Envisioning the Conscious Workplace of Tomorrow

We’ve come a long way since office employees in the 1800s were expected to fill lamps, clean chimneys, wash windows, bring in coal and water supplies, make their own pens, and work 13 hours a day.

However, during the recent fast-food workers strike it came to glaring light that while James A Skinner, CEO of McDonald’s for the past seven years, earns over $13 million a year his front line workers often make only minimum wage — $7.25 per hour. That amounts to $290 a week and that’s before tax deductions. According to the Milwaukee Courier, "Nationally, the median wage for cooks, cashiers and crew at fast food restaurants is just $8.94 an hour."

When people make approximately $1000 a month take-home and have to pay rent, utilities, food, clothing, car payments, gas and insurance, and are supporting a family — that’s an impossibility. One fast food worker reported that not only did she and her husband both work, they and their two children had to live with the woman’s mother in order to get by.

Do you agree that there’s something wrong with this picture?

In the conscious workplace of tomorrow, in order for all persons who contribute to the success of a business to be justly rewarded, the leadership of that business must contribute conscious care for all workers’ well-being not just their business savvy, which allowed the leadership to help build the bottom line and climb to the top.

Now, before you start jumping to conclusions, I’m not taking a Pollyanna position that requires a Marxist road map. But I am insisting that heartfelt human "being" and consideration for all workers must become the norm as part of business leadership if there is to be a corporate model for conscious participation and collaboration on this planet that we all share.

Either way, I will continue to hope that the conscious workplace of the future will invite, promote, and reward excellence across all levels of employment. I will hope that companies with vast storehouses of financial assets provide educational support for everyone at any work-grade who shows promise.

I will hope that doing business "the way it’s always been done" will be replaced by visionary leaders who understand the power of enterprise to guide us into a future of conscious abundance unlike anything ever seen before except in some rare businesses which have usually had very small footprints due to their being small local companies.

If you could disappear the voice in your head that may want to defend "how it’s always been" and give rise to your planet-wide larger imagination, what would your ideal conscious workplace of tomorrow look like?