The reward of the brave

T he self-evident way in which personnel is seen and treated today as a cost factor and the incessant search for ways to reduce personnel costs clearly does not promote the willingness to perform. The same is true of the almost regular replacement of older employees, who are usually more expensive (and often more resistant to company policy), by younger employees who are cheaper to employ (and easier to manage).

Questionable employment practices
"You want a lot for a little, but we're being squeezed!" This is another sentence that is often heard. Mostly in the context of the experience that the target is raised even higher once the target agreement has been met. The often very questionable employment practices of interns, the temporary employment that has almost become a matter of course, the use of temporary workers and the performance of work through contracts for work and services also give rise to sour feelings - at least in Germany. That all that grumbling inside doesn't exactly fuel the will to go above and beyond, is that any wonder? "How and on what is an existence to be founded on this uncertainty?" It's a thought that both drives and slows.

Let's hear from the other side, the employers and business owners. It is not that the problem behind the performance problem is not seen. But it is overlaid by another problem: that of the global economy, with its ever more oppressive pressure to rationalise and outsource activities to places where the wage structure is different. This would result in ever-increasing pressure to view personnel as a cost factor and to deal with them accordingly. It is not only the shareholders who expect more and more from fewer and fewer people.

The looming consequences of digitalisation
And then the man-machine competition would also grow. This too should not be left out of consideration. The digitalisation1 of the economy, to put it in general terms, by no means makes working people superfluous. But it is becoming increasingly easier and more compelling to fill jobs with machines instead of people. And this displacement process is by no means only strongest where qualifications are lowest.

We are talking here about Economy 4.0, the dawning age of networked production, in which machines communicate with each other and also with the products they manufacture. This also includes the possibility of individualized production with 3D printers. Dental technicians in dental laboratories, for example, are likely to feel the competition of this new possibility in the production of dental crowns more and more in the near future. Big Data, the rapidly growing ability to process huge amounts of data, is also being addressed. In production as well as in the service sector in the broadest sense, those responsible are facing revolutionary changes.

Global competition for jobs
There is already talk of the economy having to reinvent itself. The Austrian economist Schumpeter found a much more elegant term for this: "creative destruction". Of course, this progress not only creatively destroys jobs, it also creates new ones. But for whom? And: how much actually? That there will be competition between the animate workforce and the inanimate workforce is beyond question. And there also seems to be no question that this emerging competition promises to be explosive. The HWWI study, at any rate, leaves no doubt about that.

To get a clearer picture of what is about to happen, let me refer you to what Jim Clifton of the Gallup polling firm writes in his book "The Coming Jobs War": Of the more than five billion people over the age of 15 in the future, three billion will want to work, but full-time jobs will be available for only 1.2 billion. There will be global competition for the available jobs. And to be able to participate in this competition - once again the title of the book: "The Coming Jobs War" - will probably only be possible for those who are willing to make an effort. Regardless of whether they are dependent employees or entrepreneurs in their own right.

Unfit for everyday requirements?
"Why should I exert myself when, even with the best performance, all jobs are basically up for grabs when the company has to be turned around yet again because costs have to be cut for balance sheet cosmetics?" Let's look at the flip side of this quote. Here's what Zurich-based psychotherapist Gisela Ana Cöppicus has to say: "In psychotherapeutic practice, we often see narcissistically disturbed, intelligent but arrogant young people who feed on Internet knowledge but can barely get on their feet professionally. They give the impression of highly intelligent wannabe nerds, but are unfit for the demands of everyday life."

The demands of everyday life. In fact, they cause trouble because they demand "something", namely commitment. A generational problem? Take a look at the 2015 job study by management consultants EY Ernst & Young. On the one hand, it says that the economy has highly committed workers in the 60-plus generation at its disposal. And on the other hand, that members of the younger generation are more difficult to motivate. Not all of them, of course. But apparently quite a lot of them

Entrepreneurs, executives, and exhausted journeymen in the skilled trades speak less openly of the sometimes breathless listlessness and lack of interest of a majority of them. They also complain about their lack of resilience and critical faculties, as well as a pronounced self-centredness and a sense of entitlement that bears no relation to their performance. The same applies to the fact that they "drop the bucket" when the bell rings at the end of the working day. According to other studies, the need for leisure time is much more important than building up a professional stability, which also takes into account the inevitable career breaks and new beginnings. In the competition between performance and aspirational thinking, the former seems to be getting a worse deal. In a world in a state of galloping upheaval, we must warn against this short-sightedness.

The "Self-efficacy"
The main impetus for this warning is the indication from the therapeutic side that when external stability breaks down, the effort to achieve internal stability becomes increasingly important. And the reassuring feeling of being able to perform, of being able to tackle something and to carry it through even in the face of resistance, in short, of being able to assert oneself, plays a very central role in this. For Thomas Weegen, the managing director of Coverdale Unternehmensberatung in Munich, who is familiar with the disruptions, upheavals and inconsistencies in the economy, "performance should therefore always be both: just as much a self-evident duty to the employer as it is to oneself." Weegen believes that the misconception that anyone who delivers a decent performance is only doing something for the employer is an extraordinarily self-damaging one in the current circumstances.

A remarkable coincidence of two fingers. What connects them? Among other things, the name Albert Bandura and his concept of "perceived self-efficacy". At the end of the 1970s, the Canadian psychologist introduced the concept of self-efficacy expectations or self-efficacy. In simple terms, this refers to the stabilizing conviction that a person is able to cope with new or difficult tasks on the basis of proven performance. You know you can do something. Even when the wind is blowing sharply in your face and the ground is shaking under your feet.

Self-efficacy thus stands for a well-founded belief in one's own ability to cope with life. "And this should definitely also be trained through performance at work," says Weegen. The feeling of having been able to cope with the pressure, uncertainty and unpredictability of working life becomes the decisive driving force for a new start in the event of a career change that is now possible at any time. The "Dorsch", the standard work of psychology recently published in its 17th edition, underlines this point of view. On page 1507 it says: "High S (= self-efficacy) was associated, among other things, with less frequent anxiety disorders and depression, good academic and professional performance, low stress reactions, rapid coping with critical life events, high pain tolerance, better immune system, satisfactory social relationships and high well-being."