Is it Friday yet – Photo credit: womansday.com
Happy Friday! TGIF!
“Is it Friday yet?”, “Can’t wait for Friday”, “Yes it’s Friday”! TGIF!
Let’s keep it real, most of us (even Beyonce) look forward to Friday. Not only is it the end of the work week, it officially signals the beginning of this two-day whirlwind break aka the week-end. And who wouldn’t be excited about not having to deal with bosses, co-workers and un-formatted Excel spreadsheets?
Yet just as getting excited about your next paycheck gets a lot less exciting as you can’t seem to get out of the paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, so does living Friday to Friday…During one of the worst professional experiences of my career, the only highlight of my week was looking forward to Friday. Not just because of the week-end, but because I could not stand my work life at the time. And inevitably, of course, the Fridays highs were seemingly always followed by dreadful Monday lows…
Until I realized I was spending upwards of 10 hours each day profoundly unhappy. Now this may be an extreme case of the Friday highs and Mondays lows. Yet, in our millenial search for meaning in our work, in our desperate cravings for life balance (not just work-life balance), this Friday lifestyle is slowly signaling a creeping work identity crisis already affecting us all.
Employees are no longer engaged at work, because work has ceased engaging them. As professionals, and women professionals especially, have evolved, most workplace cultures have not. In turn, this generates a TGIF culture valuing work less and less, seeking meaning in other pursuits instead.
Is it time to reconsider why we look so much, if not only, forward to Fridays? Is the stagnation of workplace culture to blame for this TGIF culture? And most importantly, are we failing ourselves and others by not engaging in work we truly value?
The Corporate Sis.
