My boss asked me to finish a report by Monday morning. I was planning to submit it by Wednesday next week but my boss wanted it earlier. Because he asked me on Friday, I had to cancel my weekend plans.
Some bosses pile on work on their employees. The bosses would believe there is good reason but they also would believe they aren’t beholden to explain deadlines to their subordinates. Bosses dictate, employees follow, after all.
Employees, however, are people too and it can be demoralising when the boss deems work more important than the quality time of employees after work hours.
So, what can employees do?
Either the employees just do what the bosses say or they don’t. If they do, they can count on some praising like a pat-on-the-back assuming they did a good job. If they don’t, they’ll risk getting on the bad side of the boss who would put a bad mark on an employee’s performance record which may lead to career stagnation.
Not really much of a choice. But that’s reality.
Never mind what some consultants or so-called gurus may say, people who work for other people don’t own their time. When we have bosses, the bosses own us and sometimes if not often, they own even our time after work hours.
This is because work for many people, like middle managers and office workers, as we know it no longer is limited to a fixed schedule. With email, SMS texting, and Internet-enabled voice & chat technologies, the boss can communicate with her employees wherever they may be and at anytime. (I had a boss who’d call me when I was halfway around the world on vacation and that was even before the Internet).
But thanks also to the Internet, we have more access to more information. We can find out if there are other jobs waiting for us in other companies. We can submit our curricula vitae (CV) with a few clicks of a mouse. And we can get interviewed long distances from the comforts of our own home (or office desk when the boss isn’t around).
The hard part, of course, is writing the CV and preparing for the interview. The harder part is deciding whether we’d want to change careers in the first place.
The hardest part, however, is making the choice itself. We’d wrack our brains thinking if we should stay in our jobs or move on to greener pastures.
It isn’t just about the risks of what we choose but it’s also what we believe in.
This is what being proactive is really about. Proactive is choosing based on what we value. Note it isn’t what we want, it is what we value. Stephen Covey of Seven (7) Habits fame identifies being proactive as the freedom to choose one’s response. But to choose what we believe is right, we should choose based on what’s important for us, which is in a nutshell are our values.
Employees would opt to stick with a job with a slave-driver boss that deprives weekends off because the employees would value the job security and income needed for their families.
An employee, however, may choose to quit because she values her time with her children more than anything else.
But as much as it may be clear to some, it can be a lengthy exercise for many who haven’t really defined what they value or are in self-conflict with changes in what are important to them.
As the PlanPlus Online website puts it, values “may change as demands or needs change.”
“If a given belief or opinion is something that might be altered if the conditions are right, then it’s a value.”
-PlanPlus Online, The Difference Between Principles and Values, https://www.planplusonline.com/difference-principles-values/
When values become moving targets, we can become confused and that can make it difficult to decide things. We therefore sometimes become dependent on others to make our minds up, like just doing what the boss tells us to do.
Values are based on beliefs, opinions, causes, and/or the very stuff we put the highest importance on, such as our families, relationships, careers, and religions. We often try to rank them and doing so can be a difficult process, not to mention frustrating. The bottom line is we always are evaluating what our priorities are.
Is there a best way to define our values? No. But the question maybe should be: how often should we define our values? Not everybody knows what he or she wants. Lucky for those who do but there are many who constantly need to review what’s important. Actually, it may be those who do it often are the luckier ones because they would always be updated to their versions of their value systems.
When we know surely what we think or feel what’s important, we’d know how to choose confidently. We end up knowing how to answer when a boss asks us to work on weekends.
Ellery's Essays 
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