A Transcendent Vision of a Workplace as a Worthplace

Today's workplaces consist of cubicles where headsets are necessary to foster an element of quiet, but not silence. Noise and interruptions inundate us, and people fear silence. We cannot escape the fact that silence values stillness: It grows our ability to listen to others. 

By Benedictine Oblate Jan Gull

Benedict brought worth to work. Work was a value, not just an obligation or necessity.

Michael Rock explores the concept that work expresses the person in his book St. Benedict's Guide to Improving Your Work Life. It defines and shapes who the person becomes. 

A key to valuing work as worth is Listening.

Benedict taught us to "listen with the ear of the heart." This is fundamental to flourishing.

What we notice and value becomes what is "worthy” to us. This is also true of employees in their workplaces. 

Rock explains how effective listening requires us to understand and accept others.

Today's workplaces consist of cubicles where headsets are necessary to foster an element of quiet, but not silence.

Noise and interruptions inundate us, and people fear silence. We cannot escape the fact that silence values stillness: It grows our ability to listen to others. 

Hesychasm is the Greek word for stillness. The hesychast was a person who, amidst city bustle and pressure, possessed an inner sense of stillness that gifted those around them.

Today’s workplace would benefit from a hesychastic disposition in leaders who are able to listen in the silence and see things from an angle other than the tyranny of the urgent.   

A common hurdle to this practice of listening is managers who think they know what workers should want and need. This often translates into lack of respect, which can foster an authoritarianism that precludes true listening.

Real listening is an act of love and deep care for the other.  It requires us to not only see intellectually but with our hearts.

Rock also discusses Carl Jung’s notion that spirituality is holy longing that helps us know the difference between who we are (as a person) and what we do (our role in the workplace). 

For Benedict, work was essential and part of one’s vocation, but it never exhausted the reality of the individual.

In today’s society, what we do seems to define who we are. When so much of our identity is shaped by our work, who we are can easily get lost in what we do.

Today’s workplace focuses on the role an employee plays, with little regard for the person’s worth beyond work.  This practice nourishes the false self -- one not true to who they really are. 

Benedict encouraged his monks to work daily at becoming more and more who they were created to be. 

Benedict’s message has inspired us for 15 centuries.   

He offers principles that can be applied easily in today’s workplace – flexibility, moderation, empathy, social responsibility and single-mindedness. 

Benedict’s clarion call was that work should have meaning for the individual: It should build up the community and contribute to the higher good. 

This transcendent vision has the ability to shift our thinking – and our being – from workplace to worthplace.