If you want to confront sheer horror, take the metro in the morning. Where are all these people going? To hell? In any case, that's what they look like: empty eyes, poisonous glances, many drilled into their mobile phone displays; disgruntled faces, joylessness as a sense of community.
For many, the way to work is the shortest connection between "I don't like Mondays" and "Thank God it's Friday". Fortunately, five days of life have been poured into the canal, the weekend begins, the holiday is approaching, and hopefully the next public holiday is already smiling from the calendar.
Recently I was giving a talk on a Saturday and I asked the audience, "Who has to work on Monday?" Most of them raised their hands. When I asked the following question: "Who wants to work on Monday?" there were considerably fewer hands.
TOO LAZY TO READ ON? THEN LISTEN TO ME:
In the blogcast, I read this recent blog article to you. With emphasis, of course!
When was the last time you had the feeling on a Monday morning that today is the start of another great week?
Can you remember when you were a child and you were so engrossed in playing or in your colouring book that you didn't even notice how time was flying by until Mum said, "So, time for dinner." - Self-forgetfulness at its best. Disappearing into enthusiasm.
When was the last time you had this feeling? At work?
I recently read that 24% of all working people had quit internally, 61% were only doing their job by the book and only 15% were emotionally attached to their employer. So this is how people spend a large part of their waking hours during a large part of their lives - that period of life when their performance is at its highest.
Are you all right?
At the same time, career fairs are teeming, the competition for qualified employees is in full swing, employer branding is on everyone's lips. "How can we find skilled workers, apprentices, well-motivated colleagues?" is the yearning tone from the HR departments.
So the pictures of the employees smile at you in the foyer, foosball machines and fruit baskets are set up, and at the end of the apprenticeship there's a driving licence as a reward for the best. And then?
Are all employees actually fans of their own company page on Facebook? Really? Do they actually like or share the content?
Oh yes: actually ...
Actually ... what now?
When people tell me about their jobs and their plans for life, hardly anyone can do without the word actually.
Why actually?
"Actually, I always wanted to ..."
"Actually, I would much rather ..."
Most people live in the subjunctive. They throw themselves out as a surfboard in search of the perfect wave of their existence, are shaken up and finally washed up as an ironing board on the shore of everyday frustration.
Is it any wonder that there is an explosion of advisory services on the topic of "Find Your Destiny"? Get off the hamster wheel, passion projects, being self-employed from home, follow your heart, live your dream ... web platforms, online courses, books, festivals, inspiration nights, motivational quote postings - there is no shortage of pre- and post-screening opportunities to find out what you could/would/should do and how you could succeed. Orientation aids in the search for answers to the painfully burning question: "What did you actually start out for?"
In the meantime, the ironing boards are stacked in the companies while the HR department focuses the surfboard telescope.
Luck or money?
In addition to this, it is also becoming more important, especially in Generation Y, to live and work differently, and this does not only mean the content, but also how and how much.
Admittedly: People who talk too much about work-life balance often confuse being free with having free time. But young people increasingly see the connection between work, income and a happy life from a very different perspective than in the past decades, when it was taken for granted as a law of nature, even though it was completely different in the advanced civilisation of antiquity.
Kerstin Bund, author at Time, has published an illuminating book entitled "Happiness beats money". Book written about how their generation wants to live and work. Here Kerstin briefly explains what it is about. Every HR manager should read this book three times and own it twice: once for the desk and once for under the pillow. And don't think it's about an all-too-small niche. This is about a paradigm shift that is being put through its paces once again by the digital transformation in a new spin. In every niche.
Why do the passions of individuals and what they do professionally fit together less and less? And how can this be made to fit?
Anyone who can see recognises that there is a very close connection between what a company stands for and what its employees experience as a result.
Where do we work - and why?
I recently read - if I remember correctly, in a Futurestep study- that the culture of a company and its connection to purpose is the most important reason why people choose an employer.
Once again, it is the ever-popular story of a company - its cause, its mission, its task - that provides for the experience of meaning(haftigkeit). This is why employees are the first and most important audience of any company, because it is in this group that truth is understood, lived and shared. And because it is above all what is experienced that counts, so that what is told lives.
Not least because of this, the top-down and bottom-up leadership models have long since become obsolete. Inside-out is written on the cover of today's leadership manual! Purpose drives everything from the inside, creates waves on the outside - and if it is successful, also the perfect wave for many surfboards, whose ambition can unfold in paradise, draw new circles, capture others and take them along.
Perhaps it is not too much of a coincidence that Yvon Chouinard, the legendary founder of Patagonia, titled his autobiography "Let my People go Surfing".
