Work worth doing: a meditation on meaningful employment and professional development

It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.

• William Morris, ‘Art & Socialism’

About 7 months ago, I left my role as an assistant knowledge manager at a silver circle law firm, where I had been working for 18 months, to took up a maternity cover post as an assistant librarian in a specialist health research school. This was a slightly scary, but ultimately brilliant decision. I have remembered what it’s like to get up in the morning and genuinely look forward to getting in to work, and I will miss the place and the people hugely when I have to move on in February next year. When contemplating making the move from private to public sector, from business support to customer service, and from permanent job to temporary post, and now again as I turn my eye reluctantly back towards the jobs market, I have given a lot of thought to the worth of work: to what extent it has meaning (and to what extent it should); what it gives, or can give, beyond simply getting paid; and, most importantly, what makes for a good job, a happy worker.

To some people, of course, work is simply a means to an end – they put time in, get money out, and consider this a price worth paying in order to support their ‘real life’ – their home, their family, their social life, their hobbies. For other people, their work is the cornerstone of their identity, central to their conception of themselves. It would be easy to imagine that the former, lacking the emotional investment of the latter, would be less committed, less focussed, more prone to inefficiency and errors. But I think someone to whom work is so much more than ‘just a job’, whose job is not giving them what they need, can be far less competent than someone to whom the nature of the work they do is a matter or serene indifference.

I think a good analogy is food. Like work, we need food to live. Some people’s relationship with food does not go beyond that simple fact – they eat what they need, when they need it, and that’s the end of that. However, a lot of people’s relationship with food is much richer, more emotional, less rational. Food is not just fuel; it can be love, comfort, fellowship, sensuality; or it can be compulsion, distraction, guilt, self-loathing, punishment. This connection can also turn completely on its head; food – previously merely a stage upon which to act out one’s internal psychodramas – becomes instead their subject, either as a glorious, fulfilling passion or a destructive, dark obsession. So it is with work. The more work means to you, the more it can do – both for you or to you.

I am – in case you hadn’t guessed – very much in the latter camp (in both respects). Food for me will never be just fuel; and work for me will never be (no matter how much I might sometimes wish it would) a simple exchange of labour for cash. I have been in employment in one capacity or another since I was 14, and have had wonderful jobs and awful ones. The work I have done and the environment in which I have done it has had a massive impact on my general wellbeing, at least as big a factor as my personal relationships. Work matters to me in ways that go far beyond being able to make the rent. A bad job can make for a bad year, all by itself. A good job, on the other hand, can give an otherwise difficult time in one’s life real joy and meaning.

It seems to me that there are three main factors that make a job pleasurable, although these factors can be broken down further. They broadly follow the Morris quote above, and jobs I have had could be plotted on the Venn diagram the three elements of the quotation form:

•  Work worth doing: You both understand and approve of the result of your labour – directly in the labour itself, and/or the larger aims and achievements it contributes to.
• Work pleasant to do: The process of the labour is interesting and enjoyable on its own account, quite apart from the value of the result or the remuneration offered.
• Conditions neither wearisome nor over-anxious: Competence is attainable, without the work becoming tedious. You feel secure but not stuck in your position.

Of course the content of these categories will be different for everyone, but theoretically, at the point these circles cross lies that individual’s perfect job. The real challenge lies in working out the elements that populate your personal circles, and perhaps even more importantly, which compromise will be most bearable if the perfect central sector cannot be reached.

Over time, I have come to realise that for me the most important circle is the first: if I don’t believe the work I do is in some way worth doing, it doesn’t matter how enjoyable it is to do or how well I am capable of doing it – my motivation crumbles rapidly, my self-esteem plummets, and I feel both frustrated and ashamed. This is why I haven’t pursued a career as an arts academic, even though I enjoyed reading and analysing texts and the research and writing up process, and even though I was quite good at it – I could never convince myself, either at undergraduate or masters level, that what I was doing was of any appreciable benefit to anyone but myself, and so over time became miserable.

