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silveradept[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
There are a lot of things in a workplace that can contribute to major it a much less happy place to work. Sometimes it's the job itself, where a person who has been trained in all sorts of things finds out they're going to be using a much smaller subset of that knowledge, repetitively. Or is a very high stress job that slowly (or quickly) eats away at you until you can't summon the desire to go to work anymore. Sometimes it's the people you have to work with, whether they're actively harassing you, making your work environment horrible, or just providing well over your recommended daily allowance of micro- and macroaggressions. Sometimes it's the public, especially if you work in a profession where the people that are calling you are almost uniformly in a bad mood and angry at the company for one reason or another.
But even if you have a good workplace and people who you can get along with, there's always the possibility that you're going to experience a situation where work is too much like work and not enough like a thing you might nominally enjoy or want to do. It's the sort of thing that can come forward later on in your career, after the rush of employment and the initial attempts to figure out exactly what the job entails settle into an understanding of where the boundaries are and what the expectations are. After the novelty of things wears off, burnout can always settle in. Perhaps it's working too many days without a meaningful vacation, wanting to do something different for once, finding out that the job just doesn't carry as much fun as it used to, or being shuffled or promoted into a position where the responsibilities are very different or the client group is very different does it. Many library jobs are unionized, but the classification for the librarian is often singular, no matter what your specialization might be, so in times of economic unrest, it's entirely possible that an adult services librarian may find themselves the new children's librarian or a supervisor has to return to a public-facing position. Being employed is nice, but if you specifically joined the library system so you didn't have to provide programming for children on a regular basis, you can see where getting stuck in that spot because of your seniority might not contribute to happiness at work.
Layoffs and bumping and such are generally pretty stressful affairs for everyone affected by them. Work environments and people dynamics get upset and now everyone has to learn how to make the page function smoothly again, which will take some false starts and probably some genuine screw-ups before things can find their rhythm again. My organization managed to kill morale and goodwill along the staff by hiring in a speaker for the staff day after the economic crash created layoffs. The speaker's message started well, acknowledging that there is a grief process that happens with layoffs and shuffling in the organization, stop that the feelings that are going around were valid. Where things went off, however, was when they started showing productivity graphs and said that the average grief period lasted about two years before productivity returned to normal. The conclusion being drawn was thrash while our feelings were valid, we should totally hurry up and get over them so that we could go back to operating at our peak productivity. The library workers were certainly not having any of that, and the management had just added a layer of anger and resentment to their problems by promoting a message that was utterly inappropriate for the time.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the format of the staff day changed to a learning day with workshops and presentations to attend for the year or two after that, since the grumbles hadn't ceased like they were supposed to, and then when the complaints rolled in that the learning day wasn't helping all that much, the day disappeared for the better part of a decade. Which was cost saving for sure, as there wasn't quite the bed for substitutes, but which also isolated people even more from seeing others at different locations, especially those ones across the county from themselves. The morale did not improve as had been hoped.
Discipline doesn't help toward happy employees, either, and neither does having to tell someone you can't get them a card because they're in the shared temper tantrum zone. And if the politics around you is pretty grim, well, you can see how trying to maintain a positive attitude, which is explicitly called out as one of the skills and qualities of a good employee, can be exceedingly difficult. Spare a thought for all the people you meet in the course of their day - odds are good that there's something that's drawing away their happiness and they could use something to help shore that up. No, creepy compliments are not the way to go. Written comments about how excellent the person is that helped you are.
The cycle of up and down continues, always, but acknowledging the ups can sometimes burst against the downs. In theory, that's why my organization has awards for staff to give each other as applause for work well done, written the idea that birth recipient and nominee get entered in for a small prize in the months where the award is given. Which works great, if you're in a location that recognizes that good work and then goes from there. But it's very easy to see high quality work as the standard, instead of the exception, and then there aren't nearly as many good things given as there could be.
Morale is a tricky business, certainly. And the focus on the Platonic form of things in library school can often leave someone without the tools to recognize and try to change things so as to change their own morale and make things better for everyone. More on that idea later. For now, take some time to compliment the person you see all the time but haven't actually told how good they are.
