Tag Archives: work ethic

Work ethic

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I sent my daughters a meme recently on instagram. It’s a guy buckled into the driver’s seat of a parked car and he’s hitting the passenger seat headrest with a side-fist. The caption reads:

“When your parents gave you work ethic instead of generational wealth.”

Both my kids have it. They are praised at work for doing an excellent job. They have always been that kid who gets asked to train someone coming up even though others have been at the job longer than them. And they take pride in doing an excellent job. It’s great to see them excel both at work and in the things they love to do.

With respect to my own job, education certainly is one of those fields where many people come into the profession with a solid work ethic. I see it time and again. My team really has some dedicated educators and support staff who show what a good work ethic looks like, and that has an incredible impact on the work and learning environment. It shines through in the pride people take in their work, and the praise they get for what they do.

I don’t think a good work ethic is innate. I think it is fostered and developed. I think it can be learned. I also think it can be contagious. Equally so, laziness can also be contagious. Years ago I worked on a factory floor for a soft drink company. My job was to feed a conveyor belt with crates of 12 used 750ml glass bottles to be washed and refilled. (You need to be a certain age to remember these bottles that out-date the plastic 2-litre ones.) This was a labour intensive job, with a fork lift driver bringing pallets of crates for two of us to unload.

When it was break time, another worker would relieve us one at a time, but this one guy, whose name I no longer remember, would send us both on break at the same time. It was a 15 minute break and he’d say, “take 20”, then he’d do the job of two people. I did this a couple times for my partner to take a quick washroom break, but I’d be huffing and puffing if I had to do it for 20.

This guy relieved us like this for almost a week, then our boss saw him and told him to stop. Not because he was going to hurt himself, but rather because he didn’t want the higher-ups to see that one person could do the job. The whole culture in the factory was ‘do the minimum’, ‘don’t show off’, ‘don’t do anything extra’. It wasn’t an environment I would have wanted to stay in any longer than the summer between school semesters. In fact, I didn’t go back the next year.

A good work ethic is often overlooked. It’s only when you come up against a bad work ethic in comparison that you begin to value what a good work ethic means to the culture of an organization. Remember to show value and appreciation to those around you with a good work ethic.

Incremental Improvements

For about 5 weeks now, I’ve been recovering from a shoulder injury. It’s nothing too serious, and I think it was brought on by hours of shovelling snow then doing some wide-arm chin ups for my workout the next day… I put together two activities I seldom do, and I overdid it. I recently wrote about how my physiotherapist stopped weeks of pain in one session. I saw him a second time last week and he put me through a regimen of exercises that I’m to do over the next 3 weeks until I see him again. Although he was able to quickly stop the pain I was dealing with, he thinks that it will be another 6 weeks before I’m able to do everything that I could do before the injury.

This is the hard part of injury recovery. Progress is slow and nothing comes easily. But if I don’t put the time and effort in, I delay the recovery time. Day-to-day the results are not visible. Yesterday felt less strong than the day before, today will hopefully be different. When this is the experience, it doesn’t feel like I’m getting better. I have to put that aside, focus, and keep my regular routine up, including pushing myself to work my shoulder, while also not overdoing it.

We are often enamoured by the quick fix, the easy answer, fast and obvious results. But these quick rewards are not always available. Sometimes it’s the slow incremental changes that make us better, stronger, and more resilient. Sometimes we need to work through things slowly and properly in order to see the results we really want.

It doesn’t always seem glamorous, but the day to day grind of doing things well, with positive intention, and dedication can be the key to success. Sometimes it’s not about what we can do to quickly fix a problem, instead it’s about what we can do consistently over time that brings results. Staying positive and keeping the end goal in sight is important. This isn’t always easy to remember when the results we want come from incremental improvements.