Do you think a sense of satisfaction in all you do is a right or a privilege? Do you expect to receive satisfaction or do you seek to find it? At work if you only expect to feel satisfied but not try to find it, you’ll be bitter against the boss, your colleagues and clients. In relationships, the same attitude can drain the joy out of simple moments.
Time to realise that finding satisfaction is our own responsibility. And the good news is that it can be found in the simplest places and things. It is about working out the story in our head for what we do, and being aware of our hedonic adaptation. What we found exhilarating probably won’t be the same after 5 times of doing it.
Thinking of reasons for your dissatisfaction may not be as useful as recognising satisfaction is something to be hunted down and found. It requires a high degree of introspection. And it is not up to someone else to give it to you!
Responsibility without authority burns people out. Nurses who care for patients but have little means of controlling the pain and comfort of those they care for will be drained. Likewise the social worker who tries to help those disenfranchised but gets flooded with paper work and a mammoth system to navigate. And the public servant who is sent to “help” members of the public, or small businesses, but are given few tools that really can be used to benefit those truly in need.
We all burn out when we feel and are made to feel responsible for things which we do not have control over. In many sense, corporates confronting sustainability targets can feel that way. They’ve been consuming energy from the grid and traditional sources of power they don’t realise they have the authority or control even when they feel responsible for carbon footprint. They will have to start looking to take control of the way they produce the products, and consume the energy, as well as be more conscious about who they work with across the supply chain.
The decarbonisation movement isn’t just about mimicry or words put out in the public, it is a reflection of taking leadership over what a firm has been doing to be able to provide things of value. Because as the economy is pivoting, if you are just trying to make a living by being a copycat, it’s only going to keep getting harder. Taking responsibility for sustainability is kind, but taking control is effective.
We are not all self-sufficient. We rely on our butchers for meat, bakers for bread, and blacksmiths for bronze. Okay maybe not so much the last point. But we need things others produce and create. And our own creations? We can’t survive on them alone. But there are others who want what we produce? Don’t they?
And so we create promises; if you produce this for me, I’ll produce this for that guy who wants this stuff and he’s gonna produce for another girl who wants this other stuff, who’s good at producing yet another thing which actually you sought after. So now you take my promise and your needs are as good as fulfilled when you produce for me. Money is that promise; it is the promise of value for our labour, the promise of fulfilment of our needs.
Then as humans, we realised if you can promise that whole cycle of bartering executed with money, then you can promise a barter with the future self, or future wants, etc. So from the promise of inter-spatial movement of products and services, we move to the promise of inter-temporal movements. This creates a new dynamic because promises age as time passes. Time will tell the quality of the promise; and that will manifest in terms of the value of that promise as time passes. Alas, born the concept of interest.
And because at any point of time, there is going to be lots of overpromises, failure to fulfill them; the system has to make good of it. So when there is overpromising, the value of promise also falls over time. That is where inflation came from. Money in itself has really no value; but the legal tender provides a tool by which government enacts and extracts taxation. This is important because it keeps an economy demanding the instrument as opposed to just using another, more established currency. Taxation as a form of revenue is ultimately more effective to keep the money system from destabilising; compared to just using seignorage as a means of revenue.
Which brings me to an interesting conversation with a friend about Bitcoin. He thinks that using excess energy such as those which would be wasted through flaring, venting of gaseous fuels, or from curtailment events of intermittent renewable energy can be used to mine bitcoins. That way, the energy otherwise wasted is converted to a form of value. It is used to do some kind of work in the bitcoin network, facilitating transactions, securing it.
I am not sure how practical this is but the idea is appealing on the count that we are actually creating a new value stream rather than have mining capture and squander existing energy resources. If bitcoin mining becomes such a “flexible” load in the energy system, it’ll prove incredible value in highly practical ways.
We can’t think our way or optimise our way to full excellence. And that’s why it is important to put things out there. So you can gather feedback, so that you can build an audience. It won’t be for everyone so find your audience. You can’t have an audience if you’re hiding your work. But that first piece of work, it’s going to suck. What you then need are people who care about the same work you do, who would be generous with constructive feedback, generous with offering themselves.
