Helping others is hard to incentivise, but an important part of work

Despite dramatic portrayals of ambitious business people stabbing each other in the back to get ahead, and the growing trend of divisive and individualistic politics in many parts of the world, most of the progress that we make at work and in wider society relies on people helping each other out.

In the careers section of Chemistry World recently, we’ve celebrated some people who have made helping others an important part of their working life. For Emanuel Wallace, his desire to help students who were struggling with a lack of practical lessons during Covid-19 lockdowns led to a new career as the content creator Big Manny. And the three researchers featured in Victoria Atkinson’s article created websites to share their knowledge about lab safety, organic chemistry techniques and computational skills more widely, to benefit the whole chemistry community.

Of equal importance to big projects like these are the small helpful actions that go on every day in the workplace. The postdoc who shows you how to set up a reaction; the colleague who checks over a report you’ve written; the technician who helps a student work out why an experiment has failed.