Job Strategies: A matter of priorities

We’ve all gone the extra mile at work, burned the midnight oil, given our all for the team. When the chips are down, the American can-do spirit heralded in come-from-behind sports movies envelops the workplace and inspires us to give one last triumphant effort to … to what, exactly?

A cynical person might end the sentence with “… to line the pockets of the multinationals that own our jobs.”

I’m not a cynical person, and I do think that heroic effort can be called for now and then in the workplace. But after several years of watching worker productivity go up while wages and employment stagnate or decline, I have to ask: When does Sisyphus get to stop rolling the rock up the hill?

Or to bring the question into our own era, when does the American worker get to stop putting the job ahead of everything else? Already we take less vacation, work longer hours and hold more second jobs than workers in other industrialized nations.

There’s no doubt that work ethic, pride and tradition play a role in this equation, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m proud that our workers produce and innovate on a daily basis. But I do wonder about some of the decisions we’re making as individuals and whether we have our priorities straight.

I was reminded of this after a recent East Coast blizzard. Out of that snowy mess came the dramatic story of people trapped all night on the highways, having misjudged the storm’s severity — despite repeated and urgent messages from officials to stay off the roads. One story focused on a woman trapped on a closed highway for 12 hours who spent the time writing goodbye letters to her husband and young children.

The woman was eventually rescued. But why was she on the road? Because she couldn’t leave her office until 4 p.m., long after the safest time to travel. While the winds howled and the snow piled up, she sat at her desk doing the critical work of a business-to-business sales rep in the optical supplies field. On a Friday afternoon.

It’s unkind to single out one person from the dozens who made similar choices. Indeed, my heart was with this woman right until the end of the newspaper account where her occupation was revealed. That’s when the words popped into my head, “You couldn’t take the file home?”

I don’t know what kind of pressure she was under or how close she was to closing a deal. I don’t even know that I would have made a different decision myself, except that I grew up in Minnesota where blizzard warnings are taken pretty seriously.

But I do know what she’s probably also concluded in the weeks since that scary night: There aren’t many sales jobs worth the kind of sacrifice she almost made.

A friend I mentioned this to told me of her own, much less dramatic lesson in setting priorities. She and her husband were returning from a European vacation when the airline informed them the flight home was overbooked. Their options were to stay at a luxury hotel at the airline’s expense and then fly home first class or take an alternate coach booking with multiple stops and layovers, landing just in time for my friend to return to work.