One of the reasons given by employers as to why they do not find suitable employees, is that job applicants may not have the required positive work ethic. This claim may be correct.

Anyone who talks to business leaders, managers or supervisors for very long will eventually hear complaints about younger employees not having a good work ethic. Sometimes the comments are so intense, it feels like millennial bashing.

However, one would also need to accept that in this country we have had a restructuring of our values in the last number of years. So the issue is not necessarily that young people may not have a work ethic, but that they may give a different meaning to it.

Traditionally, a work ethic was described as the principle that hard work is intrinsically virtuous or worthy of reward. Both proponents of capitalism and proponents of the communist system promoted hard work and the importance of a strong work ethic based on hard work.

Eventually, in the Western world, a person having a good work ethic was seen to be part of the establishment and eventually, a French 20th century philosopher, Andre Gorz, declared that, “The work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life”.

I strongly believe that it is the traditional way of describing work ethic which is obsolete, but not the concept per se. Rather than talking of a person working hard when we speak of work ethic, we should be talking of something else.

We should be talking of someone who takes pleasure in doing one’s job, someone who cares. We should be talking of a person who is eager to learn more and develop one’s skills, a person who does one’s work with a sense of purpose and urgency, a person who is always seeking to surpass oneself, a person who has a vision for oneself and for one’s job.

The work ethic is still very strong, even among young people

If we pose the issue in this way, we would recognise that the work ethic is still very strong, even among young people. They may have a different approach to their job, in that today the job is a means to a lifestyle and not a means to make a living.

Such a different approach is more than understandable given the vast range of job opportunities available today.

In more generic terms, one may define work ethic as the behaviour that employees need to demonstrate to meet the needs of the customers. For some this could be sheer hard work. For other job situations, it would be something else. So what really counts is that customers receive the quality they expect for the price they have paid. The behaviours that create this result are what defines a good work ethic.

One may ask if there is a set of behaviours, which if interpreted widely enough, could reflect the new work ethic. I would think yes. I would include aspects such as integrity, a sense of quality, accountability, teamwork and determination.

Integrity shapes the type of relationship an employee has with one’s colleagues across the organisation and with customers. A sense of quality ensures that, irrespective of the level one is in the organisation, one does things right and one does the right things.

Accountability ensures that an employee fulfils comprehensively one’s responsibilities. Teamwork helps to generate respect, healthy communication and trust in an organisation. An employee’s level of determination is indicative of one’s commitment to the job, colleagues and the organisation as a whole.

I do not consider this list to be exhaustive as I do accept that it is really horses for courses. Each organisation should establish what a positive work ethic means to itself.

Nevertheless, in Malta we do need to put in more effort to safeguard a positive work ethic, in whatever shape and form. An excellent economic performance spanning three decades does give rise to complacency; it also gives rise to expectations that are not realistic and sustainable. For this reason, we need to continue sending out the message that nobody owes us a living and that without a positive work ethic, our economic success is in jeopardy.