"Why You Hate Work": The New York Times claims to know

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In a recent article in the New York Times, the co-authors Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath* detail the various reasons White Collar workers in a number of occupations have described why they hate their jobs.

Well, don't bother to read it: it's just a lot of psychobabble about what aspects of their work puts off the people who have been studied.  We're all being overworked, because management has increasingly specialized in how to get more work out of fewer workers.  I'm astounded that anyone is naive enough to want to tinker with band-aids to the Employee-Productivity Problem.  You just have to stop firing your employees, and giving their responsibilities to the remaining employees.

I'm sure some employers will come up with anecdotes about why decreasing the size of their workforce was just the ticket.  Fiscally conservative employers are past masters at this game, and graduate schools pay a lot of money to business executives who can persuade their students that this is how it should be done: fire employees, cut costs, and increase dividends.

Throughout the ages, the stereotype of a do-nothing employee has been popular.  Those who have co-workers who don't do anything except keep checking the price of their stocks on Wall Street know all too well that these sorts of do-nothings are anything but rare.  They do tend to be found among upper-management, though.

The antidotes for employee burnout offered by Schwartz and Porath are: making employees feel wanted and appreciated,  Encouraging employees to take a break every 90 minutes, and other brilliant ideas along the same lines.  Now, I would be the last to claim that taking a break every 90 minutes is a bad thing to do.  But will this enable the same old tired staff to manage without that employee that was just fired, and whose workload was distributed among two workers who can no longer take breaks every 90 minutes?  Whom are we kidding here?

Do please read the article.  I could be wrong; perhaps it is possible by following their suggestions, to make an office so fantastically productive that you could fire a couple of people, and still get the same jobs done even better.  That's what this country needs: fewer, and more productive employees.  Give me a break.

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(*Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of The Energy Project, a consulting firm. Christine Porath is an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a consultant to The Energy Project)