O Cubeland, wherefore art thou Cubeland?
I miss my old office job. There I said it. Yes, I know. I work from home and for myself. I set my own hours and have total flexibility. What could be better?
Well….
- Working with people I like and respect who I can learn from and continue to grow. I miss that.
- Having someone else set my goals and priorities more often because doing it all myself is quite frankly exhausting.
- Having somewhere to go that is separate from home where there is a clear definition of what is work time and what is not.
- Listening to the radio on my commute.
- Walking around the office and half-hearing 100s of conversations about things I’m both interested in and also could completely care less about. But hearing the buzz of life.
- The soda & snack machines.
Many of these may sound pretty mundane but I miss them. So when I read that Laurie Ruettimann had taken a new job I was not one of the many who thought “how could you?!” What I thought was “Wow, good for her. I am jealous.”
But the reasons I don’t have an office job are because I value my work/life fit. And last night on a chat about workplace flexibility and work life fit with human resource types on twitter (search Twitter for #TChat to see the conversation) it was once again shown to me that I won’t have an office job for probably quite a long time.
Here are some of the gems that confirmed this:
Asking about what kind of hours that company keeps during the interview process is a “non-starter” and is seen as lazy – in other words don’t even bother applying.
Well I have made the choice to pick my kid up at school during the week. It doesn’t have to be everyday, but I would like it to be at least 3 of the 5 days of school. And that doesn’t happen at or after 5pm. And I don’t want to get to the final stages of an interview only to find out this doesn’t work for a future employer. I have 20 years of experience and great references from former bosses who I’m now lucky enough to see socially years after we worked together. But still in HR’s eyes I’m damaged goods
HR’s perception generally is still that any work/life issues you have are your problem to solve. The company you choose to work for is simply not responsible for that. If you don’t like it you have the choice to simply look for another job. Apparently the fact that they need people to do the work as much as people need them to provide work still eludes them. They feel they are still in the driver’s seat and if you don’t like the way they operate you can walk. I don’t know about you…but that doesn’t feel like a relationship to me, it feels like an unhappy existence rife with work/life conflict.
Flexibility is still seen as more for salaried workers than hourly. Those of us now making our working consulting sent out the hue and cry. After all we are paid hourly and that is precisely why I have the flexibility I have. I can pick and choose which hours I work for my clients and which I devote to personal interests. But that seemed to fall on deaf ears.
There were glimpses of hope, too:
Like the fact that if our workplaces expect us to be flexible when they have more work than they can handle, they need to be flexible with workers when they have important non-work stuff they need to handle.
And the discussion of the term “work life balance” and how that is not really the right term. My take was when I think of balance I think of the scales of justice perfectly side by side. And my comment to someone was. ”I’ve never had that work/life day.” And he agreed.
So 3 years after leaving my office job because of lost flexibility, I don’t believe I’ll be returning to an office job anytime soon. I feel the conversation has come far in those 3 years but human resources and companies still lag way behind where workers are on this subject – in a recent survey 87 percent of employees reported that flexibility in their jobs would be extremely or very important in deciding whether to take a new job.
The part that really befuddles me is that there are good workers out there who want work and there are companies out there looking for workers but the “rules” of work are so constrained that the two cannot help each other out. So I will continue to set my own goals and priorities for now. Because fixing that assinine fact would be one of them.
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