How to create balance between employer and employee
Controversy of Demanding Culture
Ladies and gentlemen.
Today we are speaking about how to create balance between employer and employee. Since I am a business owner and as a consultant I know many companies and their situation, I will speak about employees and their demands.
During the last twenty years, comfort and demands have become an axiom of today´s time in the euro Atlantic civilization. Most job applicants demand work conditions that are above average before having achieved anything.
Of course, if you recruit a star, you have to pay for it, but there are too many people at the beginning of their career coming with demands of a comfortable and financially secure life.
Let me give you some examples. Learning new things, everybody has to get into a discomfort zone. There is a natural law, the best things are born from pain. If you want to get bigger muscles, you have to feel some pain, it does not work without exercising and getting sweaty. If you want to learn a foreign language, you have to get over the laziness and learn, which is a pain too. When a little child learns how to walk, it keeps falling down, which hurts as well.
And what about today´s employees? Figuratively speaking, they want to exercise, but they do not want their muscles to hurt. They want to learn, how to walk, but they do not want to fall down.
It sounds weird, but many people do not want to get tired at work.
Let us briefly look at the definitions of work and relaxation as they are used in social psychology: Work is a planned and conscious activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.
Relaxation, according to new researches, is a compensation of work, that unequally burdens the human organism. It is supposed to be a refreshment of body or mind.
These definitions tell us work makes you tired.
At present, many people take part in all different kinds of racing in their free time. If we accept, that relax is a counterbalance of work, it means those people do not have enough challenges at work. They need to compete. They need a measurable achievement, which they do not get at work.
At present, many people do lots of adrenalin sports and activities in their free time. If we accept, that relax is a compensation of work, it means those people do not have enough excitement and stress creating adrenalin. And what is the strongest adrenalin? Responsibility, of course. Responsibility for an achievement, result, for people, for the company, for the existence. Do people want such a responsibility at work?
In my opinion, it is obvious; it has become standard to live a comfortable life and make demands. HR managers in companies know this. Job applicants ask them not only about their paycheck, which is natural, but also about their benefits.
And benefits, it is a special topic. Everybody should get well paid for work. In the best case in correspondence to the achievement, but, have you ever seen anyone, who does not work well, not having benefits? Giving benefits, we have succeeded at devaluation of reward for work, without any regards to its efficiency. Because of comfort, we spend more than we make.
To be fair, I have to say, employees are not to blame. It is the employers and states who create this cycle of inflation.
Everything said above refers mainly to the Czech Republic and the EU. But the development is similar in the whole euro American civilization. The level of thinking, life style, education and economics we have reached is both our strength and our weakness.
I am aware of not saying agreeable and popular things. I like people and I believe in the natural course of the world. I am afraid, if the trends I just described continue, we will get into big troubles.
Radomil Bábek, AmCham Praha, 12.3.2013
