The Job of Work Relations

Posted on October 29, 2007
Filed Under Society |

Wonderful Work So the corporate social environment is a parody of socializing. I have worked in a number of offices, and very often the interactions between many of the people are muted and distorted. The ideas and beliefs which the work environment encourages are not truly compatible with what is genuinely within our hearts. In a normal social environment people tend to gravitate towards those they naturally resonate with. So if you get on well with someone, then you talk to them, spend time with them – become friends even.Yet, in many ways the situation in the work environment is very different; as we are forced to develop relationships with people we normally wouldn’t even consider doing so. This is confounded by the workplace ethics and conditioning, which determines acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

These so called ethics – enforced by the sort of team building I wrote about recently – create false walls between people. They generate a sort of artificial action and attitude, which causes us to suppress our true personality (so you don’t tell the office troll to “Piss off!”), and instead sacrifice your free-time and even submit your personality, to further the goals of the office, department or company.

Meanwhile, what is going on inside of us is at constant battle with the expectations created from the work ethics. It is a form of mind-fragmentation; one part just wants to be our self, whilst the other part feels it has to conform and tow-the-line. And this only serves to make those false-work-relationships even more tense.

So the truth is there are expectations all round. People who are deeply entrenched in the work-ethic world-view are at constant odds with the more ‘relaxed’ and ‘laid-back’ individuals. In many ways all relationships revolve around our sense of identity. For many people their job is their identity, which means that the work-ethics are tightly bound up with their sense of self. For these people, any challenge to the work-ethics can be perceived as a challenge to their identity.

We can help to alleviate these sorts of conflict by learning to identify within ourselves where the corporate programming ends and our own self begins. This helps because we can discover the cause of our personal reactions and attitude within the workplace. If someone is annoying you, figure out if your annoyance is based on work-ethics (i.e. the other person isn’t conforming, or meeting expectations) or if it is because the person simply pisses you off (maybe you don’t like them much – which is fine, it is a totally human feeling!)

The truth is – many of the workplace expectations are false notions. They are based upon dysfunctional methods of human interaction (work takes priority over personal feelings, space, life); yet such dysfunction is often rewarded because it is beneficial to the corporation. It creates convoluted relationships between people – yet we can side-step all that by simply understanding what is in our hearts, with self-honesty and by reacting from the heart. And that never ceases to amaze me.