Why is my work important?

Living in the middle of the chaos that is life, with all the uncertainty that surrounds us and the varied types of events that can lead to a sudden or painful death, is a grueling exercise. Most of us manage to deal with the ordeal by assigning meaning to our actions, and the ways to achieve this goal are very diverse. One of them is confirming that our work is important. If our work is important we automatically get a "mission", the fulfillment of this job, that gives sense and purpose to our lives.

One frequent problem in the corporate sphere is the evaluation of the importance of the work, both by yourself and by everybody else, but in particular by your boss, because he has the ultimate power to keep you on the roster or to kick you out. And the fact is that many jobs are very important even if they do not have the aura of glamour that we have been taught to expect. The recent pandemic has unmistakably shown just how important the job of supermarket cashiers, truck drivers and janitorial staff is. Without their help, the current situation would have been apocalyptic. Other jobs, in particular those related to knowledge and other intangible goods, have proven to be non-essential: it is clear that they can provide something of value under normal circumstances, but when the situation gets ugly and you enter emergency mode, you can suddenly spare a lot of the overhead that has been weighing you down. Do we really need all those consultants, assistants, controllers, and other families of bureaucrats? It is well documented that, if you feel that your work is irrelevant, you lose all interest in doing it, even if you still get paid.

Photo: Gerard Van der Leun

Some people answer the question of relevance by simply being busy: if you are busy all the time is because your job is important, because otherwise you could just cut back and be less busy. But not only all your tasks are important to the point that you cannot put them on hold, it is all the more urgent that you do them yourself, because nobody else can complete them in a satisfactory way. Of course, this is in many cases self-serving. The report that you wanted to prepare on that subject can be important, but it is mostly important for you to feel important about your job. Sometimes you are even aware that the recipient of the report will not read it or at least not straightaway, but you still feel that it is important that the report gets written.

A couple of weeks ago I took part on a conference call that discussed, among other things, the situation of the colleagues in one of the projects, that had been clocking overtime at insane rates, and someone voiced the concern that they might get burnt or even physically ill, to which the director stated that the project was of strategic importance to all of us, that we could not afford delivering late and that if someone had to punch longer ours for a while, they just had to bite through it. It turns out that the overtime was mostly concentrated on two middle managers who pretty much can design how closely they look at the work of the people below them, and which certainly could hand out part of their work to someone else if they wanted to. But, of course, they do not want to: being busy feels important, and they like feeling important. Let us just hope that they do not get burnt in the process. Have a good evening.