Business has never been easy, but these days it is punishingly tough. In many companies there are fewer people doing more and more, and increasing costs eating away at standstill prices.
While I’m on the cynical side of when-the-tough-get-going strategies (because that’s what you should be doing anyway), there’s no question that work these days is about working harder and longer without additional reward. Can it be anything else in this climate?
Apparently it can. There’s a suggestion that at least a few people think a four-day week, cruising through the day and dashing for the door at 5.30 are all you need to do to bring home a good wage.
Who are they? According to George Cowcher, they are our future. What the chief exec of Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber is referring to is a generation of kids, some of whom seem to think that work means money for the taking.
Now, I normally take a pretty sceptical view of those who shake their head and mutter dismissively about ‘the young people of today’ or suggest it wasn’t like this in my day etc.
But George Cowcher isn’t that kind of bloke, and he was referring to the hard evidence consistently flagged up in a survey of small businesses in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
His starting point was the continuing puzzle of consistently improving exam results versus the consistently poor standards of literacy and numeracy displayed by people who turn up for job interviews.
That, he believes, may be down to the generation of kids who went through schools before a heavy emphasis was placed on those key skills. Exam passes are one thing, practical everyday skills another.
But the apparently poor work ethic is less straightforward. According to Mr Cowcher, at its worst this manifests itself in people who think it’s OK to throw sickies on Mondays because they’ve overdone the pop at the weekend. But it also extends to graduates who think a degree is the automatic route to a handsome pay packet…even when they can’t keep a phone conversation going and rely on a Word spellchecker for their communications skills.
“It is surprising in this climate,” he told me. “But there is a cohort which doesn’t see work as the major driver in their life and wants something for nothing.”
There is a debate here to be had about whether a decade of economic growth, easy credit and the rise of the consumer economy has led to an era of entitlement, an age when people grow up thinking that a high standard of living is something you are entitled to rather than something you have to work your socks off for.
It may be that we’re going through a period of adjustment, and those that go through the educational system from 2007 onwards will emerge with a more realistic expectations about the relationship between rights and responsibilities.
In my experience, there have always been people who think the world owes them a living and moan loudly when it isn’t served up on a plate. And debates like this have a habit of occurring in cycles.
But you can also criticise individual businesses for the way they took their foot off the gas - and their eye off the ball - during a bubble that was never likely to last.
The surprise for me was someone like George Cowcher – an experienced operator who usually chooses his ground very carefully – delivering some unequivocal criticism.
Does he have a point?
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