I’m Engaged!!! Are you?

One afternoon I entered into a public restroom in a corporate building. As I walked across the bathroom to a stall, I noticed a cleaning lady near the sinks. She was wiping the sinks with one hand, and holding her cell phone in the other hand. She was involved in a very intense conversation with the other person on the line. However, she was not so consumed by the call that she could not acknowledge my presence. She looked up from the phone conversation, smiled and said, “Hello.” While in the stall, I noticed that the woman returned to the intensity of her conversation. The conversation went on and on and on and on with no apparent end in sight. As I exited the stall and proceeded to the sink near the cleaning lady, to wash my hands, I noticed that she had moved into a space where she was no longer conscious of my presence. She was wholly engulfed in the conversation. It was as if cleaning the restroom was a secondary task for her.

As I stared down at my own hands, scrubbing the palms of my hands with soap, I realized that the task of cleaning the restroom just was not important to this woman. She had been scrubbing the same spot for at least 3 to 4 minutes. I looked at her rag and saw no moisture. I asked myself if she had even put any cleaning solution on the rag. Her arm moved steadily and constantly, but it seemed as if she was not making any progress towards improving the cleanliness of the sink she scrubbed for such a long period of time. The phone call had captured the majority of her focus. She seemed to be disconnected from the very task she was being paid to perform.

That led me to an earth-shattering realization. Ordinarily, I would have been annoyed by the fact that the woman ignored her responsibility to clean the public bathroom that she was being paid to clean. Ordinarily, I would have interpreted her action as proof that she lacked integrity – her being paid to work but refusing to actually work. But this time I felt nothing but compassion for the woman. I realized that it’s very likely that she ignored her job responsibilities because she wasn’t sufficiently interested in the task she was being paid to perform. Perhaps there wasn’t an issue of integrity at all. Perhaps the issue was that she had yet to find a position that offered her a level of engagement that could hold her attention. Perhaps she had not yet found a position that would challenge and grow her skills and abilities appropriately. Perhaps it was just that she needed social engagement with the person on the line while at work because the position itself didn’t offer opportunities that piqued her interest.

The world we live in has evolved to a place where you can be paid to do almost anything. There is no longer a limited set of traditional employment opportunities. In fact, you can build a career doing just about anything you are interested in doing. No one should spend their time in an employment opportunity that doesn’t appeal to their personal interest, offer meaningful engagement, or provide a challenge. It is when one doesn’t have a position that satisfies at least one of these needs that a person looks for (social) activity to occupy their time at work. This shouldn’t be the case. Your job should continuously captivate your attention such that it persuades you to remain. Otherwise, other employment opportunities should be considered.