Cafe Society: Flourishing in a changing work landscape

Career coach Katherine Street sees brilliant opportunities for dynamic working lives on the horizon.

Workplace coach Katherine Street. Picture: ZAK SIMMONDS

JADED colleagues suck the life out of workplaces the world over, but is job stagnation particularly prevalent in Tasmania? I pose the question to Katherine Street in a fireside chat at the atrium of the RACT Hobart Apartment Hotel in Collins St.

The career coach and consultant says the risk of staleness can be higher in smaller job markets, where people tend to play it safer, sitting tight in the same jobs for longer.

Katherine wants to see fearless job-hopping become more common in the state.

“I would like to hear more people say ‘I’ve been doing this for three years. What’s next?’ ” she says.

“We’re after a bit more dance and flow happening in this world of work.”

Greater and more diverse economic activity and the changing nature of jobs in general are setting the scene for change.

“Because our renaissance is coming from small business and through industries that are not necessarily tied to desks, we can reconceptualise the way work looks,” says Katherine, predicting strong continuing growth in sectors including the arts, research and development, and service industries including caring and tourism.

She says technology has unlocked opportunity for more Tasmanians to work long-distance for faraway employers, but we’re mostly ignoring the potential.

“A lovely trend happening is people working for international organisations who are now placing themselves in Tasmania. Great. Love it. But what I am not seeing is Tasmanians saying ‘Well, I’m already here. Where are the international organisations I want to work for?’

“A lot of the time Tasmanians will only look at Tasmanian opportunities. We are not quite connecting up with the global change in how work happens, but there are very wide opportunities we could be looking at.”

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On the local employment front, Katherine sees an abundance of interesting avenues for people to proactively shape the way they go about earning a quid.

“In Tasmania we are so on the right track in terms of career opportunities ­— if people can look at career as something a little different than what we have been imagining,” she says.

“The old image of what a job would be, of going into an organisation that had a pathway for you, just isn’t stacking up anymore.

“Growth is happening in lots of different little areas, and that means people can look at careers that are much more constructed from different elements.

“There’s lots of side-hustle stuff available here. You might have a three-day a week job in an organisation, say at the university, and you might make sweet treats, for example, to sell at the farmers’ markets on Sunday.” But is that a way to get ahead, I ask.

“Even asking that presupposes a very old definition of career success,” she says. That old ladder-climbing model is rusty.

“There’s a fallacy around career that there should be an ultimate goal.”

Financial literacy is important in successfully navigating the new landscape, she adds. And Tasmanians need to get better at selling themselves. “Marketing is not a dirty word,” she says.

At her consultancy, People Flourishing, Katherine works to help clients shift from a languishing to a flourishing state.

“Our old purely financial paradigm of flourishing needs updating,” she says. “I often come across people who are languishing. They have resigned themselves to the jobs they have, even if the fit is not as good as they would like. This is such a waste. They know they could add more value and find more career happiness, but don’t.”

She says cultivating a workplace culture of greater kindness in Tasmania, where diversity is not always properly valued, would encourage greater dynamism.

Katherine is particularly concerned by harsh recruitment practices, the prospect or memory of which can deter people from leaving jobs they have outgrown or to which they are ill-suited. She is calling for local employers to extend more kindness to applicants.

“I hear about a lot of recruitment practices that trick, unsettle, demean, interrogate and treat applicants poorly,” she says. “Stepping into a hostile recruitment process is not what people are jumping out of their skin to do, so no wonder we get people stuck in roles where they don’t have a great fit for long periods of time.”

We could also be more mindful of emotional contagion in the workplace, whereby we catch each other’s emotions in our interactions, if we want kinder professional environments.

“I would like to see people realise that the little things — a smile, patience, a kind word — are the big things,” says Katherine.

“We are at a lovely tipping point now in Tasmania, where a more hopeful mindset is getting the upper hand, and we need sustained kindness to keep this happening.”

Katherine’s career guide, In the Loop of a Flourishing Career, Balboa Press, $21.99, comes out next week at local bookstores and via her website: flourishing.com.au