Where is the happy medium?

The average British person spends about 100,000 hours working, that's about 1/3 of their lifetime. Thats without the rediculous amount of time spent working overtime, answering midnight blackberry emails and the endless painful hours packed on sweaty trains and tubes travelling to and from work.

Work is a massive part of our lives.

So when does it become too much?

People differ - it depends on how you feel about your job, the amount of autonomy you have, the relationships you have at work, even the heating, lighting and air conditioning in your office affects how you feel about your job.

People have different motivations, some want to get home to their partners and families others want to stay away from them. All of these people and their worlds contribute to the social structure and culture of workplaces. Some are prepared to work very long hours because they enjoy the work they are doing and therefore they get some internal gain from the work. Others hate to work long hours because it encroaches on their free time and affects their social lives.  Some are made to work long hours because the attitude can be 'if you don't do it, someone else will' Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum where people wait for their working days to end, clock watching because they have so little to fill their days but they're afraid to speak up in case they talk themselves out of a job.

So who gets it right? There are extremes. The likes of Google with their sleep pods which peopel can use at any time during the working day to help revive them for more work!

Research has shown that people most enjoying working when it provides them with some intrinsic value, that is it means something to them, it motivates them from within rather than from external gains like financial rewards or tangible gifts. People like to feel they are making a difference to someone somewhere. It's human nature.

But then should we be happy at work? Is that what it's about? Surely we only go to work to make money in order to live the rest of our lives... but when you break it down 'the rest of lives' is pretty minimal, once you factor in sleep, going to the toilet etc. But then some of us enjoy all those things too. Maybe we just live for those small moments of intense satisfaction, those times when we feel pure elation. Like the first few months of being in love or when we have an amazing night out with friends, or see a great film or for those altruistic types, help someone in need. Work is just part of life. Most of us have to do it and it brings order into the choas that is our world. Those who give up work through good fortune or are born into money and don't have to work are often unhappy souls. So as much as we moan about work it actually brings value to life.

Difficulties of people accepting the value of occupational psychology as a profession.

Industrial Psychology is such an important profession as its aim is to help people to perform efficiently and effectively and therefore its principals feed into the other professions and help them to operate more efficiently. We are unique in the way we approach our work as well, we work with the goals of the company as a whole, increase productivity, workplace performance e.t.c but also on the morale of the individual employee, a bottom up approach rather than the usual top down approach.

Unfortunately I think there are many issues with industrial / occupational psychology as a profession. Firstly, people who do not study psychology or have an interest in the human psyche, don't have a real understanding of the value such practice can add to organisational environments and worker output. Most problems in the workplace stem from human interaction, be it interaction with each other or those external to the business, or, in the modern world, human interaction with machinery. In other professions, for example HR, IT, Marketing, the outputs are more tangible, e.g. a new marketing campaign resulting in increased sales, or a new website which sees more traffic than the old version. Applying psychology in the workplace is much more complex and doesn't provide fast results.

In my view, work psychology as a discipline and work psychologists as professionals need to concentrate on two things; the first is ensuring that anyone practising in the profession, whatever their title or whichever discipline they are working in, should concentrate on marketing the value of psychology in the workplace. This should primarily be done through applying a ‘quick win’ strategy so that fast and effective changes can be put in place which show the real value psychologists can add. This strategy would also serve to get people excited about what psychology can offer organisations.

Secondly, there needs to be more buzz around what psychology has to offer. Even with a great MSc course in occupational psychology, and supposedly the most practical in terms of transfer into the workplace, I was not prepared for the lack of enthusiasm and understanding of the value that the profession can offer. Nor was I prepared for how little (despite having 6 years of work experience) I knew about how to apply the principles. Don't get me wrong, there is good work out there, there are consultants I work with who are delivering top quality people and organisational development solutions on an on-going basis, but the industry is still in its early stages and our new grads in the profession are not prepared to fight the battle.

Are open plan office environments productive?

Many of us know the feeling of working in busy open plan offices, people trashing back and forth, the office loud mouth chattering to her colleagues about her drunken weekend antics, your boss facing you or worse, peering over your shoulder while you work… does this environment really breed productivity? Then you have those people who think it is important to talk so loudly about what they are working on, just so that everyone is aware of how 'busy' they are and how hard they work.

Back in the 80’s the trend was to have office cubicles, places where each person could sit quietly and get on with their work. This was also unproductive, no-one was expected to talk and it resulted in high levels of boredom and absenteeism. 

But what I would give for a bit of peace and quiet right now... Here I am sat in an office full of about 300 people and there is nowhere to escape. Even if you can find a quiet corner, everyone sees you go there and keeps a record of how long you stay there. Only the other day I was talking to a friend about her experiences of the office toilet habits. Everyone in the office knows the time you go and length of time you spend on the throne and they then judge whether or not it is safe to go afterwards! My friend, who will rename unnamed, now has a complex about her toilet habits!

Is this really caring for our workers? Have we gone ‘open plan, shove them in like cattle’ mad?!

The modern office means that not only have we got more desks per square meter than spotlights, there is also the small, but super trendy, matter of hot-desking. That is desks that are assigned to anyone who can grab them before the next person. For those people who don’t spend every day in the office, why bother giving them their own desk… let them find some space and if there is none, tough! If you manage to find a desk, then you have to put up with working from a minuscule laptop, uninviting strip lighting and defiantly bad ergonomics. Is it just me or have we gone backwards?! The industrial revolution brought us small tightly packed offices where production was key, no thought for worker welfare. The scenarios described above hinge on similar levels of treatment.

But differently personalities suit different environments. Some people like the busy buzzy office environments, chit chat with their colleagues, I prefer to keep a professional distance most of the time, it takes time to develop relationships, and trusting people in the workplace is, in my view, difficult.

So where is the middle ground? How should our offices be laid out? And is it only me that struggles with this? I'd love to hear your views...