Migrations of the Holy Into the Workplace
The religious impulse will likely continue to find a partial outlet in the workplace—one of the few opportunities for social participation still obligatory for most of us.
Author’s Note: This essay was first published in Church Life Journal. You can read part of the essay below and follow the accompanying link to Church Life Journal if you’re interested in reading the full piece.
Before deciding to attend graduate school, I worked as a writer, editor, and content strategist for a small, faith-based liberal arts university. I was a member of that forgotten “third” rank behind faculty and students: staff. In some respects, the institution functioned more like a church than a work organization. It offered university-sponsored book clubs with faculty and staff as well as optional staff chapel events for worship, prayer, and fellowship. Such opportunities for socializing and fun were not instances of “time theft” but opportunities to strengthen a working community. This differed from my previous employers’ mindsets, where opportunities for personal edification and communal ritual-building were scant.
Things seem to be taking a turn within the “world of work.” Upon a casual survey of online job postings, there is a fair amount of attention now spent on the quality and contour of the work environments themselves. Organizations boast of well-serviced cafés and break rooms redolent of Vegas lounges. They emphasize robust fitness and wellness programs in which employees are welcome—even strongly encouraged—to participate to foster optimal health and befriend a cohort of like-bodied coworkers. They espouse mindfulness meditation and stress relief programs, communal self-centering and calming activities that enable the type of holistic development that has become a staple for young (and not-so-young) urbanites.
These well-rounded work environments dovetail nicely with the rise in workplace flexibility. The number of remote workers and freelancers in the country continues to grow, along with the concomitant rise in common workspace companies. Benefit packages boasting of unlimited paid time off (PTO)—a notion that would have been unthinkable to HR managers a couple of decades ago—are much more commonplace. Many people now expect employers to treat them as holistic, multifaceted individuals with varied needs, preferences, and abilities that can only be properly satisfied through personalized attention.
This marks a departure from the “cog-in-the-machine” environment of classic American workplaces. As long as a job offered a consistent salary, a pension or contributing 401k, and enough time off a year to recharge (a metaphor that itself reveals our tendency to equate human labor with automaton activity), a monotonous or creatively stifling job could still be considered, well, decent. Yet, human beings do not do all that well when treated like ancillary machines along a factory line, and burgeoning jobs within the “knowledge economy” require a logic of labor that is not easily quantifiable. Cal Newport touches on this in his book Deep Work, writing that uninterrupted, focused attention for a relatively short length of time (three to four hours) can result in exponentially greater productivity than a protracted work day, one that often foments inefficiency, boredom, and bruised morale.
Continue reading this article in Church Life Journal.