Hustle culture and changing work mentality
If we all take a moment to look around us, at our coworkers, our peers, our friends, and our managers, I think we’ll find that none of us took exactly the same path to get to where we are today. Some of us may have followed in the footsteps of a family member or mentor, some of us went to college and some didn’t, some of us knew early on that we wanted to be in this industry and followed a direct route here, and some of us took some detours along the way.
But, for a lot of us, the early stages of our careers were probably similar in one way: we learned our industry from the ground up. We learned by doing, we put in a lot of hours, and we hustled. We may have spent summers hand-watering plants, pulling weeds, and spreading mulch, and winters plowing snow, installing Christmas decorations, and doing whatever else we could to gain experience, be recognized, and move up the ladder. We learned plant culture by observing and handling plants day in and day out, from season to season, and by making a lot of mistakes along the way. We may have spent years doing the monotonous, tedious, and sometimes unpleasant day-to-day tasks that keep a nursery, landscape company, or garden center running.
In short, we participated in what’s now referred to as ‘hustle culture’. It’s a way of life, really, an approach that puts work at the center of your life, with the mentality that you can’t be successful by working only 40 hours a week. But, in recent years, we’ve seen this approach to success begin to fall under scrutiny. ‘Burnout culture’, ‘hustle culture’, or ‘grind culture’, as it’s called, is facing an existential crisis with today’s workforce.
Not only that, but the generations behind us - the future managers and decision-makers of our industry and others - are coming up in a world much different from the one we experienced. Gen Z is the first truly digital generation, the first to grow up with no memory of a world without the internet. Tomorrow’s leaders have grown up in a society where information is constantly accessible, and where answers are expected to be at our fingertips.
What’s more, our industry is becoming increasingly automated. Modern greenhouses and nursery operations are models of efficiency. For many years, our industry relied on, and was built around, a seemingly unlimited and cheap labor pool. While some may look back on those days fondly, the labor challenges we’ve faced in the past few decades have forced all of us to take a hard look, not only at our inefficiencies, but at the type of work we expect from our employees, and to ask ourselves how we can do better.
Over the past season, I’ve found that that my relationships with those in next generation of the green industry have begun to shift my own mentality when it comes to how I think about work – maybe my way of learning isn’t the only way, or the best way. And, in some cases, the way I learned is no longer relevant. Take watering – I spent many, many hours in the early years of my career with a hose in my hand, whether it was spending summers watering container shrubs outside or taking weekend watering shifts as a greenhouse intern. But today’s young growers are taking jobs at greenhouses and nurseries where watering and climate control are completely automated, and the presets are already programmed when they walk through the door. I do believe that if you want to learn to grow plants you need to walk the crops, touch them, take them out of the pot, and feel the soil. You can’t get that knowledge entirely from a book, culture sheets, or YouTube videos. But recently I’ve begun to ask myself how much of my earlier years were spent gaining valuable work experience, and how much of them were simply spent paying my dues and putting in my time.
All this isn’t to say that our young workers of today aren’t still grinding it out, putting in the hours, and taking on unglamorous responsibilities in the name of professional growth. But there’s been a tendency throughout history to associate changes in culture with laziness or apathy, especially when it comes to younger generations and their relationship with work. Moving forward and making progress is only possible if we’re openminded, adaptable, and willing to change how we operate and how we think. If we can do this, I think we’ll also find ourselves endlessly inspired by our future generations and what we can accomplish together.
