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Workplace Quotes

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Workplace Quotes

“The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.”

ArtPassionWorkCommitmentConformityJobDedicationWorkplaceArtistsNonconformityLinchpin
Book:Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
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“Every great athlete, artist and aspiring being has a great team to help them flourish and succeed - personally and professionally. Even the so-called 'solo star' has a strong supporting cast helping them shine, thrive and take flight.”

SuccessFriendshipMotivational QuotesBusinessCreativitySupportProgressTeamGreatnessFameAthleteMindsetGoalsPersonal DevelopmentEntrepreneurshipGuidanceCoachingEnterpriseThriveGreatTeamworkHelpCreative ProcessWorkplaceArtistsAthleticStarSurviveMentoringShineRasheed Ogunlaru QuotesSportRasheed OgunlaruProfessional DevelopmentQuotes On SuccessStadiumMaking It HappenQuotes On BusinessQuotes On ArtQuotes On SportSupporting CastQuotes On Goals
Author:Rasheed Ogunlaru
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“Organizations are set up by and large to support an ideal type of worker, what I call a prototype, to succeed. And research consistently has shown even across geographies, and across different cultures, that this is by and large a man. So, this tends to be somebody, you know, when we think of a manager, we think of somebody that’s male, but not only that, but they tend to have sort of masculine attributes. So, white, middle class, heterosexual, sort of able-bodied male. But importantly it’s also someone that’s willing to engage in sort of dominant, assertive, aggressive, competitive, exclusionary behaviors to get ahead. And they are willing also to make work the number one priority, so that means it’s also somebody that’s free from dependent care responsibilities. The problem with prototypes is people who tend to succeed in organizations are people who best fit the prototype. You fit in almost by default, you walk in, and it’s easier for you to access networks, it’s easier for you to be sponsored, it’s easier for people to see you as a leader just simply because you match in their mind what good looks like when it comes to leadership. But the reverse is also true. So, the more ways that you differ from this ideal standard, the more challenges you’re going to experience trying to advance at work. And this is true for both men and women, which is a really important point to make. The barriers are not just something that women experience, men also experience challenges to that. And so, what the system has got wrong is that since the beginning of time, since organizations have been around, they’ve pretty much been hardwired with this ideal standard in mind. In many ways, what we’re rarely getting right, or rarely trying to fix around the system, is how we value difference. So, can we create an environment where different types of individuals can succeed.”

MenWomenLeadershipWorkGenderBiasWorkplaceStereotypesGender BiasBias At Work
Author:Michelle P. King
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“I won’t play the game—I don’t bake cupcakes and make cooing noises over pictures of everyone’s kids. If a man doesn’t bake cupcakes and make cooing noises, you know what they call him? Senior Partner. Ben hasn’t made cupcakes once. But men expect you to be more thoughtful than they are—softer, more accommodating. And when you are paid less than your peers, or assaulted on a date, or lose a promotion, they’ll tell you it was your fault—you were too soft, too accommodating.”

MenSexWomenWorkFeminismFemaleFeministGenderSexismWorkplace
Book:The Devil You Know
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“A good manager instills staff with self-confidence, teaches them to believe in themselves and helps them to realise their brilliance. Do not ever treat your staff with disrespect. It is competent until proven incompetent; not incompetent til proven competent.”

BusinessConfidenceRespectManagementStaffWorkplaceCompetentWorkingIncompetentSelf BeliefManagerManaging PeopleManagingCompetencyIncompetencyHow To Manage Staff
Book:Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
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“Research has established, however, that burnout is primarily the result of psychologically hazardous factors that occur at your workplace. (So no, it isn’t just an individual problem; it’s an organizational issue.) More specifically, burnout happens when there’s an ongoing mismatch between the conditions an employee needs to support their well-being and their best work, and what their organization actually provides. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers.”

WorkWorkplaceTriggersBurnoutOrganizationsBurnout TriggersPsychological Hazards
Author:Kandi Wiens
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“A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should work, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous.”

