WHY do we work? John J Arent

Why I do what I do.

Working for a living is a necessity for the vast majority of people.  I recently came across surveys that show that over 60% of employees today are unhappy with their current employers.  There are various reasons for this which I hope to entertain in a future blog.  Today, the purpose of this post is to answer the question…”Why I do what I do”?

I conducted a survey recently that had over 300 responses….The overwhelming majority of the comments received was financial liabilities.  A distant second was personal enjoyment.  There was a total of 311 respondents and the poll showed the following results. The multiple choice responses were as follows:

Career position/advancement                         14                           4.5%

Pay the bills                                                   219                         70.4%

Enjoyed company/culture/colleagues             18                           5.7%

Liked working for direct manager                    2                          < 1%

Other                                                               58                         18.6%

Unfortunately, I was unable to categorize the “Other” reasons collected on the survey.  I am following this up with the hope of a much larger poll (17,000) in the next few weeks.

The bottom line as I see it from this unscientific poll  is that we as business leaders have much work to  be done in creating an environment that is conducive to long-term commitment.  If the #1 reason that employees are spending over 50% of their waking hours is simply to pay bills, something is wrong.  Do you agree?


Please forward this along to your channel of colleagues....we need to get this information out so that corrective measures can be made!  Thanks and God Bless!