in advance that his producer has a story about the fire season or current drought, he can work in an “explainer” about the 2-degree increase in temperatures in Rocky Mountain National Park over the past century or how ,at this rate of increase, the “climate in Denver in the next 50 to 70 years will be more like Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Sullin does much the same for her viewers when she explains the 115 degree day today by noting that prior to 1960, there were only 7 days this hot every 20 years, while in the current 20-year period, there have been 42 of them. They’re providing viewers with some relevant facts and leaving it to them to figure out what to do about the picture they paint.
 
Nelson says there is occasional blowback even though he sticks “to physical science instead of political science.” But he adds that for every complaint or attempt “to bully him,” there are 20 audience members expressing their gratitude. Since people are inviting him into their living rooms, he feels it’s “his responsibility” to tell them the whole story. Sullins also feels she is building an additional level of trust with her audience, explaining how the positive feedback she gets from emails and Facebook posts are continuing and broadening the conversation. As viewer’s grapple with the issues, she sees “more wheels spinning in their heads” and their pursuit of even more information. Both Nelson and Sullins are actively working with new meteorologists too so they can learn how to provide this broader context in their weather reports and avoid having their new careers derailed by a political backlash. More than “weather reporters,” Nelson and Sullin see themselves as “educators” of both their audiences and their younger colleagues.

+  +  + 

 In a post of mine last May called “How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate,” much of the answer seemed to depend on how much those hearts and minds trusted the messenger who brought them the information.  According to one poll I cited, that need for trust comes from the fact that only 60% of Americans think that global warming will affect the US, only 40% believe that it will affect them personally and 2/3rds never talk with anyone else about what lies ahead. Addressing climate change is still not on most people’s list of priorities, but letting trusted people “in their living rooms” to talk about it could change that.

As long as a group trusts you enough to ‘give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,’ you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.

Meteorologists are “job crafting” their weather reporting and “taking responsibility” for educating their viewers who have found “what’s at stake” and “what can be done about it” difficult to understand until now. They are bringing their already trusted voices to a broader definition of their current jobs because it’s filling them with pride and they know that by doing so they could be making all the difference in the world. 

+ + +

Notes:  I just started publishing some of my weekly posts on Medium, an on-line opinion network, and my recent post on Uber drivers and Amazon packages was featured by its Business and Economy editors this week. Stories on Medium are usually available behind a paywall, but it you want to see my post or check out the site, here is a link that will get you there for free. (Of course, it would be much appreciated if you give it a quick read and check out the new pictures when you visit!)

This post was adapted from my September 22, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work, Building Your Values into Your Work, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: capabilities, climate change, global warming, job crafting, making the most out of your job, priorities, values, work

Maybe Uber Drivers Can Handle Amazon Deliveries Too

September 9, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

These days it seems like companies are pawning off as many risks, costs and responsibilities on workers as they can get away with. It’s particularly apparent among new gig-economy workers like Uber and Amazon drivers. The on-going transfer of economic burdens from companies to workers is a principal reason why many (and maybe most) Americans feel economically vulnerable today. 

At its heart, this is an ethical problem. Where do flourishing workers (families and communities) fall on our list of national and local priorities? Until very recently, the answer was “pretty low,” which is a key reason why there was such widespread discontent around the 2016 election and why it continues to unsettle our next one. Too many Americans feel that the economic security they have painstakingly built for themselves is being assaulted from all sides.

Since the 1980’s, government policies have massively favored businesses over workers, families and communities. This is simply a fact.

That preferential treatment includes policies that dictate who (between companies and individuals) pays and does not pay taxes, and how much each one of them pays. It includes lax enforcement policies that have enabled our most innovative companies (like Google, Facebook and Amazon) to achieve marketplace dominance by eliminating their competition and, in effect, operate however they want. It is also explained by the declining counterweight of organized labor and (until this year) by open trade policies that found the cost of an American worker directly competing with the cost a similar worker in China, Vietnam or Bangladesh. 

The net of these (and similar) forces over the past 50 years is that each American worker has been progressively owning a smaller and smaller share of the nation’s wealth given how little she’s compensated for her labor, while also being asked to pay more than she should for many “goods and services” in our consumer-driven economy. In other words, she’s being squeezed at both ends.

It’s hardly a recipe for flourishing workers, or for the families and communities across America that depend on them to thrive. 

Given the on-going, anti-workforce trend, I’m not being entirely facetious when I suggest that Uber drivers could be asked tomorrow to handle Amazon deliveries too. When all that we seem to care about is maximizing an Uber’s or an Amazon’s profits, an additional demand like this on gig-economy workers hardly seems out of the question. Why not pile even more onto them?

No wonder the social fabric feels like it is unraveling on the backs of the individuals (like you and me) whose strength it depends on at least as much as the companies that have organized and rallied us in profit-making directions.

