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The robots are coming. Technology could eliminate half of all jobs over the next ten years. Working harder isn’t going to save your job. Working smarter won’t to do it either. The economy is changing and the way to ride the wave of change is to change our attitude about work.

Several years ago a business magazine surveyed businesses to find what qualities they looked for when hiring employees. The top two items were a desire to serve others and an aptitude to work with others in a team environment. Those sound like Christian virtues, don’t they?

Let’s stop telling young people entering the job market that if they are willing to work really hard they will always have a job. T’aint necessarily so. Especially not in the coming economic transformation. The old ideals of individualistic effort are about to be cast on the scrap heap.

Christians have absorbed an idea from the world that values a person by the amount he produces. We expect that success equates high production with the ability to spend more on the things we consume. Could we shift our attitude to value a person by what he or she contributes to the common good? That would seem more like a Christian value system, unless we would try to measure that contribution in dollars and cents.

W. Edwards Deming became a hero to Japanese industry when he showed them how to drastically improve the quality of their products after World War II. It wasn’t until 1980, when Deming was 80, that US business started to pay attention to what he had to say. His analysis of American management methods were devastating. He told companies that they needed to drive out fear and eliminate barriers between departments so that everyone could work together for the good of the business. He condemned annual performance reviews, saying they forced employees to compete against each other rather than working together for the common good.

In the survey quoted earlier, educational accomplishments came far down the list of qualities that business leaders were looking for in new hires. Graduates who have a piece of paper showing their success in the classroom may expect employers to give them preferential treatment. The problem is that things learned in the classroom often don’t have much value in the workplace.

Employers want employees who are life long learners. They want to be able to direct their employees towards learning things that apply to their work and will benefit the business. Years ago Henry Ford said: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”

To put this all together, as Christians we should teach the value of a servant spirit. This should be evident in every area of life. Can we really serve God and not be willing to serve our fellow man?

Ideas like “I know better” or “I can do it better” should have no place in Christian life. We should not expect them to be useful in our work life either. Success in the coming economy will not go to the one who works the hardest to prove that he can do things faster and better. The person who dedicates his efforts to the success of the whole group will be a valued member of any team.