Work pressure and ethics
Ethical servant?
While some relate ethics to submissiveness and coercion with forced conformity, in its broader sense ethics reflect diligence and value based work. It is true that meticulousness and hard work produce better professional outcomes, and rightly so, impact personal recognition and promotion of the ethical employee. The 20th century employee in the industrial age had to perform sufficiently enough to bring food to his plate. Any extra work never got him value addition. Thus ethics and diligence meant something different then. If it that worker got more money on the table, he was willing to shed some extra sweat.
Ethics or Morals
For some, eating the fruit of their effort is ethical. For many others who are infected with laziness, this is illogical. On a moral standpoint the unethical and immoral are frequently thieves, cheaters, burglars and robbers. They live off the effort of others and refuse to do their share. Their moral development is unquestionably stagnated. However in a working organization, it is presumed that no one is a thief. Each may perceive their effort in variable perspectives. Many feel they are not paid ‘enough’ for their effort. Few believe that that they get their true ‘worth’ and several seem to be uninterested in greater ‘value’ addition.
Hard work misconstrued
In today’s postindustrial era, critics of ‘hard’ work are only too many. Mechanization and technological advancement has ostensibly diminished the valuableness of human effort, thus these critics believe that there are no ethics left to build on. It is misconstrued that hard work adds to the economic growth of a handful on the top of the ecological (rather economical) pyramid while the hard working class gets classified as the loyal servant category, which is not honorable anyways. These views of freethinkers are erroneous.
The truth about hard work
Time is money and money is not everything. So it seems that time is unimportant and is all right if wasted on being lazy and inefficient. Hard work and ethics are not about money. This is all about the personal growth more than professional. Ethics and values make humans mature as people, not mathematical figures in the banks of employers or themselves. The average employee does not attain satisfaction only from the money he or she makes. Value judgment is a personal choice. Employees desire recognition, acknowledgement as well as rightful praise for what they do. Promotions may bring in fatter paychecks but also greater responsibility; and people readily accept the recognition and the new voluminous workload at their free will. People care about value based work more than employers often realize.
MINDFRAMES: Reframing ethics
Managements need to reframe their value judgment of employees to assure justness and fairness in the game. Likewise, workers ought to understand the weight of their worth to their organizations and themselves. That will ascertain the highest ethics and moral standards at any workplace.