Verified by 
Whether it’s taking advice from author Timothy Ferriss who encouraged us all to “outsource our life” or caving to the realization three untidy children in our household will forever outnumber two meticulously minded parents, in the fall of 2011, Denise and I hired a house cleaning agency.
While our home and working lives were busy, the simple fact of the matter was that our house itself was beginning to slowly morph into something akin to a post-apocalyptic nuclear war bunker. Mercifully, we gained a welcome respite from dusty shelves, toothpaste encrusted sinks and persistently dirty floors by hiring help.
I'm a mobile worker, which is to say I have the privilege of working from pretty much anywhere. Being a mobile worker means I also will work from home when the stars align. When we hired the cleaning agency, Tuesday mornings at precisely nine o'clock became what I call “root canal day.” It’s a day I didn't look forward to it at all if I knew I was working from home that particular Tuesday.
With taxation season-like reliability, the cleaners' car pulled up into the driveway sharply at 9:00 a.m. Each week, two individuals emerged from the car. The first evidence of workplace discontent was their body language and facial expressions. My home office window overlooks the driveway, so I had a front row seat to the magical misery tour. Sadly, those facial expressions resembled the fiercest of ice storms. These people were cold, rigid and (arguably) emotionally wrinkled.
You could sense their frustration. You could almost smell their unhappiness. You could certainly detect their disengagement. As they entered the home, loud bangs from cleaning equipment being dropped on the floor echoed through the front foyer. The sighs were audible through the doors and walls. Even the normally friendly cat fled for cover.
I made it a habit to venture out of the office—during breaks from conference calls and meetings —to make a tea and observe the melancholy. Don’t be mistaken, I wasn't micro-managing or playing the part of a customer perfectionist. I wasn't yelling out, “Hey you missed a spot.” I was merely a curious researcher and author. It was during those random and sometimes surreptitious walkabouts inside the house where I began having short conversations with the dynamic duo of doom.
“Do you enjoy this line of work?” I somewhat bluntly asked one of the cleaners during a rainy Tuesday, while sipping a cup of Creamy Earl Grey tea. Not skipping a beat, she replied, “It pays the bills, but no, not really.”
Of course she was quick to question me right afterward, “But you’re not going to tell my boss, are you? I don’t want to be fired. I may not like my job, but I need the paycheck.”
Innocuous as the response was, it got me thinking deeply about what I refer to as the “job mindset.” Is a job simply supposed to pay the bills? Is the human psyche of possessing a job related to a paycheck-only attitude of some sort? If someone uses the word job as the way she describes her profession, does it create negative connotations from the onset of employment?
Were the cleaners simply performing a job to make ends meet, thus causing their unhappiness and workplace dissatisfaction? Were the cleaners physically and verbally distraught because their job was unfulfilling? Were the cleaners generally fearful of losing their job and thus their next meal?
Interestingly, researchers in New Jersey and New York also revealed those with a job mindset feel less secure about their current and future roles than workers who might possess a career or purpose mindset. If this is the case, it behooves leaders to help employees shift their mindset – from job to purpose – if only to shift their thinking from a state of fear to one of calm and mindfulness. Lessening the fear of paycheck security can only result in positive benefits to the employee, the leader, the team and the organization alike.
Authors John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Alok Ranjan and Daniel Byler discovered what they coined a "passion gap" in America's workforce. Your intuition is right – this isn't a good thing. The researchers found close to 90 percent of working Americans were "not able to contribute to their full potential" due to a lack of "passion for their work."
Not surprisingly, they also found that only 12 percent of the workforce possesses the attributes that define a passionate worker. The authors suggest this so-called “passion gap” is important to pay attention to because "passionate workers are committed to continually achieving higher levels of performance." If one occupies a job mindset, is there the requisite levels of passion nested in the work they produce to not only be productive, but to feel meaning in their work? Can this job mindset invoke any level of passion?
With a job mindset – whether by choice or by circumstance – the employee does not knowingly seek out meaning or purpose. Either that’s not the goal for the employee — he is content with the paycheck and possesses no aspiration for a higher level of meaning — or the employee is hampered by team dynamics, negative leadership practices and an organization’s questionable culture to become mired in a situation of hopelessness. Furthermore, if the employee has developed far too many extrinsic motivators as a basis for role happiness (consciously or unconsciously, whether by workplace inanities or otherwise), they will undoubtedly remain in a job mindset.
I have written that a “job mindset” refers to someone who believes he or she is employed to perform transactional duties in return for compensation and not much else. For a portion of the population, the job mindset is perfectly fine. They want nothing from work other than the paycheck. They understand the social contract between employee and employer. They don’t seek to rock the company boat nor do they expect anything more than the wage, and possibly the benefits and perquisites that accompany such an employment situation. Some organizations have called this "peace and pay." For those within this particular job mindset, their purpose is found elsewhere.
But my concern rests with the millions of employees who reluctantly possess a job mindset. Like the cleaners Denise and I used to employ who did not have any support or guidance from “upper management”, it’s incumbent upon leaders and managers to help employees find a purpose in the role that they occupy. We might heed the advice of management guru W. Edwards Deming who said, “Management’s overall aim should be to create a system in which everybody may take joy in his work.”
