Just two decades ago, our outside life gave us the hardship and pain that made our lives challenging.  Events such as weddings or the death of a family member created enough stress in us that it affected our ability to perform our jobs with high levels of efficiency and effectiveness.  In more recent studies of such events, the events that now affect our performance on the job are being generated right there in the workplace.  In this post, we’ll discuss the top five workplace events that are occurring with more frequency and are forcing significant change on the job.

Academia doesn’t prepare you for the life events that will push you to your limits because schools must have structure.  Programs have to be well identified, defined and certified.  These programs are reviewed and sometimes changed to meet a particular need but that’s usually on a 5 year cycle.  After graduation, you quickly learn that the corporate world moves at a much faster pace.  The corporate world doesn’t won’t to be fixed to a particular structure because it would limit its ability to respond to changing demands.  This idea of constantly changing to meet changing demands is the force that you must overcome to maintain a higher level of success.

Changing Work Responsibilities.  This event ranked #1 in a recent survey.  If you find yourself working in the same field as your academic study and performing some of the activities you learned in college, consider yourself lucky.  As companies struggle to keep pace with demand, they find themselves in an almost amorphous state, poised to take whatever shape they need to at any given moment.  This means that employees must be prepared to change roles, no matter whether you have the skills for it or not.  A recent example of this is where an English Major was managing a high tech research and development group in an Aerospace company.  An English student certainly isn’t trained to understand engineering concepts, methods or analytical techniques, but that doesn’t stop organizational leadership from identifying you with some important trait that would make them feel you could do the job.  Of course, there’s always the situation where someone has to do the work and management doesn’t have the time to see who has the skills for it, so they just assign someone.  These are your opportunities to shine, yet they will also take you out of your comfort zone since you’ll have to figure out how to be successful with it.

Changing employers and careers.   You should expect to change jobs. In today's career world, job stability does not always equal job security. The U.S. Department of Labor Statistics reports that over the past 25 years, baby boomers have held an average of 10.5 jobs.  For the average American, you can expect to hold nine jobs between the ages of 18 and 34.  Now, if you’re expecting to achieve financial success by jumping to a new company, you should realize that you may have to take a decrease in salary to do so.  Currently, college graduates that are changing jobs experience about a 21% decrease (compared to about a 10% decrease in 1984).  Apparently, everyone isn’t driven by the quest for more money.  The alarming question that should certainly be in the minds of employers is “are my employees leaving because they feel they can’t be successful here?”

Employer reorganizing or downsizing.  It doesn’t take much to figure out what this event is or what impact it will have on those who fall victim to one of them.  Of course, the picture for those who are left in the company after such an event isn’t so rosy either.  Companies often downsize as a way to become more efficient.  Of course, I like to think of this as the “doing more with less syndrome.”  The efficiency comes from the financial side, not necessarily the operational side.  As a result, the remaining employees inherit the responsibilities of those who were laid off.  More responsibilities can make it difficult to shine in any one particular area as you must learn to spread your time across many activities, reducing your efficiency and effectiveness.  For go-getters, this situation is quite difficult as they want to be great at everything they do and sometimes that gets to be a real challenge.

Major disagreement with a boss or coworker.  General David McChrystal, former top military commander for US troops in Afghanistan, is a good example of the change that can occur from a disagreement with your boss.  He was forced to retire for his comments in an article in the Rolling Stone Magazine.  While this is an extreme example, it does highlight the fact that conflicts with management rarely go well for you.  It’s interesting that this event ranked #7 in the survey, which implies that it happens fairly often.  Due to the fact that so much change is occurring in the workplace so often, it’s likely that this increase is directly related to the increase in change events.  If you’re a go-getter seeking to move up, these events are like land mines and should be disarmed and handled carefully. 

Change in employment position.  As organizations attempt to restructure to ensure more financial stability, the workforce seems to be shifting more towards contract and part-time labor, or so they say.  These events tend to violate the psychological contract between the employee and the employer.  Employees in this situation are forced to perform their daily duties with the idea that if companies are willing to make me part-time, at what point will they no longer need me.  This change in part-time employment isn’t a transition it is the reflection of the changing hiring strategies of employers.    

Very few people can argue that work provides a daily bout with change.  Unfortunately, much of it is caused by the workplace, generating stress and demotivating the efforts of the real go-getters.  The big worry here is that the workplace is quickly becoming our greatest challenge in life.  If there is ever a need for a good work-life balance, now is certainly the time.  You can balance it out by celebrating the little successes.  After all, how many big ones do we really get in a career anyhow?  Focus on those little victories and use them to create more success.   Eventually, you can trade a bunch of little successes in for a big one.