This is key. My method of determining the value of my work is pretty subjective; there is no overarching ethical framework I refer to in order to benchmark the value of my contribution, despite my holding the usual left-wing inclinations towards a nebulous concept of ‘the public good’. Yes, I am much happier now I know that my daily graft is as part of an organisation that is trying to save lives, rather than one that is trying to move money around from one wealthy company or individual to another. But there is a lot more (or possibly less) to my newfound job satisfaction than that.

Fundamentally, my work attains value in my eyes at the point I see it make a positive impact on others. However, it is not always enough for me to know in the abstract that something I do has been of benefit to a colleague or a service user. Rather predictably, as for a mouse in a lab ever questing for the cheese, the effect is amplified exponentially through reward – not financial reward, but recognition of the value added and appreciation of my efforts by the recipient. A simple ‘thank you’ can make me a half-inch taller for the rest of the day.

This is why working bar was actually one of the most fulfilling jobs I ever had – the work/value/reward loop was beautifully simple: customer comes in and asks for drink; I bring drink; customer is satisfied and says thank you; I feel useful and appreciated. Job’s a good’un.

Of course, not all meaningful work is so obvious or so easy. My desire to provide a perceived benefit to others, to get that hit of recognition, can make it difficult for me to engage positively with more long-term, strategic or background work. For example, advocating changes and improvements can be difficult for me when the proposed beneficiaries do not immediately recognise the merit of my proposals. I can quickly lose confidence in what are fundamentally good ideas, and become easily discouraged by others’ lack of enthusiasm. I am much more comfortable delivering a neatly wrapped package of Desired Result to people than I am getting them involved with the process, to try and persuade them to change their ways, to help them find better ways to achieve results for themselves. I want to make it easy on them, to give them what they want. It’s the desire for that pat on the head, that sugar-lump. Quite embarrassing, really.

It’s also a dreadful way of working, for a number of reasons. For one thing, service users don’t always know what they want – they don’t always even know what’s possible – and they certainly don’t always know what they need. A lot of good ideas and projects will fall by the wayside if the person with the knowledge doesn’t have the confidence and charisma (and, occasionally, the brass neck) to push them through opposition or apathy. For another, being purely reactive and eager to please are not qualities inherent in good management. As I continue to progress in my career, I will be called upon more often to decide, to lead and to instruct, to go beyond my instinctive impersonation of the Genie of the Lamp.

The increased amount of information skills teaching I do in my current job (as distinct from the training I have delivered in previous roles) is an excellent remedy for this impulse. So much of it is about helping people to help themselves, and showing them better ways of doing things they often think they already know how to do ‘well enough’. I have had to quickly develop a thicker skin in the face of incomprehension or reluctance, and quell my instinctive urge to do things for people rather than helping them to understand how to do things for themselves. I literally have to sit on my hands sometimes to do this, but I am getting better with every session.

And I’m still getting my satisfied-customer kicks – the incredibly positive and generous feedback students give when they get it is unbeatable; being credited in the acknowledgments of someone’s Masters dissertation is a total joy. True, it’s a longer game than slinging drinks, but the payoff is a lot more valuable to me: not just the satisfaction of having delivered ‘a good result’, but the confidence to set the parameters of what that good result looks like myself.

An update and one from the Archives: Victoria Pendleton, femininity and being a “proper girl”

OK, so, that new year’s resolution to write write write write write?  Umm, working on it!

I have been ridiculously busy this week one way or another, and have not really had time to blog.  On the other hand, a visit to the gorgeous William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow has prompted an idea for a potential new novel, which I have been researching in a preliminary kind of way.  This is very exciting, as I don’t get ideas for novels very often – in fact the last idea I had was over 10 years ago, and I told you what became of that.  So if you live to a ripe old age, you may yet get to read a rough first draft of my story about Jenny and May, the daughters of William Morris.  Just, you know, based on past performance?  Don’t actually hold your breath.

ANYWAY.  In lieu of any actual fresh writing, I have refreshed the following article (first written in 2009) just for the sake of something to put up.  I should note I am a lot less judge-y of other women nowadays (and have also learned how to put on make-up), but I still stand by the points in the article in the main, and I was pleased with it as a piece of writing.  Enjoy!