WorkLaborControlWorkplaceTechniques
Book:Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
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“It's possible to see how much the brand culture rubs off on even the most sceptical employee. Joanne Ciulla sums up the dangers of these management practices: 'First, scientific management sought to capture the body, then human relations sought to capture the heart, now consultants want tap into the soul... what they offer is therapy and spirituality lite... [which] makes you feel good, but does not address problems of power, conflict and autonomy.'¹0 The greatest success of the employer brand' concept has been to mask the declining power of workers, for whom pay inequality has increased, job security evaporated and pensions are increasingly precarious. Yet employees, seduced by a culture of approachable, friendly managers, told me they didn't need a union - they could always go and talk to their boss. At the same time, workers are encouraged to channel more of their lives through work - not just their time and energy during working hours, but their social life and their volunteering and fundraising. Work is taking on the roles once played by other institutions in our lives, and the potential for abuse is clear. A company designs ever more exacting performance targets, with the tantalising carrot of accolades and pay increases to manipulate ever more feverish commitment. The core workforce finds itself hooked into a self-reinforcing cycle of emotional dependency: the increasing demands of their jobs deprive them of the possibility of developing the relationships and interests which would enable them to break their dependency. The greater the dependency, the greater the fear of going cold turkey - through losing the job or even changing the lifestyle. 'Of all the institutions in society, why let one of the more precarious ones supply our social, spiritual and psychological needs? It doesn't make sense to put such a large portion of our lives into the unsteady hands of employers,' concludes Ciulla. Life is work, work is life for the willing slaves who hand over such large chunks of themselves to their employer in return for the paycheque. The price is heavy in the loss of privacy, the loss of autonomy over the innermost workings of one's emotions, and the compromising of authenticity. The logical conclusion, unless challenged, is capitalism at its most inhuman - the commodification of human beings.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Author:Madeleine Bunting
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“But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes. According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“The analogy with the environment [crisis] is apt, because both forms of sustainability - human and environmental - have no market value, they cannot be bought and sold. Both fall into the category of what economists call the tragedy of the commons': in an unfettered market, they are subject to its depredations without any accounting for their true value. Just as the damage to the environment has become increasingly clear, so we will see in the coming decades a growing anxiety about the erosion of human sustainability as we witness an exponential rise in depression, stress and anxiety. It is the conditions of our working lives which are one of the main causes.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“What we have lost to a very great degree is the possibility of resistance, confrontation or reform of taking the struggle for freedom back into the workplace. Many of the private sector jobs worst hit by long hours and rising stress have a low rate of trade union membership. The number of workplaces with high union density and well-established collective bargaining fell from 47 per cent in 1980 to only 17 per cent in 1998.26 Two-thirds of all workplaces have no union presence at all.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork HardWork Life BalanceOverworkWork Ethics
Author:Madeleine Bunting
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“Work's enormous drain on time and energy is depriving relationships of care and dependence, the investment they urgently need right now. At the same time, it often adds new demands on those relationships as the stress and exhaustion spill over. Overwork erodes intimate relationships, which have never been so brittle and which, in a competitive, individualistic society, have never been so essential in supporting individual well-being, identity and security. Never have we so needed a place to call home, a place of refuge from the dictates of the market, from its crude calibration of value and its demands on us to perform. Yet at the very same moment, the time we have at home is shrinking, and the privacy we have there is fast disappearing. What is in conflict here is a labour-market ethic of individual achievement and effort, versus older ethics of the dignity of dependence and the fulfilment of selflesness.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Author:Madeleine Bunting
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“As their personal connections to a geographical community shrink, so people look to work to compensate; volunteer schemes organised through the workplace and corporate social responsibility programmes become a substitute. Putnam quotes one commentator's conclusion: 'As more Americans spend more of their time "at work", work gradually becomes less of a one-dimensional activity and assumes more of the concerns and activities of both private (family) and public (social and political) life. It is the corporation which hands out advice on toddler pottytraining and childcare, offers parenthood classes and sets up a reading support programme in a local school - all of which exist in British corporations – rather than the social networks of family, friends and neighbours. This amounts to a form of corporate neopaternalism which binds the employee ever tighter into a suffocating embrace, underpinning the kind of invasive management techniques described in Chapter 4.”

WorkDemocracyGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“[...] The revolution was left unfinished. The feminists of the sixties and seventies challenged the rigid division of labour between men and women; they wanted women to have access to the workplace, and men to rediscover their role at home. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach reflects on the thinking of the seventies: 'We wanted to challenge the whole distribution of work we wanted to put at the centre of everything the reproduction of daily life, but feminism got seduced by the work ethic. My generation wanted to change the values of the workplace so that it accepted family life.' This radical agenda for the reorganisation of work and home was abandoned in Britain. Instead we took on the American model of feminism, influenced by the rise of neo-liberalism and individualism. Feminism acquired shoulderpads and an appetite for power; it celebrated individual achievement rather than working out how to transform the separation between work and family, and the social processes of how we care for dependants and raise children. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt remembers a turning point in the debate in the UK when she was at the National Council for Civil Liberties: 'The key moment was when we organised a major conference in the seventies with a lot of American speakers who were terrific feminists. When they arrived we were astonished that they were totally uninterested in an agenda around better maternity leave, etc. They argued that we couldn't claim special treatment in the workplace; women would simply prove they were equals. You couldn't make claims on the workplace. We thought it was appalling.”

WorkDemocracyFeminismGood LifeWorking ClassWorkplaceWork EthicWork HardWork Life BalanceOverwork
Book:Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives
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“The upper management team had informed me that an employee that worked for me was a poor performer and would be terminated soon. This employee was clearly displaying mental health issues that were causing problems in the workplace. When I followed the company procedures and reported this to human resources, their response was to inform me that my contract would not be renewed and I would be immediately fired if anyone complained about me. This was my introduction to how mental health issues are handled in the USA.”

PoorCompanyIssuesTeamHealthHumanResourcesManagementResponseUsaEmployeeProblemsWorkplaceMentalIntroductionProceduresWorkedInformSoonContractClearlyInformedFiredTerminatedImmediatelyPerformerRenewedReportedUpperCausingComplainedHandled
Author:Steven Magee
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“As a manager, I was able to put the USA workplace mental health system to the test. In each of three separate companies there was an employee that was displaying mental health issues and I reported this to the human resources department. The outcome: I was terminated every time. The conclusion: Reporting mental health issues in USA employees will lose you your job!”

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Author:Steven Magee
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“A human being in a highly technicized productive unit is simply not allowed to be spontaneous. It just interferes with the plan laid down in advance by the engineers and technicians who decide how he should word, and in this way he, the human being, is profoundly diminished, because he is not permitted to be spontaneous.”

CreativityStressTensionExploitationWorkplaceWorkaholicMonitoring
Book:Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
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