In my work, I go beyond recruitment and into training and development. We deal primarily with 'high- turnover-low-productivity staff' companies, resulting in unhealthy work stress created by bad communication, bickering and politicking.

How do we turn this around? With difficulaty. It requires a fundamental change in the way everyone in the company views work.

We all know and agree that a primary source of wealth is human labour, yet there is such discontent around it. Employers see it as a necessary evil, a cost item, to be reduced to a minimum, and automated, if possible. Employees see it as a sacrifice of their leisure and comfort, and wages its reward. Ideally employers want output without employees and employees want an income without working. Offcourse getting rid of work is neither possible nor expedient, however, the goal is to create a win-win workspace so that all can survive and thrive.

It never stops to amaze me how often we are able to turn a culture around just by changing everyone's beliefs about ''work'. When you become aware that having no work or no opportunity to obtain work,will put you in a desperate position, not simply because of lack of income, but because you will lack this nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace, you begin to appreciate the functions of work, which is threefold: 

• it gives you a chance to utilise and develop your faculties
• it enables you to overcome your ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task
• to bring forth goods and services need for existence

Work is the second balance sheet bottom line reporting requirement, so:

'If you want to keep earning (working), you must keep learning'