         The Shift of Risks, Costs and Responsibilities to Workers Continues

Recent stories about workers at Amazon and Uber illustrate the exploitation and vulnerability that are all-too-familiar by-products of working in America today. Not only is there little-to-no safety net around these and other gig-economy workers; but more and more economic risk is continuously shoved onto them by companies that champion profits over paying their workers enough to provide the bare necessities for their families.

If you drive for Uber (or for one of the other car service companies) you’re probably no longer surprised when your passenger wants you to take him to the hospital with a medical emergency. According to a recent University of Kansas study and several recent podcasts picking up on it, Uber cars are commonly used as ambulances because in many parts of the country, taking an ambulance to the ER is not covered by health insurance and can run into the thousands of dollars. As a result, Uber drivers are being called upon to shoulder the financial responsibility (as well as the stress) of ferrying people who are often in extremis to emergency rooms across America. Of course, they never come close to recouping these psychological and risk-laden “costs” in their ride-hailing fees.

A mid-August op-ed in the Wall Street Journal describes another way that Uber drivers end up paying in ways they never contemplated. Few of these drivers appreciate that they are failing to recoup anything that even approximates the depreciation in value that comes from using their private cars—an amount the authors calculate at $11 billion a year, and another burden that Uber is off-loading onto its workers.

Once drivers understand that they are liquidating the value of their vehicles, in effect receiving pay-day loans with their cars as collateral, the effects may be significant. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Grubhub and Door-Dash may find it more difficult to recruit and retain drivers unless they raise prices and pay drivers more.

Another recent article decried how Amazon has exempted itself from any financial responsibility for its drivers who get in car accidents while they are making deliveries to Amazon’s customers. It is the delivery-driver’s car insurance (and his rising premiums) not Amazon’s that bear this expense. Under a clause in the driver’s contract, company profits are shielded from liability for personal injuries and property damage during the company’s delivery-related accidents. Of course many if not most drivers fail to realize that they have “accepted” this responsibility until it’s too late.
 
This summer, journalists at the New York Times also focused  on the working conditions at Amazon’s cavernous regional warehouses, where its employees toil side-by-side with increasingly nimble robots to ensure that the book or toiletry you ordered gets into the right box. One terrifying down-side in this “who’s more efficient, the human or the machine?” type of workspace, is the extent to which live employees are monitored down to the minute in the quest for almost robot-like efficiency throughout their shifts. In addition, because many fear that their jobs will be replaced by their robotic co-workers one day, they strive to meet an automaton’s level of performance to demonstrate their continuing value as employees.

Ironically, these Amazon warehouses are called “fulfillment centers,” but certainly not for the men and women who are becoming stressed out and broken down by working in them. Moreover, when considered in light of “morally acceptable work standards,” it seems fair to ask whether “free” deliveries, “same day” deliveries and customer convenience can be justified when the worker (family and community) costs are this high. 
 
Beyond Uber and Amazon, all of us are either moving from work towards retirement or have already retired. That’s what makes the next story—about home health workers—both heartwarming and chilling. 
 
Mostly women and often minority women, home health workers are the caregivers for millions of people who are still living at home but find themselves burdened by illness, disability or advanced age. These are “whatever-is-required” kinds of jobs, including feeding, bathing, administering medication, providing companionship and ensuring their clients’ personal safety and integrity. Home health workers are literally sustaining people’s lives, yet they struggle as a group to receive “a living wage” in exchange for their long hours and humanitarian service. 
 
As more people live to advanced age but want to avoid long-tern care facilities by staying at home, these health workers will be in even greater demand, but even the groups that are most likely to need their services are not calling for them to receive adequate pay. I, for one, would not want to hope that I’ll receive compassion when my caregiver isn’t being respected enough or paid enough to provide it. But still, according to the reporters in this story, most of these home health workers are, in fact, providing it. That means these women are, in essence, receiving pay-day loans with their human decency as collateral so that the health care companies that employ them can make as much money as possible. It’s one more shameful tradeoff.
 
Many American workers are also parents providing for their children. But according to a New York Times story last week, 67% of the 1000 parents surveyed said they had gone into debt to buy their children necessary items such as food, clothes and food, and 69% of them said that they kept these child-related debts a secret. 
 
Part of the reason that the economic insecurity of many (if not most) Americans has stayed below the radar is that many (if not most) Americans are either too proud to talk about it or too embarrassed to admit that they’ve failed to realize the American Dream. But their anxiety is real. It is manifest in our politics, and the full extent of the problem will (quite literally) “come home to roost” when the nation enters more turbulent economic waters or we find ourselves in the next recession.

It’s time to strengthen the social fabric with sound economic policies

While we have been victimized as “workers” and “families” by 50 years of government policies that have mostly favored business, we have also been victimized as “consumers,” right down to today.
 