Great products, artists, companies and brands are not overnight hits. They build their reputation, cultivate their audience bit by bit; and it takes time to create something that sustains. Most of the musical hits don’t last past the year they get on billboards and growing fast overnight isn’t that much to be proud of if it collapses just as fast.
Ultimately, putting the work out, gathering more data, going back to the work is the best system we have ever known to truly practice creativity and generate hits. Though not before shipping lots of work that suck.
A friend was working through a bunch of data and trying to understand if residential living density had anything to do with a sense of belonging or general well-being. It was hard to uncover these parameters because we had to control for many other socio-economic factors at play. In Singapore, the good thing is most of these people owned their own housing, so rent-vs-own is already controlled for. Then there’s income, the size of household, and difference between the amenities in old (less dense) vs new (denser) estates. Too many confounding factors.
Another friend whom I posed this question to said that often, there are just plainly things we can observe and appreciate without having to mine through data. Sometimes, the desire to mine through data to ‘prove’ something is actually just getting a false sense of security. After all, there’s lots of scientific studies which are not replicable.
When it comes to fluffy factors like sense of well-being or belonging, maybe falling back on anecdotes, and our gut instincts, helps a lot. Because these things are just not quantifiable and when you ask a large number of people subjective things, the categorical result tabulation does not create that much objectivity within it.
Rather, the best way to understanding the phenomenon, might be to simply open your eyes and ears to observe, to speak to people, to actually conduct it from the perspective of the people themselves. To use ethnography.
Governments around the world are highly pro-business. And if they are not that supportive if private businesses, they’d at least lend some hand to the public corporations. Which means things might be more difficult for the employee, or the common worker.
But small business is also an area the government cares about and surely that is in the right direction? Perhaps so. But programmes for small businesses are hard to administer and corporate welfarism for small businesses in lieu of individuals can still be very inefficient.
Take for example giving enterprises grants to work on the business strategy. It sounds good (particularly for the consultants) but to prevent adverse selection there has to be some kind of bar to make sure the business is legit; and then you have to make sure the consultant is good as well. These sort of checks and balances ends up squandering more resources and results in inefficient allocations more often than not. At the end of the day, the funds goes to people who know how to do the reporting rather than those who would really benefit from it or going to that which would end up benefiting society the most.
That may be seen as a necessary evil in the absence of better alternatives. Maybe the solution is to stop channeling resources this way? Directing these investments into more common infrastructure and general programmes that uplifts more businesses, reduce general business costs might be the best approach to promoting businesses. Enhancing economic efficiency can improve competitiveness – even when it doesn’t give the civil servants as much brownie points with their bosses.
If you can make administrative work highly predictable, such as estimating the specific amount of time it takes to fill up a form, the number of people it takes to process the form; streamlining the processes in order to filter out exceptions that need more deliberations or processing, and be able to tag a time it takes to it, you’ll be able to create a system that takes out most of the inefficiency in administrative tasks.
The greatest challenge isn’t that there are administrative tasks. Of course there are. But we don’t know how long it takes to do it. And even when people tells us we will hear back in 3 days or 5 days, it doesn’t happen. Because backlogs build up and companies, departments do not make provision to hire more staff or put more resources at work processing admin. They rather allow it to be a bottleneck.
For example, one needs to register the foreign immunization certification with Singapore’s National Immunization Register (NIR) and get an all-clear before putting up the application for Dependents Pass for the kids who had their vacination overseas. And we are not talking about Covid-19 vaccines here. Just the normal ones. Even if there are sufficient people processing Dependent Passes at Immigration & Customs Authority (ICA), the lack of personnel at NIR can be a problem. Because an application to NIR usually takes 20 working days to complete has taken more than 30 working days and we have not heard from them.