That is what every person is actually looking for: a place where they have the certainty of spending their time meaningfully. Nobody quits their job because of money, even if many think they do. People change jobs because of other people or because they hope to be worth more at the new place - to get more self-worth.
We should not make the mistake of reducing this connection to so-called jobs for the so-called better educated. As a rule, the better educated have only completed a higher level of education, and even that says little. After all, every idiotic car driver you meet has a driving licence ...
You should be a rubbish man!
Self-worth arises in the task and its meaning, which everyone recognises in it for themselves, completely independent of profession and position. This became clear to me only recently when I observed a rubbish man in Vienna. This man in his fifties - tall, lean, well-groomed - took the rubbish bins out of the houses with an upright gait, greeted passers-by in a friendly manner, gave them the right of way on the pavement and carried out his work with a self-confident elegance, indeed with a dignity that one hardly ever sees in anyone else.
I didn't have the time to talk to him, but I will certainly do so. And I'll make every bet: This man has understood for himself that he does not clean up other people's mess, but that he makes an essential contribution to the quality of life of the residents and an indispensable contribution to the functioning coexistence in our city, as a glance at any place where the rubbish collection is on strike makes more than clear. It is indispensable!
When was the last time you had that rubbish man feeling?
Or your employees?
Why not, actually?
The only effective employer branding story.
Of all the recruiting campaigns that come out of the woodwork these days, produced at great expense and with a lot of money, very few tell the only relevant story: here you are making a meaningful contribution to something big, to our common purpose, and getting a booster shot for your self-worth every day. Most companies talk to potential applicants, but they only mean themselves.
I always make an extremely interesting observation when I talk to company founders. When they tell me their story, it often starts with "Actually, I learned something completely different ...". The basic desire to break new ground undoubtedly plays a major role in the lives of entrepreneurial people, yet I ask myself: What is wrong with our education system when people spend at least nine years in school, many much longer, and then do something completely different so that they can find something like fulfilment?
What happens to the children's talents? Why is hardly anyone helped to discover their own story and bring it to life?
I'm afraid the poisonous looks in the morning underground come from the heart. No wonder: unlived life poisons, untold stories poison.
What is being hurled at us today as a worry topic in recruiting and employer branding will in a very short time be staring at us from many, many empty pairs of eyes as a scenario for society as a whole if we are not careful. Namely, when the effects of the technological upheaval become tangible.
After all, if the digital transformation does what every technological upheaval is supposed to do: make us humans work less, people will work less and fewer people will work. What else?
Yes, there will be new jobs and new professions.
No, not everyone will be able to do them.
It will then also not be a question of ideologies and party-political views or forms of government whether something like a citizen's income comes into being, that will quite simply be necessary.
What we work, how we work and how much, who will work at all - the connection between work, income and the meaning of one's existence will need a special, good and often also a new story for each person.
Where then do the poisoned people on the underground go when they no longer even have their frustration jobs as a camouflage for what they lack in reality?
Who then will explain the new world to the people? Wolfgang Fellner? Heidi Klum? Alexander Gauland? The suburban women?
The best thing would be for everyone to find their own human resources themselves, as CEOs and better still as entrepreneurs in their own lives.
We've got something coming!
It's not getting any easier, let's do better!
Employer branding - in my opinion - is certainly not made easier by this, and "How can we find skilled workers, apprentices, well-motivated colleagues?" still looks like a question, but sounds like a cry of despair.
The winner of this competition, like any other, is first of all the one who has the better story and shares it in an inspiring way. Incidentally, it is the same story that is already the only success story in employer branding. It tells of self-worth, of the feeling of making a valuable contribution, of being effective and relevant.
This is also the counter-recipe to the primal fear of digital transformation, which is sold under the title of "job loss" but tells the story of loss of significance.
It goes without saying that this story has to be told differently for everyone and shared at different meeting points, just like the story of self-worth and the value of being loved, which at one time sounds like "Cinderella" and at another time looks like "Rocky".
Do you know your story?
Because regardless of whether it's a global corporation or an SME - every person, every company has and needs meaning, a mission, a purpose, i.e. at least one archaic value and the story it activates, around which everything revolves. With this story, one wins like-minded comrades-in-arms, that is the principle of employer branding.
If you don't have a magnetic value at the core of your HR story and you can't communicate a purpose, there is only one issue left: the higher salary. And in this case, that's just another word for pain money on the escape route.
So to all those who say: "It doesn't apply to me and my brand!", I would like to recommend the words that my grandmother, old Story Dudette, used to iron onto her surfboard: "No Story. No Glory."