It’s 8 in the morning and you’re all flustered and rushed to make it to your workplace on time. Loads of little things are hurting your head and you don’t have time to live a few clever moments of sweet happiness!
Life sucks and nothing seems like a cakewalk. Your WFH siesta has ended leaving you all keyed up with crazy jaded ideas about how you are going to begin offline. You don’t feel any heart left for your desk after a long break and don’t know how and if you can you keep pace with life now. The vacuum is all eating you up. You wish you could go back in time; not to change anything but to feel couple of things twice and possibly change hands with something more exciting.
The phantom in you whines and pines for more.
Let’s face it; Life isn’t easy and glee and all that, but you know what? If you endure your daily grind and drain yourself out without knowing why, it’s possible that your personality and your place of work might run into odds with each other. You are aware that ripping the band-aid off could get you the sun shine you were looking for so long than enduring an unfitting, ill suited work space; but a switch over is always a difficult choice.
You’re not sure if that would be the right thing to do…!
If you’re facing the headwinds- right from Covid to quality and performance concerns and feel low and trapped – the list of crises hitting businesses keeps getting longer–bad breaks aren’t going to leave you any time sooner.
Here are three way to know if your hard time is simply some short living raw deal or your work place is particularly draining for your personality.
It feels like entering a pit hole!
Your Office pyramid works infamously with a twisted bottom line mentality. It’s 3Ps-Productivity, performance and profits and that’s that. No room for anything else! Your wellness and personal relations have no takers here. The demon of highbrowism is raging in every corner. It’s problematic and unhealthy–especially if you’re obsessively passionate about your work and often land yourself right in the middle of the rut!
If you are someone who is passionately preoccupied with the job and unwittingly ignores his personal wellness, then a damaging crisis awaits you with no near term exit in sight; one that can pile tremendous pressure on your happiness.
So, should this mean you’re stranded at cross roads?
Gosh-darn!…it’s intense. From sob story to small choices…you’d always figure out something and find the balance.
If you are hooked to a “spongy” mentality and dire the struggle, there is nothing much for you to do than to try and keep your obsessive passion for work at bay. Pursue the whole nine yards with a sense of balance and flexibility and you may survive the crisis.
Indeed, there is no saying where it all ends but any emotional distance between you and your work might just work.
The waters here are choppy and bruising!
The relief here always comes too little, too late! The workstead that lacks autonomy but typically has dogsbody driven high turnover, is unhealthy for most passionate people.
So, if you get butterflies in your gut, get tizzy and flustered easily and jim jams make you jumpy whenever work stress spikes; you’re in for some troubled times. Even the micromanagement would fail you completely and the unstoppable domino effect would skewer your anxiety to unhealthy levels. Again, in a job that is highly stressful and tags little or no job security; increase in bitterness, anger and sulkiness is inevitable.
When things get so screwed up and it gets harder to get out of the mess, is there anything helpful besides a non-micro managing boss to move your happiness needle, leewards?
Nothing much…if you cannot rid yourself of work slave mentality or empower yourself enough to bring changes in your work environment; then it’s time to move on. Should you get to stay; you’d continue to burn slow and so would your happiness.
However,…
If you begin your day at your workstation with a sense of belonging, have a clear sense of purpose and at the end of the day feel like you’ve achieved what you had set out for in the morning; then probably you are working in an inclusive and respectful workplace. Experiencing appreciation, freedom, leaning while earning well and feeling supported by a helpful boss! Christ!… that’s a paradise no nine-to-fiver ever stops dreaming of! No need to move quickly to act. This place is no goof up!!
WFH exclusivity continues!
Virus has waned but work from home is a dreamy reality that is yet to end. For many this is a desire come true; for others though it works better in theory than practice. Bad habits, gross indiscipline and over sedentary days spew out of remote connectivity. Boozing, watching Netflix or surfing e-commerce sites during work hours have driven people low on conscientiousness. Discipline has taken some punishing and frowned upon behaviors have upped the ante.
You don’t find anything wrong in that…do you? After all it’s rest, respite and work at will…no boundaries, no godforsaken tantrums, no frayed tempers! It feels like you’ve got everything under the sun!
But if you find yourself struggling with the pivot to work-from-home especially when you are completely disconnected from work at the end of the day, then in all probability you’d feel all screwed up. What if your workstead has chosen a hybrid employment model where you spend part of your time working from home and part in Office. Better work-life balance, less commute stress, location independence improved inclusivity, minimized distraction; there are 20 different reasons that your boss could rattle off to advocate the benefits of remote working. You try fitting in like always but wouldn’t find the foothold.
Are you the one to give up on team building events and could endure endless unmotivated sessions? Unmonitored performance, increased likelihood of overworking, distractions at home, lesser perks, increased isolation; everything makes it tough to turn off. The laptop at your kitchen table beckons and you may not feel enough separation between your work and life. This all would contribute to feeling of being overwhelmed or even burnout. And, above all….
People don’t believe you’re actually working!!
Let’s be real, no matter where you’re working from, you’re still doing just that; Working. Honestly it all comes down to the environment you’re most effective in. But if your workstead promotes WFH it is not for the sake of some classic benefits of telecommuting. It’s more about a great opportunity to dig deep in to the market. Remote work is the new cool for it saves your boss from 6 different costs, gets the work done round the clock, enhances branding, parks pre-trained employees for no extra strings and a lot more. Biggest surprise!!… He could be saving up to 50% on operational costs, 15-25% on assets and up to 31% reduction in health insurance spends. Another big-wig here… smart savings is done on energy-printers, laptops, cooling systems, lighting etc. as well. So don’t fool yourself with narratives surrounding remote work.
Besides your work place at home would never sport a garden view!!
Being stranded with an ill suited job always has some serious fallout. Your personality becomes a twisted image of you. It’s no place for you to return if it incites a bottom line mentality in you. Say no to pressure cooker environment. Even if you are somewhat less conscientious and not so passionately obsessive about work; WFH settings would still harm you.
Feeling at sea and don’t know how to let go your jammed session with this new project? and what with the Netflix hollering all the time; “You still have 3 episodes of ‘Ice piercer’ to watch”!
My word!
Return to a place that spares you a high degree of independence, choice, self direction and belonging. Stop being chased.
On a brighter note!…
In bargain you’ll find yourself some small doses of happiness that you didn’t know you needed until now.
The Maverick#59: Inspiring and empowering, for the best is possible. 