Singapore government have been known to be efficient and effective because we think deeply about such problems, about optimising processes and making the customer service journey for people more humane. But in recent years, with digitization, automation and a bid to shed manpower or get them to do ‘higher value services’, have resulted in people falling through the cracks and the lack of manpower to deal with exceptions that pops up.
This is highly inefficient; because the lack of transparency about what’s happening at the NIR is costly: it has already wasted over 30 minutes of my time calling, speaking to officers, getting them to escalate issues, repeating application reference numbers. And that’s across myself, 3 officers (including the one who picked up and was silent the whole time until I hang up after waiting for over 2 minutes because I could hear the background call-center sounds and harbored hope he would return to his desk from his toilet break). All these time could be spent processing the application itself.
Sometimes, saving the world is about solving these problems.
If you make $2000 a month, working about 20 days, your single work day is worth about $100 to the boss. If he dangles $100 in front of you and tells you that if you don’t take any sick leave for a month, you’ll be given $100 “incentive”. Most of us have 14 days of paid sick leave in a year so by right, the $2000 salary ‘budgeted’ for more than 1 day of sick leave. But it seemed like a win-win for you to continue working, getting paid, and for your boss to continue extracting value out of you in the meantime, especially since the value you can bring him is potentially more than $100/day.
But what if you’re sick, what if you are at risk of spreading illness to others in the company? What is the price you are actually paying? How about your family, and your colleagues? And the society? This time around, because of the pandemic, there was a law and it punished this man. It is deeply unfortunate for him, his family who needs him and the income. But if employers are doing these sort of things to their workers, and pitting their workers against their own health for the sake of work, should the law be stopping them?
Laws are not the cure-all, and we’ve seen that countries with strong labour laws typically end up just discouraging paid workers, causing higher rates of unemployment. So we need to build a culture that rallies around the labour and staff, and frown upon such employer practices. We need a culture of helping one another so that such incentives have no claim on us.
I don’t really like administrative tasks. Do you? They are pretty good for feeling somewhat productive. At least for most of us. Being able to fill up a simple form that gets you through to the next stage, or file a report to get bite sized information to your boss that he can bring to his boss or see a bigger picture than the nitty gritty can feel ‘productive’. But this is part of a longer chain of work that must all take place before real work happens.
Admin that keeps information flowing is useful and productive only when decisions are made based on them and action taken. The reason why consultants are often able to make recommendations that can bring about cost savings in big companies because somewhere somehow, there’s always someone churning out reports that no one is actually reading or bothering with. But no one told him to stop so he didn’t stop. And he is probably afraid to find out that he’s been wasting his time all these while, if he does stop and no one notices.
And people also don’t spend enough effort designing admin and processes that makes life easier for those who are doing the admin work. More importantly, the work ought to be more useful to them than their bosses. We’ve taken for granted that admin tasks are only for those receiving it but someone working on admin tasks can benefit from the discoveries in putting numbers together, aggregating things. If we can create intuitive platforms that generates dopamine hits for little admin tasks done by a worker, that’ll be a greater use of technology than the attention-hungry social media platform.
When businesses think there is a shortage of good employees, it is high time to consider if the issue could be that there’s a shortage of good employers. While the government thinks about building up good manpower and talents for the companies they want to attract; they also need to consider the quality of employers and jobs created in Singapore. One of the reasons for Singapore’s success is the constant fine-tuning of this.
Our government agencies through design and by policy have a deep understanding of the two-sided nature of the labour market. And there’s recognition that in order for there to be employment, have to balance the demand and supply for labour delicately. This means that having some kind of liberal immigration regime is important, so that gaps in our domestic workforce can be closed.
Nevertheless, over periods of very serious dislocations of the skills demanded and supplied by our domestic workforce, there can be problems of foreign labour being demanded more than domestic labour; and with a huge pool of companies based here but unable to find suitable staff. Restructuring the economy is painful business and it is hard to tell whether the situation is temporary or permanent. Being able to continue dreaming about what is the future economy and suite of jobs made available in the economy for Singaporeans is important.
