Work Is Part of a Contract

Corporate culture talks readily about family, mission and a shared destiny when the organisation needs more time and loyalty. But a company buys a person’s work, not the whole person.

Work can be important, interesting and socially useful. But a crisis in it doesn’t automatically have to become a personal tragedy for every employee.

It helps to distinguish:

• the organisation’s problem;
• your own duty;
• a problem you are able to solve;
• a problem you are answerable for;
• a problem you are simply being shown, in the hope of voluntary adoption.

The phrase “not my problem” sometimes marks a healthy boundary and sometimes a refusal to do your own job. It is more precise to ask:

Is this my task?

If it is, what authority and resources do I have?

If it isn’t, whose is it?

An employee isn’t obliged to experience every corporate success as personal greatness and every failure as a moral defeat. Emotional distance makes decisions calmer.

At the same time work does have consequences for other people. Treating it purely as a game played in your own interest is dangerous too. An engineering calculation, a medical procedure, a financial report or a school lesson affects people who take no part in your inner philosophy.

A good attitude to work combines two statements:

I don’t belong to the organisation.

I am answerable for what I agreed to do.

Work should occupy a place in a life, not the whole of it. If it constantly demands sacrificing sleep, health, the people close to you and the ability to think, the problem may not be the employee’s insufficient devotion.

Some companies call that state engagement. The body usually uses less festive terms.

At an interview, the word “family” is worth translating back into the language of the contract. Families don’t make people redundant on quarterly results, don’t ask you to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and don’t issue a pass that stops opening the door on the day you leave. A company does all of that, and rightly, because it is a company. The question is not for the organisation but for the vocabulary that asks for family devotion in exchange for employment terms.

The test is simple: look at which way the metaphor works. If “we’re one family” comes up in conversations about overtime and almost never in conversations about bonuses, the word is being used as a currency only one side can print.