Thinkers50 is delighted to be partnering with Mercer on an ebook-- The Human-Centric Enterprise. I'm Stuart Crainer, Co-founder of Thinkers50. Today, I'm talking to one of the contributors to the ebook, Melissa Swift. Melissa is author of WORK Here NOW and a member of the Thinkers50 Radar community for 2023. For this ebook, Melissa's contribution is titled "Being Human-- the most transformational move of all. So Melissa, let's start by asking, what does the idea of the human-centric enterprise mean to you?
Well, for me, it really means eroding this historical dichotomy. We had sort of-- we're people over here and we do work over here. And we've got one set of rules here and another set of rules here. And any kind of fluidity between the two means that the work, that serious realm of work, isn't getting done quite right.
And when we really look at things in a human-centric way, we say, no, it's the same players on both teams-- the work team and the life team. Why are we using two different sets of rules?
Now, I wonder when that dichotomy was created.
Well, so it's interesting because I researched this for my book a bit. And what most historians believe is that there's not necessarily a dichotomy-creating moment but the industrialization of work-- and not just the Industrial Revolution, but even the use of more simple machines, et cetera, et cetera is probably a little bit of what drives that, because, the second you introduce a machine into a human environment, there's a negotiation.
We need the humans to work with the machines. So you had-- as a for instance-- this very dramatic moment in the Industrial Revolution, where you're saying, OK, you're not having these kind of organic interactions with agrarian work, where the sun and the wind and the rain are setting your patterns. We need you to work in these very regimented patterns because we need you to work with these big honking machines.
And that was, I think, a bit of a watershed, but like most other changes in the world of work, it had been going on quietly for a while, that we were trying to dichotomize a bit. But that's one of the watershed moments, I would say.
So in work here now, you talk about building a powerhouse workplace. I wonder if you could tell us what you mean by that.
So I think a powerhouse workplace, it has its own momentum. You're not having to constantly push and tug and add more of the things. We have especially in-- it's especially true in, I believe, a knowledge work that we don't necessarily know exactly what makes the whole thing run sometimes.
So there's a lot of artificial-- like adding stuff on and doing the things and making the lists. And it's not necessarily a driver of either worker happiness or business outcomes. So a powerhouse workplace is one where there's an organic momentum to the work, where the work itself is deeply understood by the humans doing it, and ultimately, you're not having to constantly stoke the fire.
There's just a good motion of work getting done in good and sensible and sustainable ways. I use the word sustainable a lot because I think that's part of being a powerhouse workplace too, is you're not constantly having to go in and hire a ton of people or rescue people's mental health. Things work. You got a good, stable workforce that ebbs and flows in the right ways, and that is basically healthy.
You talk to a lot of organizations, visit a lot of companies, talk to a lot of executives and business leaders. How many powerhouse workplaces do you encounter?
It's interesting because there are more-- I would say there are fewer overall ones than one might think, but there are more pockets also than one might think. That it's programmatically discouraging, anecdotally encouraging.
And honestly, what I'm really encouraged by, that I see at some of my client organizations, is they're willing to take those little areas of best practice or where things really do have that wonderful momentum, and they're willing to then say, OK, let's extract the lessons and then spread them out across these big, diverse, complex organizations. And that, to me, may be a bit of the future of how to do this all, is just figure out those little pieces and replicate them.
And how did the pandemic contribute to the rise of these powerhouse pockets?
Well, I would say it made us confront some long-standing trends. So some of the trends that I talk about in the book, let's say greedy work, where work just expands to fill all the hours of the day, or intensified work, where you're doing too many units of work per unit of time, researchers will tell you, that stuff's been going on for a while, that none of that is new to the COVID era.
But what the pandemic did is it gave us this moment when everything went quiet and there was almost nothing in our lives but work. And oh boy, did we confront decades of negative changes in how we get work done. And again, for me, that's a hopeful thing. We looked in the mirror and it didn't look so good.
And you don't think there's temptation to return to pre-pandemic working habits and working attitudes.
I think there's a good amount of temptation, especially for, I think, unfortunately, the folks at the tops of organizations, because, if you think about it, there's just some kind of human cognitive bias. That you say, OK, I'm really successful. I'm a CEO. That your brain wants to believe that everything you did to that point added up to where you are.
We all think that way. We're all the authors of our own little stories. It is a very natural and human way to think. The problem is we've really experienced a moment of disruption of paradigm shift. Anything you did to become a great CEO, most of it happened on the other side of that paradigm shift.
And so you can't take that data and say-- what is it they say? Past performance is not predictive of future results. We're in the ultimate moment of that. And that's why we have to resist this temptation to just snap back to the way things were because it's like those results are N/A, not applicable.
Yeah, I wonder if the-- I mean, obviously, a lot of people's jobs have changed a great deal over the last few years-- more working at home, et cetera. And I wonder, at the very senior levels in organizations, if their jobs have changed as much.
