Assessment of almost a quarter of a century of employment

After more than twenty years of skimming through employers of all kinds, I decided a few months ago to hang up my crampons. I am lucky to be able to do so in the prime of life, thanks to the investments I made at the time, having barely entered the professional world. I understood very quickly that this environment would not suit me. I had to find an alternative to live differently. Today, when I can finally pull the plug, it is time to take stock of these years spent with these different employers.

Bosses of all kinds

Even though, as soon as I started working, a certain uneasiness took hold deep inside me, I always hoped that the fault lay with the employer of the moment. So, I skimmed through a fair number of companies and organizations of all kinds, in very different sectors of activity, equally diversified workplaces, in several cantons, even in German-speaking Switzerland. Similarly, I tested small family businesses, large national and even international companies. I worked for public limited companies, cooperatives, listed companies and public services. In addition, I held very diverse positions, first as an intern, then as an employee and fairly quickly as a manager, even up to a fairly high level, with several people under my orders. In short, I think we can say that I tried a bit of everything in order to find the shoe that fit me.

Good times... Short-lived

At times I had the brief illusion of achieving this. Indeed, over this long period, I experienced a few rare moments of serenity. I would not go so far as to say that I went to work with a flower in my rifle. I just felt good, happy to go see my colleagues and spend time with them. Unfortunately, these moments never lasted very long, a few months at most. The arrival of a new boss, a new management, a move or a change in strategic direction was enough to break this fragile tranquility and transform it into a new period of doubts, dissatisfaction and sometimes even suffering.

The three main flaws of being an employee

Today, with hindsight, I understand better what got stuck and what, I think, generally poses a problem with salaried employment. I can cite: the loss of meaning in work, the multiplicity of chains of command and the intrusion of work into the private sphere.

The loss of meaning in work

In just a few weeks of working as a freelancer for my clients, I felt like I was infinitely more useful to others than in nearly 25 years of employment. Receiving real recognition, frank, sincere, without any ulterior motive, seeing in the eyes of the person you are talking to a real source of satisfaction, all this gives an immense feeling of pride and accomplishment. It has nothing to do with the formal, calculated and mechanical thanks that managers squander in the world of work.

The sessions

Among the elements that have made me lose the most interest in my activity, I point first of all to the work sessions. I can no longer count exactly the thousands of hours thus lost, ranting in a perfectly sterile manner, on subjects without real importance and almost never arriving at making major decisions. These were in fact discussed at a higher level anyway. The sessions always take place according to an almost identical scenario, with a handful of people who mobilize the speech. The others wait religiously for time to pass, hoping to have to open it as little as possible and above all to be able to return as quickly as possible to deal with much more important and urgent matters.

Emails

Emails are the other culprits in the loss of meaning in work. How is it possible that we have come to this? Without wanting to sink into nostalgia, before the massive arrival of email, we dealt with current affairs quickly, with a quick phone call or a visit to the office next door. Today, everything goes through this medium, in order to "keep a record". All spontaneity is nipped in the bud. We lose not only in decision-making fluidity, but also in human contact. Not to mention that "in order to inform as many people as possible" (meaning to cover oneself), we flood the recipients with copies.

Emails now number in the dozens, even hundreds, per day, some arriving in the middle of the night or on weekends. Inboxes overflow when people return from vacation, and it takes several days of work just to catch up on the email backlog, which means staying frozen behind your screen for hours on end, clicking, reading, deleting and sometimes responding to increasingly long emails.

The multiplicity of chains of command

The other point that has weighed on me particularly over these many years is having to be accountable to more and more people. When there start to be more chiefs than Indians, there is clearly a problem. Paradoxical injunctions multiply, the decision-making process becomes obscure and no one is responsible for anything. The only one who gets the brunt is the one who does the job or who ends up making decisions because no one at the top is capable of doing so. I have obviously experienced this in the public service, but also in several large companies. The group effect encourages social laziness, limits creativity and individual initiatives, as well as decision-making. From this point of view, small family businesses are much better off.

The intrusion of work into the private sphere

Finally, we need to highlight the increasingly blurred boundary between the world of work and our private sphere. We didn't really notice it, because it happened over time. When I think back to my job more than twenty years ago, I remember a clear split between these two worlds. When we left work, it never came to our house. The day was over. Today, working hours are longer, meetings are scheduled early in the morning or late in the evening, because our schedules are already full. The lack of staff, the launch of ill-considered projects in all directions, increasingly complex work procedures, increasingly thorough checks and the avalanche of emails mean that overtime is becoming the norm.

Smartphone, laptop and teleworking

The arrival of the smartphone and laptop, supposed to make it easier to organize our work, has above all allowed it to emerge in our family cocoon. Thanks to these tools, and with the support of Covid, teleworking has definitively buried the separation between private and professional life. Not everything is black in this evolution of course. Working from home has several advantages, in particular the limitation of business travel. However, as the saying goes, there is no gain without loss. Here, clearly, over time, our employers have clearly expanded their hold on us.

Company outings

I still note the increase in aperitifs and dinners/company parties. Covid has calmed things down a bit, but this trend is not about to disappear. I am not against a good drink or a meal with work colleagues, quite the contrary. What I criticize, however, is this penchant of company management to recover the spontaneity of these outings. They turn them into a kind of pseudo-obligatory entertainment with the sole aim of expanding their hold over us a little more.

It's time to move on

Loss of meaning in work, multiple chains of command and intrusion of work into the private sphere... These are indeed the elements that weighed on me the most during all these years of employment. However, above all, it was the passion I had for other areas, particularly finance, that gave me the desire to change. The more I ventured into it, the more I found pleasure in it and the more time I needed to devote to it, which was becoming less and less compatible with a dependent lucrative activity.

In short, I must say that I am very happy to have closed this rather long chapter of my life. There were good and even very good moments. However, these were mainly related to my private life or my path to financial independence. This is good, because now I can devote myself to it at 100%.