Personal Social Responsibility

Everyone is talking about Corporate social responsibility (CSR) but for a minute I would like to talk about personal social responsibility (PSR). The ancient Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius said “Rational beings exist for one another. That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee”. Where then do we play a part in the health and the wealth of our society? Where does our personal social responsibility begin and where should it end? In ancient, more tribal times our connections to each other were much more immediate. In those days part of tribal life will always have involved helping out others. Building each other's shelters, looking out for each other, bringing in the harvest shoulder to shoulder.

In that environment helping others is as valuable as helping ourselves. In those times our intrinsic connectedness would follow a clear logic that makes sense of such positive communal activity but when your tribe is 60 million strong as it is in the Uk tribe or 6 billion strong as it is in the global tribe it can be a little too easy to miss those connections. This is also massively compounded by the fact that we pay taxes. We no longer help each other build barns or grain stores, we no longer work on our shared harvest together, indeed we no longer see that our harvests are shared. Civilisation came up with a much more efficient way of organising our culture. We all specialise in our area of work. That is what we do, day in and day out and that is what we get good at. We are not to be disturbed or distracted. It is pointless asking the teacher to leave the school to help with the harvest. It is simply easier to tax us and distribute our tribal contribution in the form of money.

We work over here and instead of helping out in the field or building the barn or taking time to teach at the school, we simply give part of our harvest value (our earnings) and put that back into the system so that our cut gets divided up amongst those providing the social and civil service.  In many ways this is of course the best way to be efficient as a society but what has that cost us? We do not see our money doing the good work. All too often we think about what our taxes don’t manage to provide, we look at what is lacking and feel over-charged and hard done by and I am not writing this to comment that we should be happy about all the good things our taxes do in our society. I am merely drawing attention to the fact that in many ways we are no longer aware of the experience of community that this civilised efficiency has separated us from. Imagine taking your years taxes or the total of your last ten years taxes and going to give that to your local school or buying a new piece of desperately needed medical equipment for your local hospital. That would not only be good for the school but it would probably be phenomenally good for you. That satisfaction, that connection between your working day and the good of those around you is what so many of us are missing. Humans are pack animals that have essentially forgotten what it is to be part of a tribe, to be part of an extended family or community.

Social responsibility is not some heavy burden or commitment that we must carry out with furrowed brow. Social responsibility and the actions that usher forth from it are the threads that help us remember who we are when we are at our best. This is the stuff of meaning, purpose, fulfilment and satisfaction. It is when we can connect our daily work with these feelings that we have the ability to derive real and lasting satisfaction from what we do. How then can we find our way back to that most important set of feelings? How then can a company create the kind of workplaces that give people a chance to experience this kind of connection to something more important?  People are craving a life of substance and it is a wise employer that creates a way of working that gives their people a chance to find meaning in what they do. This has been the subject of much research and has been an obsession of mine, now for over a decade. How can employers and employees come together to create a working alliance that enables both the values of the organisation and the values of the employee to be properly aligned? This is not about typical value alignment, which usually involves training employees to memorise a company vision, a mission statement and a set of abstract values. This is about creating a real sense of engagement, a real sense of purpose and most importantly giving people an opportunity to be involved in something that is more important than themselves.

That is what inspires us, that is what creates real engagement, not employee engagement, but human engagement, that is what gives everyone a chance to take pride in creating something of real worth and meaning. This, however is not just for those companies that do something inspiring like drilling well holes in Africa or some such worthy cause. It has been much more interesting to research those companies that have people doing something mechanical, repetitive and otherwise boring. Some of those companies have managed to still create a real sense of satisfaction in all of their people. What I have learnt is that values have to be lived for them to become real, yet once established those values colour everything we do. In other words social responsibility is contagious. If a company in business to buy big bits of metal and turn them into smaller bits of metal and everyone who works there just does something fairly menial and repetitive, it is highly likely that the people that work there will find the work empty and numbing. They will derive no satisfaction from the work. Yet, if that same company takes 10% of their profits and donates that to their local school and they get photos from the school and letters of thanks, comments from students and they let their staff see the impact of their work, those people will be able to generate more satisfaction and meaning from their work. This is, of course, great and is within the realm of typical corporate social responsibility but that is still just another form of taxation and actually those members of staff are happy that money goes to the school instead of their bosses but deep down they would much prefer that money as a pay rise for themselves.

What makes a real difference to the meaning and satisfaction a person takes away from work is how they feel about the work itself. Menial work can easily be seen as drudgery but so can any task once it has been repeated a thousand times without meaning. So teachers, accountants, sales people, surgeons, in fact anyone in any profession can lose their connection to the satisfaction of their work over a long enough period of time. So what can change this? Deep down, there is something that we all have in common. A core need of a human is growth. This is why repetition of any task can be so numbing and destructive. We all want to grow, we all want to evolve. All too often that has been turned into the idea and feeling of wanting to grow more wealthy but actually that feeling of the need to grow is very much linked to the tribe, to the species, to the well being of mankind as a race. We are intrinsically 'socially interested' if not totally responsible, so the key to creating workplaces that inspire people is to create workplaces that give people a chance to see that work is an opportunity for them to grow, work is an opportunity for them to discover their own greatness. Everyone knows that they have a great potential inside them waiting to be released. That greatness feels most powerful when we think about how that greatness will be good for others. A person coming to work who punches holes in metal everyday might not be that interested in punching 1200 holes an hour compared to a 1000 if the profits just go to the boss, but if that person can begin to understand that work is a place where they can challenge themselves to always to do their best, not for the company primarily but more for those people that that person cares about. If he committed to doing his best in every area of his life and work was a place where he pushed himself to see what he was capable of, how might that improve the lives of his loved ones? How might it improve the lives of his loved one if, with the right training, he saw work as a training ground for his own excellence? He would give his best at work and that would enable him to be more committed at home, more committed in his community, more committed to himself, his health and his well being.

Work would stretch him and he would rise to that challenge and would find meaning in his capacity to grow, to improve and most of all his capacity to discover that the greatest human enjoyment comes when we discover our best when doing something we believe in. That is when we re-discover our communal nature. That is when we find meaning in our work no matter what it is. That desire to be our best and to use what we have and what we do as a training ground for our own excellence is the key to discovering and enjoying the meaning of life. It is a wise employer who discovers the secrets to unlocking that potential by creating the kind of workplaces that get their people to think of every piece of work in those terms. That is what we do at FreeMind. We are passionate about creating workplaces that give everyone a chance to come home from work satisfied and fulfilled no matter what they do. We are committed to creating workplaces where the children of the staff hope, one day to be lucky enough to work for that company. It is time that we started getting the youth of today excited about what work can be.