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.