There are a lot of things in a workplace that can contribute to major it a much less happy place to work. Sometimes it's the job itself, where a person who has been trained in all sorts of things finds out they're going to be using a much smaller subset of that knowledge, repetitively. Or is a very high stress job that slowly (or quickly) eats away at you until you can't summon the desire to go to work anymore. Sometimes it's the people you have to work with, whether they're actively harassing you, making your work environment horrible, or just providing well over your recommended daily allowance of micro- and macroaggressions. Sometimes it's the public, especially if you work in a profession where the people that are calling you are almost uniformly in a bad mood and angry at the company for one reason or another.
But even if you have a good workplace and people who you can get along with, there's always the possibility that you're going to experience a situation where work is too much like work and not enough like a thing you might nominally enjoy or want to do. It's the sort of thing that can come forward later on in your career, after the rush of employment and the initial attempts to figure out exactly what the job entails settle into an understanding of where the boundaries are and what the expectations are. After the novelty of things wears off, burnout can always settle in. Perhaps it's working too many days without a meaningful vacation, wanting to do something different for once, finding out that the job just doesn't carry as much fun as it used to, or being shuffled or promoted into a position where the responsibilities are very different or the client group is very different does it. Many library jobs are unionized, but the classification for the librarian is often singular, no matter what your specialization might be, so in times of economic unrest, it's entirely possible that an adult services librarian may find themselves the new children's librarian or a supervisor has to return to a public-facing position. Being employed is nice, but if you specifically joined the library system so you didn't have to provide programming for children on a regular basis, you can see where getting stuck in that spot because of your seniority might not contribute to happiness at work.
Layoffs and bumping and such are generally pretty stressful affairs for everyone affected by them. Work environments and people dynamics get upset and now everyone has to learn how to make the page function smoothly again, which will take some false starts and probably some genuine screw-ups before things can find their rhythm again. My organization managed to kill morale and goodwill along the staff by hiring in a speaker for the staff day after the economic crash created layoffs. The speaker's message started well, acknowledging that there is a grief process that happens with layoffs and shuffling in the organization, stop that the feelings that are going around were valid. Where things went off, however, was when they started showing productivity graphs and said that the average grief period lasted about two years before productivity returned to normal. The conclusion being drawn was thrash while our feelings were valid, we should totally hurry up and get over them so that we could go back to operating at our peak productivity. The library workers were certainly not having any of that, and the management had just added a layer of anger and resentment to their problems by promoting a message that was utterly inappropriate for the time.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the format of the staff day changed to a learning day with workshops and presentations to attend for the year or two after that, since the grumbles hadn't ceased like they were supposed to, and then when the complaints rolled in that the learning day wasn't helping all that much, the day disappeared for the better part of a decade. Which was cost saving for sure, as there wasn't quite the bed for substitutes, but which also isolated people even more from seeing others at different locations, especially those ones across the county from themselves. The morale did not improve as had been hoped.
Discipline doesn't help toward happy employees, either, and neither does having to tell someone you can't get them a card because they're in the shared temper tantrum zone. And if the politics around you is pretty grim, well, you can see how trying to maintain a positive attitude, which is explicitly called out as one of the skills and qualities of a good employee, can be exceedingly difficult. Spare a thought for all the people you meet in the course of their day - odds are good that there's something that's drawing away their happiness and they could use something to help shore that up. No, creepy compliments are not the way to go. Written comments about how excellent the person is that helped you are.
The cycle of up and down continues, always, but acknowledging the ups can sometimes burst against the downs. In theory, that's why my organization has awards for staff to give each other as applause for work well done, written the idea that birth recipient and nominee get entered in for a small prize in the months where the award is given. Which works great, if you're in a location that recognizes that good work and then goes from there. But it's very easy to see high quality work as the standard, instead of the exception, and then there aren't nearly as many good things given as there could be.
Morale is a tricky business, certainly. And the focus on the Platonic form of things in library school can often leave someone without the tools to recognize and try to change things so as to change their own morale and make things better for everyone. More on that idea later. For now, take some time to compliment the person you see all the time but haven't actually told how good they are.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-26 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-26 10:06 pm (UTC)