Jane is unhappy because in the summer Bob likes to use his vacation days to take Fridays off and have a long weekend. Bob is upset that Sally gets 4 less public service hours than him, even though Sally has a very specific job as the (INSERT ANY JOB TITLE) whereas Bob is a library assistant/aide whose primary duty is to serve the public. Sally doesn’t really say much to the staff when everyone is together chatting about things, but get her one on one and boy howdy she’ll tell you everything she hates about everyone. And Jim? He’ll only talk to Sally about anything that comes up even though Sally may not be the person he needs to go to. And finally….there’s Barbara. When she’s upset or overworked, she’ll immediately begin nitpicking everything that Jane and Bob do at work.
Does this completely made up story (which, like all good stories has to be somewhat inspired by real life events) sound familiar to you? It should sound familiar to you, as it is the story of every public library that has ever existed in the modern age.
In a perfect world, the public library workplace would be one that is completely in harmony and peace. After all, here’s what your job boils down to: you help people, you let them borrow things that they need, and you create and run cool events. You’re doing work that at all times gives something amazing to your community. While all of this still happens, the public library workplace is usually not full of harmony and peace. And you know what? After now being part of seven different public library workplaces I’m not sure if they’ll ever be. Some have been more harmonious than others. Yet at the core there’s always a little bit of discontent, a touch of negativity, and some jealousy thrown in there. I guess you could say it keeps things interesting.
After being a Library Director for the past two years, I’ve become a lot more in tune with what I’ll call “workplace vibes”. I see them happening, I notice the fallout from them, and I spend my days swathed in the layers of emotions they put out into the world. As the person that steers the ship of this library, I feel like a lot of those vibes are something I need to watch and control. I do my best to make sure the vibes remain positive, but in the end I’m just one person. I have my own life and my own work, and sometimes I just can’t be the only person attempting to make those vibes positive. It takes every staff member to keep the workplace vibes on the up and up. When we do this, we work together and we keep this thing in check.
Will any of us ever achieve a workplace hat is completely in harmony and peace? I don’t think it’s possible. For some reason human beings always need a little bit of unhappiness in their lives. In the past, I put myself through a lot of negative emotions feeling that I wasn’t doing my job because workplace vibes were in the pits. It was wrong of me to do that, as even though I’m the director it is not fully up to me to fix everything. We have to work together and recognize that each of us are at different periods in our journey. If someone is over there on one end, swimming in a sea of depression, we have to recognize that and do our part to not only take care of them but to know that where they may have once stepped up to the plate they may not be able to do that at the time.
Our work lives and our workplace vibes are never consistent. They are always shifting, floating from the positive end to the negative end. Recognizing where we are in that moment within ourselves is key. Through an analysis of our self, we can learn many things that help move us forward. Let’s all think about that right now.