Yeah, absolutely. There was a great article, I think, yesterday, in one of the papers, that there are certain white-collar jobs that are either changing or eroding or going away entirely. And I think the work of leadership has changed meaningfully. There's some tactical pieces.
So when you're leading a population that is more remote, you need different kinds of communication skills. That's that's very tactical. But also, if you're leading in a time of both rapid technological change and what it looks like long-term constrained labor markets-- and at Mercer, our point of view is that labor markets are going to be ever-tightening from here on out. We don't see another wash of labor supply ever really coming in due to a number of factors.
So if you're leading in that moment, that changes your job, and that requires you, in many ways, to step back from some of the behaviors that may have taken you to where you are today. A lot of those behaviors about presenting as the superhero and being the knower that knows all the things, all of those skills that we've been talking to leaders about for a while now, about you need to question, you need to listen, you need to be mentally fluid, they really, really need those skills right now, more than ever.
It's interesting how long it takes for that kind of wisdom to percolate down to legal, percolate up to leaders, because, as you say, these things have been talked about for quite a long time now. You talk about managing three critical interrelated dimensions-- the intensity of work, interactions between people and work technology, and the purpose and logic of work. Can you talk a bit, Melissa, about the links between those dimensions and delve a little bit deeper into their meaning?
Yeah, it's interesting because when all three dimensions work well together, it's like-- what's the comment from Tolstoy about all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are different? When those three dimensions work well together, all of the organizations where that happens look the same. They're the happy families and they are deeply interrelated.
So the intensity of work, that's how much work I'm doing per unit of time. And oftentimes, that second piece about the interactions with technology has a fundamental relationship to the intensity of work. Think about-- in the book, I talk about the old I Love Lucy episode, where they run the production line of chocolates too fast. That's a classic example of where the interaction between humans and technology is going wrong.
And it's intensified, the work that Lucy and Ethel are trying to do. The chocolates are coming off the assembly line too fast. And so that's all of us today with 1,000 emails coming in per day, same as the chocolates. And then the interesting thing is how that relates to the purpose and the logic of work.
So purpose gets talked about a lot. What am I really trying to accomplish here? And that could be accomplished for my company, for the world. Purpose can have a lot of different dimensions. The piece we don't attend to enough, generally, is the logic of work. Does what I'm doing, A, just prima facie, makes sense? And B, make sense for what I'm trying to accomplish?
And it's interesting. I always think about-- in the book, I talk about the Jetsons, that George Jetson's whole job is just sitting there and pushing a button because he's living in the future, and he still manages to fight with his boss. But part of what might be wrong with George Jetson's job, that might be a little wrong with a lot of our jobs today is actually that that highly technologically-enabled way of working has cut us off from the logic of work.
If you think about it, if I'm an agrarian worker in 1,700, I plant crops and then they come up, and then I harvest them. I get what I'm doing. If I am a consultant in 2023, pinging back emails and Teams messages, I might not understand the logic of what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis. And that's fundamentally, the human brain will react.
Yeah, it's quite funny, the logic of work, because it's not really-- it's not really articulated, is it? We kind of take it for granted. And in some ways, I always sense that our expectations of work have obviously changed, but in a sense, are we being unrealistic in having high expectations that it's going to provide purpose to our lives? I mean, the bar is much higher than it used to be.
Absolutely. And it's been something-- I mean, again, you can find writers from the 19th century talking about wanting to find purpose from work. It's something that we've certainly been after for a while. And I would say part of why we want so much from work is we spend so much time at work. I mean it's a very brute force argument.
But if you think about it, people always joke-- you spend more time with your co-workers than with your family, in terms of just hours spent during the week. And so under that paradigm, especially with work getting greedier, taking more and more hours of the week, at a certain point, I think one of two things happens.
Number one could be what we've been talking about as quiet quitting and saying, OK, I'm going to renegotiate my relationship with work and maybe we're not going to be in such an intensive relationship. Or number two, OK, if I'm going to spend as much time and thought process at work, I'm going to ask more from it. And so one of those two things, something's got to give on one side or the other, I believe.
I mean, you quote there's lots of research saying that people have an uneasy relationship with technology in the workplace. I mean, there's the Citrix study saying 71% of employees believe collaboration and communication technology has made their work more complex. And there's lots of other evidence like that that technology is not really working for a lot of people.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the stats that I like the best was that 18% of people have left their job to find another job where the technology is better. I mean, what more striking statement-- or there's a stat from Gartner-- 50% of people, when you implement a new system, they want the old system back. I mean, that's just-- think about it.
At home, you buy a car, you don't want the old car back. But at work, we really do have a very testy relationship with technology. And a lot of it does come back to, are we-- who sets the standard for how we work? And because a lot of times, technology, it seems easier to let technology call the tune, we let technology call the tune. And then we wonder why our human workers are bedeviled.
Yeah, bedeviled sums it up. But what you're talking about, they're really fundamental issues that haven't actually been talked about. I know something like virtual work was actually-- has been talked about for 30, 40 years, really. I mean Peter Drucker was writing about knowledge workers in the late 1960s. But it seems to have-- it's only now that the fundamental questions, such as the logic of work, and the purpose of work, are being really contemplated for the first time. I'm not sure if that's good news or bad news.
