Tillmann Prüfer is a member of the editor-in-chief of “Zeit-Magazin”.
I read in a wellness provider’s job advertisement: With us, you can be who you are. On the one hand, of course, it’s an incredibly nice thing that you should be accepted for who you are. At the same time, it is also practical. In a way, you always have yourself in your luggage. But apparently the employer wants to signal that personality is important and that personality is very important. So you should bring your whole being as a human being.
In a way, this is in contrast to times when one should above all suppress one’s personality and follow a strict code of behavior and dress. That wasn’t entirely unfounded either, because a person isn’t just made up of qualities that you absolutely value in a workplace.
There are also a number of things that employers are more than happy to do without. All the careless, licentious, hedonistic. If you have a human being in the workplace in all his humanity, then under certain circumstances he is no longer a good addition to the machine, and that can then become a problem.
But apparently people are in demand today, for example with wellness providers, approachable individuals that one would like to have around oneself. Which doesn’t qualify me for employment with a wellness provider because, in all my humanity, they don’t necessarily want to have me around. At least not if you want to relax and pay for it.
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A large part of the self has no place at work
I read in the New York Times that outside of human resources, the phrase “bring your whole self to work” is guaranteed to get a puke smiley face. After all, the office is not the only place one exists, why should the employer have the right to the whole self?
That cannot be dismissed out of hand. What is an employer supposed to do with a person’s whole self anyway? I think it’s kind of the definition of work that a big part of the self has no business there. You only need a few qualities from people there, but plenty of them. Or would a normal person, with their wholeness, spend all day in Zoom conferences, or fill out spreadsheets all day, or plan budgets, or come up with new free slogans for human resources departments?
More columns by Tillmann Prüfer
The truth is that work has so little to do with the whole person that the whole person has to spend an entire evening recovering from it. The whole person even has to take a holiday to recover from being a working person.
Maybe employers today don’t even want to hire the whole person, even if they claim to. But they want their ads to appear as if it’s not about work at all, but about something like vacation. And that’s probably why they have to keep looking for new people.
More: Sleep needs the right sound – but which one?