Stories from the WISE community: Ronald
Hi, I’m Ronald. I’ve been at WISE Employment for two years, based in the Adelaide Hills.
Working at WISE, I’m in a lucky position that I get to wake up every single day happy and excited to get to work. Do you know how insane that is?
Around 70% of people that work a nine-to-five are unhappy with their jobs. Not me. People see me driving to work with a big smile on my face. I can even see some of them whispering to themselves, “poor man, he’s gone crazy”.
At WISE, I don’t have to pretend to be someone else, and I don’t have to fake it. But it hasn’t always been that way.
When I finished high school, I decided, “you know what? I’m gonna go and get a job so I can make some money”. So I did exactly what you think a lot of teenagers would do… I stayed up playing video games. It was a bad and unhealthy cycle.
Thankfully, my dad played his role of being a father. He didn’t just tell me to get a job; he helped me gain a job through a family friend. I felt quite hopeless in my own job searching approach, so I thought to myself, “alright, let’s do it”. I said yes to a physically intensive role as a deckhand for a Tuna Company. The job was: early morning we load the boat with pilchards, feed the tunas and return.
Day in and day out, we would work long hours in unpredictable environments. I did all this despite not knowing how to swim, which made the role that much more interesting.
I remember one sunny afternoon on the boat the skipper called out to me from the cabin. He said, “Ronald, come up here. I want to talk to you”. I was thinking, “oh no, I’m in trouble.” But I’ll never forget what he said. It was, “you don’t belong here”.
It was painful. I felt this sting in my heart. “What do you mean?” I said to him. “It’s clear that I am one of your best deckhands. I’m fast and efficient, and I get the job done safely”.
He paused for a second and said, “if you decide this is your path, that’s fine by me, but you could leave a bigger impact if you wanted to”. I stood there in silent awe. This person I look up to said these great things about me while I thought very little of myself.
I decided to test his theory. So I left tuna farming and applied for various roles that were out of my scope. I landed a few of these roles and found that he was right – I could impact and positively influence people. It felt great.
But throughout my years of employment in different industries, I had yet to find great leadership like my skipper; until I started here at WISE.
Within the first six months of working at WISE, my manager saw something in me. And, the whole time I’ve been with WISE, I can confidently say that not just my direct leader but other leaders too.
Every day we are in a position to empower people and enrich the community. We can effectively do so with the faith that our leaders will guide us there.
At WISE, we do what we say and follow through with it. The integrity and culture within WISE still boggles me as it’s almost too good to be true sometimes.
Every day we ensure our customers come first over KPIs, targets or performance. And when the day to day activity gets tough, what gets me through is the understanding that the work we do affects the community at large.
It is a great feeling to know our customers go home and feel a sense of security and pride by being employed and supported. Doing this job while being surrounded by a supportive team makes it that much better.
All photos supplied by Ronald.