This country functions on the proposition that we will bring our paychecks home, pay for our families’ necessities, and spend much of the rest buying what our consumer-oriented companies produce. Well, it turns out that in many instances we are overpaying as consumers too.

Because policy makers have largely failed to ensure healthy competition between companies through strategic application of the anti-trust laws, several companies in rapidly growing sectors of the economy have achieved near total market dominance—and the pricing power that comes with it. In other words, in an uncompetitive marketplace, dominant companies can charge consumers more (and sometimes far more) for their goods and services than they could in a more competitive one. This appears to be the case in the market for cell-phone plans.
 
In recent decades, regulators have allowed the cell phone service market in the US to consolidate. As recently as a few months ago, regulators allowed T-Mobile and Sprint to merge, reducing what little competition there had been even further. Well, a Wall Street Journal column this week highlighted a recent study showing that Americans, on average, pay 27% more than their French counterparts for cell phone service. The difference between the US and France is that the French enjoy a far more competitive market for these kinds of plans. On the other hand, when you allow markets to consolidate and grow un-competitive (as the US has done) higher prices are one of the consequences, but not the one one for individuals. As the study’s author notes:

declining competition has raised profit margins [for companies] and prices [for consumers] while reducing workers’ share of national income in the U.S.  By contrast, the labor share [of France’s and the rest of the EU’s economic prosperity] has remained constant in Europe.

What this means is that our piece of the economic pie as workers has also been reduced by the lack of competition at the very same time that the prices we pay as consumers are higher, and sometimes much higher than if there were more, say, telecommunications companies competing for our business.
 
All of this adds up to economically vulnerable and anxious Americans, whether they are viewed as workers, parents, community members or consumers.

While focusing on gig-economy workers in particular, a recent post here argued for “re-bundling” benefits around them to account for their occasional unemployment or uneven income streams, their loss of traditional health and retirement benefits, and their inability to obtain financing without a traditional 9-to-5 job. To the extent that these “new economy” jobs are likely to become even more plentiful as automation replaces “old economy” jobs, the wide-spread absence of a safety net like this threatens social stability and cohesion. But as the stories above suggest, the anxiety and economic insecurity is hardly limited to gig-ecocomy workers. Instead, it affects nearly all but the very richest Americans. 
 
The good news in this troubling story is that the imbalance may finally have begun to right itself.

A New Political Force for Workers and Consumers?

There are reasons for cautious optimism because of a recent action from within the business community. Last month, the Business Roundtable, comprised of the CEOs of America’s largest companies, issued what it called A Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.

In a sharp break with the past, this Statement expressed a “fundamental commitment” to all of a company’s stakeholders: putting employees, suppliers and communities on a pedestal that once belonged only to the company’s investors (or shareholders). On “investing in employees,” the Statement said:

This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. . . Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.

If a core group of America’s most prominent business leaders (181 of them, in fact) makes good on this Statement, it will not be for altruistic reasons alone. A comment at the time in Axios which was called “CEO’s Are America’s New Politicians” lists several of the reasons that following through with corrective policies would be in these companies’ best interests too and not just a paternalistic gesture. Among other things:

–  Millennial employees demand their employers stand for something beyond profit;
 
–  It is getting harder to recruit and retain talent, especially tech talent, if profit is the only objective;
 
–  A rising number of consumers make purchasing decisions based on a company’s social purpose;
 
–  The media applies a lot more pressure on CEOs to take positions on political topics, such as race and immigration;
 
–  Every CEO/company is vulnerable to split-second, social media uprisings. Undefined CEOs and companies find it impossible to push back. 

The Roundtable’s corporate leaders are also aware that the desirability of “the capitalist system” that they safeguard is itself being debated in the run up to the next election. And finally, many of them seem to realize that acting on the Statement’s promises is the right thing to do given the imbalances that have grown between their companies and Amerca’s workers/ consumers over the past 50 years.  
 
What advocates for a flourishing workforce (and the families and communities they support) need to do is hold these corporate leaders to their noble sounding but still generalized promises. This business community needs to generate specific policy proposals and then put their considerable lobbying clout and bully pulpits behind them. For our part, we need to hail their efforts in our public statements and at the ballot box, if and when (as I hope they do) those efforts get underway.

+ + +

It is hard to escape the conclusion that America’s social fabric is both loosening and fraying. Much of the reason for this breakdown is the growing tide of economic anxiety and insecurity that has resulted from a half century where American business has gained while American workers and consumers have lost. In the political season ahead, each one of us will have many opportunities to support what is important to us. My argument is that we need to begin with thriving workers, families and communities.

This post was adapted from my September 8, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself Tagged With: BRT Statement, Business Roundtable Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, competition, consumer, economic anxiety, economic insecurity, flourishing workers, gig economy workforce, gig-economy workers, re-bundling of worker benefits, safety net, thriving workers, work, worker, workers, workforce

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