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Victoria Pendleton, femininity and being a “proper girl”

I generally eschew free magazines as a point of principle.  I live in London, and commute to work – this means that I am bombarded with so much free media that the mind boggles briskly at the thought of just how many trees must die each day in order that the post-rush-hour streets of London may be carpeted with greyish sludge on rainy days.  I hate having to run an obstacle course from my front door to the office, vaulting over unreasonably alert young men in cheerfully-coloured rainmacs attempting to foist a range of unwanted publications on me before I’ve had my first, essential-for-interaction-with-other-human-beings cup of tea.  And I hate advertising.  And litter.  And the tickly whisper of SOMEBODY ELSE’S NEWSPAPER brushing against my ear on a crowded tube.  So no CityAM, no Stylist, no ShortList, not even The Evening Standard – I spurn these pillars of the printed word, heedless of the blandishments of their vendors.  If the relentless repetition of the title in an increasingly nasal voice can be considered a blandish.

However.  This morning, I was stuck in a tunnel for 15 minutes; my iPod had packed up; and my brain had started to bleed with ennui. This, incidentally, is another symptom of London life.  When one is so constantly and copiously cudgelled with content – via billboards, hoardings, shop windows, smartphones – a few minutes of stimulation deprivation becomes more deafening and disconcerting than a fruit machine at a funeral.  So, to escape my own thoughts, I picked up and flicked through today’s offering of hard-sell and dreck in the form of Stylist.  On the only page completely free from adverts, Victoria Pendleton, Olympic gold medallist and face of Hovis Wholemeal Breakfast Week (OK, so not completely free from adverts), enlightened London on the question of how she goes about her average day.  From more or less the opening paragraph, the interview was an object lesson in patriarchy for the modern age.

“I wake up at around 8.30 AM,” says Victoria, “have a shower and do my make-up.  I do have to be a bit functional, so I just put on a bit of Mac mascara, YSL’s Touche Eclat (my can’t-live-without-it product) and scrape my hair into a ponytail.  I worry sometimes that with all the training I do I won’t look feminine.”  Quite apart from the blatant product placement making my skin itch, this sentence struck me on the femi-bone (which is to say, that part of my system that responds to any sexist stimuli by pumping me full of feminist bile).

A large picture of the woman in question dominates the page; and I see that Ms Pendleton is quite right to worry.  Try though she may (and does she ever try, jutting her hip and pouting her lip for England) there is nothing ‘feminine’ about her direct look or her lean, healthy body.  Her muscular arms and thighs, the flat firm wall of her abdominals, the aura of power she exudes even when not pedalling furiously in pursuit of gold, are so far removed from ‘femininity’ that all the Touche Eclat in the world cannot help her to that hallowed state.

It is often noted that conceptions of ideal female beauty, before television facilitated the homogenisation of culture, have varied hugely from country to country and from era to era.  But from Rubens’ chubby, lolling lovelies to the almost preternaturally fragile models like Lily Cole who command the catwalks today; from the Japanese manga obsession with pencil-thin yet strangely pneumatic schoolgirls to the re-emerging tradition in Mauritania of force-feeding young girls to make them obese (and thus, by standards of their culture, more feminine); one factor is consistent in all conceptions of femininity.  Whether it comes with rolling curves of soft, inviting flesh, or jutting bird-bones and huge haunted eyes, that which is feminine is that which is weak, helpless, harmless.  It is feminine to wear soft, delicate fabrics that tear easily; it is feminine to teeter along in pin-thin heels, deliberately crippling oneself; it is feminine to cringe, to sulk, to cry – but not to shout; it is definitely not feminine to cycle 500 metres in 33.838 seconds.

Pendleton seems to know that in spite of everything she has achieved, her lack of femininity exposes her to an opprobrium that she cannot get out from under by winning medals or breaking records.  To her credit, she has not allowed that fact to put her off.  But she does work hard in this interview and elsewhere to reassure society of her essential harmlessness.  “For years I’ve been the only girl on the team, but now there are three of us – it’s so nice to have someone to share your nail polish with when you’re on tour!” she gushes, glossing over the heartening fact of increasing numbers of serious sportswomen with a girly giggle.

