Pick a day of the work week and someone will have something negative to say about it.
There are a lot of groans heard at job sites everywhere on Mondays, Hump Days gets us half way to the weekend, and Fridays seem to never end.
We often act as if the work week is something that is to be tolerated because the only worthwhile days of the week are Saturday and Sunday. Why do we do this to ourselves?
I’m not immune to lapsing into this type of thinking from time to time, but generally, I have a positive attitude about work and working. I’m fortunate to have an interesting job and I work with good people, so the experience, for me, is often engaging and stimulating.
There are many measures of success and the ways in which we can contribute to those measures are just as varied. Some measures are easy to recognize, while others are much less apparent. Often, it is how we view our efforts in the workplace that can add texture to routine tasks and give us a sense of the positive effects that we can have on the broader enterprise.
Compiling data, modeling scenarios, management reporting, and interpreting results are all part of contributing to the making of business decisions. Having worked at many levels of accounting, from billing clerk through management during the last three decades, I’ve always found accounting to be interesting work.
Many businesses have seen declines in revenue during the current economic downturn. When these declines are coupled with rising expenses the job becomes more relevant. Accounting is usually considered to be an austere profession that is devoid of emotion, because the numbers tell us what we should do. But in reality, particularly for a small business, it’s difficult to maintain a detached view of the consequences of decisions because of the effects that those decisions have on people.
Even during good times, management decisions have consequences. The annual review of benefit packages, the construction of the appraisal process, the location of the business, the level of investment in technology, and many other decisions determine not only the profitability of the business but also the environment in which its employees spend a good portion of their lives.
When working for large corporations in similar circumstances, but at lower levels of accountability, the decompartmentalized structure of responsibilities made it seem much more like a numbers game. The ability to offer alternatives was limited and the response to those suggestions, when offered, was disappointing at best.
Long hours, constant churning of ideas – even during off hours – and the near maniacal focus on the well being of the business tends to be exhausting, but oddly the experience is also exhilarating.
Striving to find a way to “work it out” so that the business and the people who work there can both continue to thrive can be a bit daunting, but doing this type of work is also very satisfying when the result of one’s efforts can be measured both on and off of the Balance Sheet.
——————–
- How do you view your job?
- What are the aspects of your job that get you energized?
- How do you measure success?
——————–
{ 4 comments }
Ray } – 
