Evolving expectations

You | Your employer. Who’s responsible for your sense of purpose, community and wellbeing?

Employment trends, newsletters and organisational culture conversations are increasingly focused on the ever more challenging expectations of the new generation of employees.

I’d been struggling to clarify my thoughts about it until I found this video clip of Simon Sinek speaking on Gen Z in the workplace.

In years past, he said, you got your sense of purpose from church and your sense of community from your bowling club, knew your neighbours and would host barbeques with them on weekends, and were loyal to work and work loyal to you. At the time, work was simply a place where you made a living to pay your bills.

Now church attendance is down, bowling clubs are vanishing and we’re becoming more insular and often don’t even know our neighbours. We’re putting all that pressure on our workplace, expecting it to be the place we get our sense of purpose and community, our social life and, in some cases, our therapy.

What a eureka moment! But I can’t help but wonder if it’s really fair. After all, no one person can fulfil all our needs all the time, so why should we expect our workplace to be different.

I’m an advocate for the importance of finding purpose in our work, building community at work and nurturing employee wellbeing. My career is, in part, built on these beliefs. I’m also thankful organisations and leaders recognise the importance of these things and are intentional about focusing on them. It just prompted me to reflect on whether the burden of responsibility has swung too far the other way. The difference being that rather than developing our own sense of purpose, community and wellbeing and using that to contribute the same to our workplace, we take a more passive approach and wait for our workplace to deliver it to us—then leave when we aren’t feeling it.

All that said, as Simon Sinek noted in his conversation, it’s neither a positive nor a negative, it just is what it is. What we can do is recognise this has occurred and adapt to the new employment landscape. Even so, I enjoyed being challenged with a new perspective, and rethinking how I can take personal responsibility for finding purpose, building community and nurturing wellbeing outside of work.

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Photograph: Mimi Thian on Unsplash.