She concludes: “at the moment, I’m working towards two things: the Olympics and my wedding.”  The symbolism of the fact that the first thing she does when she gets home from training is to put back on her engagement ring (which might be lost or damaged during her intense sessions at the Velodrome), and the reassurance such an image offers to a nervous patriarchy, is so glaring it’s almost embarrassing.  Although if you want genuinely embarrassing, try Pendleton’s photoshoot for lad’s mag FHM and the accompanying commentary:

“Anyone who watched the 2009 World Track Cycling Championships in March will be aware of two things. Firstly, that FHM’s July issue cover star Victoria Pendleton has the sort of legs that could, should you inadvertently find yourself in a sexual embrace with the woman, kill you. Secondly … Pendleton cried so much that her lips were spasming and big drippy bogeys were on their way.”

The combination of fear and contempt encapsulated in this passage expresses all the social pressure that comes to bear on the women who either can’t or won’t be feminine – that is, who either refuse or are unable to feign weakness and debility wrapped up in a pretty chiffon package. FHM’s solution to the problem of Pendleton’s strong, healthy body, dismissively described as being ‘constructed for function rather than form’, is to photograph her in her underwear in a variety of vulnerable poses, those life-threatening legs hobbled in six-inch heels.

Now I KNOW that Pendleton is an independent woman and nobody forces her to simper about make-up or pose in her underclothes; and I KNOW that the feminist movement cannot cry conditioning forever, and that no matter how much progress is made on the equality front, there will always be women who prefer the trappings of femininity to the potential power of womanhood. Nor do I think the two are perforce mutually exclusive; I myself am wearing nail polish right now (well, more or less; I put it on about a week ago and it is now little more than a series of purple archipelagos clinging to my regrettably much-chewed nails) and have not yet felt the urge to jack my job in and make cakes all day – no more than I do after the average working day, in any case. I don’t think we all need to be nine and a half stone of twanging muscle, faces scrubbed clean and hair scraped back to face the glorious dawn of the matriarchy.

What I object to is the desperation which women like Pendleton, who for whatever reason can’t or won’t do ‘femininity’, feel the need to explain away their strength or their intellect with the silent reassurance: ‘I’m still a proper girl.’  And for all that I object to it so strongly, I am guilty of it too.

I don’t really wear makeup.  I never have.  I dabble in eye shadow now and then, and every so often I’ll buy a pot of blusher or tube of concealer that is used once and then gathers dust on my dressing table until I throw it out two years later.  What usually prompts these pointless purchases is a sudden dread of becoming one of those old women with blue eye shadow up to her hairline and orange lipstick stuck to her dentures – women who have looked in the mirror at about sixty and panicked, after decades of scrub-faced complacency.  I don’t want to be that inept when my time comes, I think.  I need to develop a cleansing regimen, I need to figure out how to apply foundation without looking like a ghost, a leper or an Oompa-Loompa, I need to become a proper girl.  The notion that I might just simply continue not to bother until the day I drop down dead doesn’t seem to get much of a look in when the fear is in me.

This creeping sense of shame at my failure to be a proper girl is what drives me to periodically part with great wodges of cash for some variation on a glorified crayon.  But the real reason I don’t use the damn things, the reason I have not devoted the time and effort required to becoming proficient in their application, is that I simply don’t like how it looks on me.  Not just because I can’t put it on right; on several occasions, for special nights out or just for fun, I have asked girl-friends to ‘do my face’; the result is invariably, subtly wrong – I may look nice, but I don’t look like me.  And while me might not be much to look at, when I am offered the choice between that and the painted stranger in the mirror, my gut reaction is to reach for the wet wipes.

On one occasion when this wasn’t practical (the friend in question had spent half an hour anointing me with her best items and would probably never have spoken to me again) I wore my strange face to the pub, and was told by another (male) friend that I looked like ‘a very sexy clown’.  At the time I thought he was being a dick; but looking back, it was perceptive.  The make-up I was sporting was subtle by the standards of the group; but on me, it sat strangely.  I wasn’t wearing it to bring out my eyes, or emphasise my smile; I was wearing it to be a proper girl.  And so, of course, I looked as stagey and ridiculous as Victoria Pendleton, Olympic cyclist, in stilettos and a scrap of silk, prone on the floor in a gentleman’s wank mag.