What is work?

Today we’ll be thinking about what is work.

More of a listener? Find the podcast version of this post here.

It sounds like a pretty easy question to answer – we all feel like we kind of know what work is, but when you start to unpack the concept and be more specific – create some boundaries about what is and what isn’t counted as ‘work’ – that you realise it’s not as easy as it seems.

If you ask Google, you’ll be told that work is either:

1. activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result, or,
2. a task or tasks to be undertaken.

So, Google thinks of work as something that requires effort and is undertaken to achieve a result.

ChatGPT is a bit more long-winded, it says:

“Work, in the context of physics and everyday life, refers to the process of applying a force to an object, causing it to move a certain distance in the direction of that force. It involves the transfer of energy from one system to another, and its occurrence often leads to a change in the object’s state or position. The amount of work done is typically measured in units of energy, such as joules. In essence, work is a measurable quantity that represents the effort put into moving or transforming something by applying force.”

So it looks to me like ChatGPT is focusing on the physical nature of work in literally applying force. Similar to Google, it picks up on this concept of effort.

Ok, so that’s what you’ll get if you ask the internet, but what do the theorists say about work?

Donald Super (Super, 1980)  gave us the life-span, life-space approach that forms a good chunk of the backbone of later career development theory, and he defined work as more than just activity that earns an income – any activity that provides a sense of purpose or meaning and contributes to growth and development fits into this category. He goes on to define a career as a cohesive sequence of roles played out over the course of a lifetime, including study, paid work, caring work, and leisure roles, which are often undertaken concurrently.  

Another of my career development theory heroes, Mark Savickas, views work as a way of making meaning in our lives. Work is intertwined with our identity, and we use it to construct our conceptions of who we are. On a more practical level, work is seen as an activity that requires us to sell our skills and services to an employer who is looking to complete projects (Savickas, 2013).

To sum all this up, work is something that:

• requires effort
• is done for a reason, and
• leads to an outcome

While many of us see work as a formal process where we exchange our services and complete specified tasks to earn an income, work actually encompasses much more than that.

What we call ‘work’ can refer to anything we put effort into to achieve a purpose. It doesn’t need to be linked to an income to count.

Which means that when we think about work we actually need to include way more than just the hours we spend physically working for an income in the equation. It’s much broader than that – and in some ways we can start to see work as anything we do that requires energy and wouldn’t be done if there wasn’t an expectation that it would achieve an outcome.

This can get a bit complicated, so let’s stop theorising for a minute and start looking at how this works in practice.

If you travel to work, then the time you spend travelling, even though you’re not paid for it, counts as a form of work, because you’re expending effort to achieve an outcome. If you listen to a podcast related to your area of employment while you’re on the train, or answer a couple of emails on your phone, or post on LinkedIn, then you’re also working, because you wouldn’t necessarily do these things if they weren’t related to your employment.

If you are responsible for caring for someone else and you complete tasks related to their care then that’s also work, because you wouldn’t have done that work which required effort if it wasn’t going to lead to an outcome.

The difference between all these forms of work and what we normally think of as work is that we don’t tend to put a dollar value on them, which makes them hard to quantify. And when anything is hard to quantify, it’s hard to measure, which means it tends to get pushed to one side while we focus on the easy stuff – the work we can collect data on.

I often find it easier to think about things the other way around – what doesn’t count as work? Things that don’t count as work are what we’d often refer to as leisure activities – things we do because we choose to, and because we want to, and which have no benefit for our lives. Spending Sunday afternoon on the couch watching Netflix fits into this category – it requires little energy, and there’s no obvious benefit outside of what it offers for our own mental and physical wellbeing. Catching up with friends also fits into this space, provided you’re not actually networking with people in your industry, as does hanging out with your family.

But even then, sometimes these activities cross the boundaries between the two. When I left school I joined the Air Force, and my friends and I would often spend our weekends and evenings hiking or in the gym – fitness was a pretty big part of our lives, including our social lives – but fitness was also integral to our work, and I meant this literally, we had to pass basic fitness tests just to stay employed. So where do our weekend hikes fit in – as work, or not? We hiked because we wanted to, but it also counts as work – it blurs the boundaries.

The reality is that the majority of the activities we do each day fits in this boundary space – neither neatly within the work camp, but also not quite what we would think of as leisure.

And this also works the other way around – how much of the time that you spend physically at your paid work do you spend doing things that count as not-work? How often do you catch up with friends and colleagues, or catching up on a bit of online shopping from your desk? You can’t be at work and 100% focused for the entire day – your productivity would be at rock bottom – so where do these activities (necessary as they are) fit into our definition of ‘work’?

We also need to think about what happens when people love the work they do. Not all of us are lucky enough to have the freedom to find work that we love, and even those who do may find themselves for one reason or another in a job that they tolerate, but there are a number of us who genuinely enjoy our work, and put in more effort than is needed to achieve our purpose.

I often find myself in this boat – I really love what I do, to the point where my kids think that I’m obsessed, and I find it hard to switch off from work. I actually don’t want to – I feel like I’m working in a space that I love, making a difference, and surrounded by a passionate community of like-minded people who I enjoy engaging with, so where does the work stop and the not-work begin? Would I do this if I wasn’t being paid? I’m not sure anymore. I know that I don’t earn anywhere near as much as I could if I went to work somewhere else.

Is it even possible to separate the two?

The days of clocking in and out to work at a desk are long-gone. The work follows us everywhere, and it is harder than ever to disconnect, to the point where we need laws to stop bosses from hounding employees outside work hours. Even when we don’t realise it, we’re connecting with professional colleagues on social media or reading news which impacts on our industry. And that’s apart from our caring responsibilities and the tasks we do just to stay fit, healthy, and clean enough to get to work.

The only activities we can clearly define are those at the extremes – the paid hours spent at work, and the time we spent doing exactly what we want in our own time – but everything else in the middle falls somewhere between the two.

Which makes me wonder if we even really need to separate them – should we stop trying to define what is and isn’t work, and instead think about each activity as a part of life?

Which is frustrating, right? Rather than giving a clear-cut answer about what work is and what it isn’t, work seems to be getting blurrier, as the edges are smudged by LinkedIn and remote working.

What this means for my project is that we need to look at a whole lot more than just the work people do to earn an income. If we want to look at how people have worked over the whole of human history, then we need to think about how they kept themselves fit and healthy so they could find and prepare food, how they cared for their young and their elderly, and how they built communities of like-minded people. We need to talk about those who were never paid, and who did not choose their work, and those who worked in ways that never resulted in the exchange of money.

We need to look at how people expended effort, how they performed tasks, and how they achieved outcomes, to really understand the work they did.

References:

Savickas, M. L. (2013). Career construction theory and practice. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

Super, D. E. (1980). A life-span, life-space approach to career development. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 16(3), 282–298. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-8791(80)90056-1