No, we're--
It takes a long time.
We're in an existential moment, I would say. And I think some of the good news, honestly, is that getting to some of these more fundamental issues, in a weird way, is an easier solve than all the things that we've been trying. There's a whole thing-- I went down a huge rabbit hole about matrix organizations, that I didn't end up writing about for the book because, honestly, I couldn't figure out what to say about matrix organizations.
It was very-- it reminded me of that whole school of architecture, where you hung the facade of the building on the front of the building. The thing that Frank Lloyd Wright famously got rid of. But it was an interesting example of, we've tried to solve some of these existential issues with more complexity.
And when you take a step back and you say, OK, I layered complexity on complexity. Why is it not working? Well, of course, it's not working. So the existential stuff allows us to get into a place where things might work if we say, OK, everyone's job has to have a fundamental logic to it. Does the work that I do every day make sense?
But if you're a long-time executive who's used to riding this bucking bronco of complexity, it's very scary to get into, OK, I don't know what 80% of the people in my organization actually do and I'm not exactly sure how to fix it. But the organizations that we're working with, that are delving into those questions, are finding that they can make progress, shockingly, rapidly because you're getting to the real stuff.
I suppose it's tempting to talk about transformation, but then just tinker around the edges.
And I think that's probably what's happened over the last few decades.
Absolutely. I mean, in the book, I talk about performative work. And there's such a thing as performative transformation. We've all seen these big innovation, theater moments. And we got 1,000 people in a room with Post-it notes. And OK, guys. Much more useful to say, OK, we have people working 60 hours a week. And they would be more productive working 55 hours a week. Some of these super simple choices are worth 10,000 times as much as the theatrical stuff.
For people who don't know, tell us a bit about performative work because it's such a great, great concept.
Yeah, so performative work-- and honestly, this is one of those things-- what do they say? All research is me-search. Performative work drove me personally crazy in the workplace for many, many years. And what it is, it's not work at all. It's just showing off, disconnect so that people will perceive you as working, disconnected from business outcomes.
And it became a-- like so many other things, it just bubbled up during the COVID time because it was like, look, I'm online all the time. Look at me in the Zoom meeting. It was very this kind of we had a very theatrical moment because everybody was anxious about whether or not they were perceived as working hard.
And so that's what performative work is. And it's problematic because it takes time, it generates no outcomes, and it's got some kind of gnarly DEI pieces, where generally, if you're from a better-represented group in the workplace, you're perceived as performing work better because yours is what people picture as the performance. So it's got a lot of problems.
Yeah, it's an entertaining idea, though, because we've all encountered it and perhaps we've actually performed.
We've all done it, unfortunately.
So where does this go? If you're looking forward five years or 10 years, how do you predict this is going to pan out in the workplace?
Well, my fervent hope is that we shift off of the debate that's just focused on where work gets done. I think the kind of in-the-office, hybrid, virtual, it's the wrong set of questions. The right set of questions is what's the actual work to get done? And then let's flow it through to a number of things.
So a lot of times, for instance, when we're trying to solve the where, the actual problem is the when. It's not, "I need to be at the office or working from home." It's "I need to pick my kids up at X time." It's a time issue, not a place issue. So one of my greatest hopes for the future of work-- this is really banal-- is that we just stop talking about the place work gets done so much, partly also because, for millions, billions of workers, they have to work on-site. So it's a very kind of knowledge work-centric conversation, and I'd rather have the conversation for all workers about work getting done better.
I know in the UK, at least, there's quite a lot of talk about the four day-- a four-day working week, and quite a few organizations are trying it out. And obviously, you can see the attractions and see the logic. What do you think about that as a concept?
I think it's great because it addresses the when and it addresses this issue-- it addresses two issues in one. So if you think about it, it addresses the greedy work issue. So if work is going to keep creeping out into weekends and vacations and breakfasts and dinners and et cetera, et cetera, having an extra day when you're not doing work.
So you can do-- I'm not talking about going and having fun. I mean, basic life stuff. I need to go buy my kids some sweatpants kind of stuff, is extremely, extremely helpful because the greedy work keeps getting greedier. But it also solves for intensified work. One of my clients said to me about a year ago, "An hour isn't an hour anymore." And I thought it was a really profound and wonderful statement, that we're just packing more in.
And again, that's true across knowledge work. It's true across blue-collar work. You're physically packing more boxes in a warehouse, or you're on more Zoom meetings in a day. So if an hour of work isn't an hour anymore, we might need an extra rest day, just cognitively, just on a neuroscience basis. So I like it because it solves for two of the issues that I see as really foundational.
So we moved from Tolstoy to the very nature of time.
[LAUGHTER]
We're hitting all the deep issues.
Melissa, thank you very, very much. That's brilliant. Melissa's book is called WORK Here NOW. Worth checking out. Melissa, thank you.
Thanks so much.
