He worked, he died

A friend of mine recently died from cancer. Although I did not have too much to do with him on a regular basis outside being my client at work, him being my doctor when I was sick, him becoming a neighbour when I bought the house, and meeting him a few times at the local choir, he was the kind of person that you can't help call a friend. If you spoke to him for no more than a minute, you'd consider him a life long friend.

His children made some wonderful speeches about how wonderful their father was.

Then came a co-worker. And the theme of co-workers were work. And I balked inside. Because they were not talking about his passion, but about work. "He was a good worker. He loved to work. He did a lot of overtime. He cared about work."

Those words. "Work." So much more could have been said. This man was a physician. He had a passion for people and helping them stay well and treating them when they were sick. He made personal contact with his patients, he truly cared, and that was his drive, his passion.

And somehow, this was boiled down to "he was a good worker who happily accepted a lot of overtime when necessary."

There was a whole bunch of them present. I see them as the "work mafia." Because what seems important to them is the idea that you work hard, not the content of your work, not your passion for your work. Which makes me think that I need a will that bans the words "work", "job" and "labour" in my funeral.

While I have a passion for the things I do for a living, I do those things because I have a passion for it. Not because it is a job. I take pride in the results of my work. It is my personal achievement. And I think this is how people deserve to be remembered - their passions. Their drive. The things that truly defined them.

That's what his children did. And that's why their speeches were so memorable.

Mental health at work

My department is especially vulnerable for psychic health: We are few, so if anyone is out, we have a real capacity problem. Despite this, we also have to accept that other people are frustrated over our capacity problem, and take it out on us. To survive, we have special focus on mental health and, to make it more tangible, we run a Burn Out Self-Test every month. This makes it easy to report mental health trends to top management, and also gives us a hint about when it is necessary to take some kind of action.

The first piece of action is to sit down and be open about what it is that bothers us. All stress issues can be related back to obstacles for the three motivating factors: autonomy, mastery and purpose. We then discuss what we can do to get rid of the obstacles and restore the motivation. If we do things right, it should be visible in the next test.

Mental health is something we have learned to speak openly about within the department. This openness fosters a culture of compassion and camaraderie. Our verbal suggestion box is not only about a ping pong table, but more so about compassion for the frustrated client swearing at us from the other end of the phone line. And if one person needs to vent, we give them that space. Someone else will deal with the difficult client.

Mastery, then, is no longer just about the tasks of the department. It is also about mastering one's own mind.

Bullying at work

"It is almost impossible to prove bullying at work," says LO-attorney Karl Inge Rotmo. While the employer has the burden of evidence that the physical work environment is in order and that there has been no discrimination, the victim must carry the burden of evidence in occurrences of non-physical bullying.

In my 10.2.2009 article in Vestlandsnytt "I was bullied", I pointed out that the victim does not necessarily know that it is being bullied. This is especially true for the work place. Alteration of the work environment to make someone uncomfortable is a way of making someone quit. It is, unfortunately, a common way simply because it is so hard to prove. Especially when the bullying is in the form of making the victim feel incompetent and worthless.

Bullying at the work place has many possible purposes: The bully's mental health, therein exaggerating other people's shortcomings in order to divert from one's own shortcomings. Squeezing someone out because of their success, which takes attention away from their boss. Squeezing someone out to make a vacancy for a friend or relative. At the end of the day, the bullying has a purpose, and it is therefore typically performed in a covert operation with subtle hard-to-prove alterations of the work environment.

Further, mental health is not seen as something very tangible. It does, however, have tangible ripples in terms of reduced productivity. If the mental health of someone who ends up quitting their job was the problem, then that one person quitting would be the end of the story. If you have a high turn over rate of employees, the problem is probably not the employee.

If you want to fight bullying at the work place, you have to look at root causes and prevent these causes from tainting the business. We know now that employees are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Bullying actually attacks at least one of these three (usually autonomy) and are therefore counter productive. The cure must therefore be to create a work environment that fosters these motivational factors. Not only is it productive, it also reduces the bully's need to bully.