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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Make work suck less and improve the performance of your people with this practical, hands-on guide
The COVID-19 pandemic and an ever-changing array of new ways of working seem to have all of us asking, “Does work really have to suck this bad?” It looks like a small taste of flexibility and freedom has made many of us rethink the nature of the work we do and how we do it.
In Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace, Mercer’s North American Transformation Leader Melissa Swift delivers an eye-opening roadmap to better work that generates wins for companies and employees alike. In the book, you’ll explore different ways to improve the growth-impeding, borderline inhumane people management practices we’ve created and endured over time. You’ll also find:
- 50 strategies to create a powerhouse workplace at organizational level
- 50 strategies to create a powerhouse workplace at team level
- A simple framework to help you make people-centered decisions
An incisive and practical take on managing and working with people that—for once—doesn’t rely on hackneyed idealism or management-by-algorithm, Work Here Now is the hands-on performance improvement tool that executives, managers, HR professionals, and other business leaders have been searching for.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Strategies
List of Figures
Preface
1 The Great Work Unpack
Work Sucks
Okay, Work Sucks—But Why?
What to Do: Five Strategies for Organizations
What to Do: Five Strategies for Teams
Notes
2 The Anxiety Monster and the Boss Baby Customer
“Get Moving Now!”: The Work Anxiety Monster
The Taskmaster Boss Hiding Around the Corner: The Boss Baby Customer
What to Do: Five Strategies for Organizations
What to Do: Five Strategies for Teams
Why Don't Things Get Better? The Organizational Copy Machine
Notes
3 Breaking the Workforce Copy Machine
The History of Human Resources Is Dark and Boring
Data Tells Us HR Is Starving, Misdirected, and Overloaded
Seizing the Future of HR: Why a Target Interaction Model Is Critical
Breaking the Four Copy Machine Engines
What to Do: Five Strategies for Organizations
What to Do: Five Strategies for Teams
Notes
4 Decisions About People, for People
A Framework for Making Work Work for People
People‐Centered Decisions Rebalance the Scales and Restore Your Workplace Equilibrium
Notes
5 Tech Dreams, Tech Nightmares
Tech at Work: The Problem
We Have Seen the Enemy and It Is Us: Technology as a Leadership Band‐Aid
Eternal Minimum Viable Product: Why the Genius of Iterative Tech Also Makes Us Crazy
Tech and Humans: The
I Love Lucy
Problem
Cyber Issues
What to Do: Organization Level
What to Do: Team Level
Notes
6 The Intentional Workforce
In the Wake of the Pandemic, Further Evidence That Different Groups Truly Experience Work Differently
Unmet Needs: Chasing the “Why” of Attrition
Contingency Planning: From Shadow to Intentional Workforces
Maximizing Human Assets: The Disturbing History of Individual Performance Management
What to Do: Organization Level
What to Do: Team Level
Notes
7 Hippos Under the Lagoon
I'm Not Going to Quote Hamilton But Immigrants Really Do Play a Crucial Role in the American Workforce
The Massive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Issue You're Not Focused On: Foreign‐Born Workers Who Are Citizens or “Green Card” Holders
Working in Limbo: The Unique Travails of Foreign‐Born Workers on Visas
Doctors Driving Taxis Amid a Healthcare Shortage: The Continuing Puzzle of Immigrant Underemployment
Work from Anywhere? The Migration Question
From Prison to Productivity: Why You Should Hire Formerly Incarcerated People
What to Do: Organization Level
What to Do: Team Level
Notes
8 Defeating Greedy Work and
Animal Farm
Syndrome
When Greed Is Definitely Not Good: The Rise and Continued Rise of Greedy Work
From Greedy Work to Piggy Bosses
What to Do: Organization Level
What to Do: Team Level
Notes
9 A Good Day at Work, Every Day
Asynchronous, Deconstructed, Transparent: Three Interesting Directions for Today's Organizations
What to Do: Five Strategies for Organizations
What to Do: Five Strategies for Teams
What's Actually at the End of the Rainbow: Toward an Achievable but Exciting Future of Work
Notes
Appendix: Strategies by Category of Action
Do
Discuss
Examine
Reduce
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 My March 2020 desk setup
Figure 1.2 Overloaded milkshake
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 TBWA Chiat Day office, 1990s
Figure 2.2 The changing face of skills
Figure 2.3 Bike delivery person
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
LA Times
bombing
Figure 3.2
The Human Resources Function,
by E. Wight Bakke
Figure 3.3 How companies rank HR performance versus effectiveness
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 An early 20th century Manischewitz factory
Figure 4.2 A Framework for human‐centric decisions
Figure 4.3 r/thereifixedit
Figure 4.4 Stanislav Petrov
Figure 4.5 How Mercer views workforce transformation
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
2001: A Space Odyssey
poster
Figure 5.2 Agile Manifesto
Figure 5.3
I Love Lucy,
“Job Switching”
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 From Mercer Data, who's thinking about quitting?
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 A U.S. “Green Card”
Figure 7.2 New York is pretty charming
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Picture of Sammy's Steak
Figure 8.2 Don't let greedy work ruin your vacation!
Figure 8.3 Don't turn into this little guy
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Strategies
List of Figures
Preface
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Appendix: Strategies by Category of Action
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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MELISSA SWIFT
WORK HERE NOW
THINK LIKE A HUMAN AND BUILD A POWERHOUSE WORKPLACE
Copyright © 2023 by Mercer (US) Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781119895275 (cloth)ISBN 9781119895299 (ePub)ISBN 9781119895282 (ePDF)
Cover Design: WileyCover Images: Building: Wiley Arrow: © RLT_Images/Getty Images
To my husband, Artem, who changed my life, and my daughter, Mira, who changed my life again
And to my mom and dad, the clinician and the researcher, who taught me two equally valid ways of looking at the world
LIST OF STRATEGIES
What to Do: Strategies at the Organization Level
Strategy 1: Regularly reexamine work for signs of being dangerous (directly or indirectly), dull and annoying, or frustrating and confusing.
Strategy 2: Don't take intensified work for granted—and don't be afraid to de‐intensify.
Strategy 3: Question long‐held assumptions and unintentional choices about work to revolutionize your DEI strategy.
Strategy 4: Seek to understand work, even if it's painful.
Strategy 5: Deliberately hold performative work in check.
Strategy 11: Unpack your foundational talent management assumptions—what decisions have you made on the basis of believing folks are lazy or slow?
Strategy 12: Regularly examine the jobs that impact your organization the most—have they changed in a way that affects how people's performance of those jobs looks (i.e., do they look lazy or slow because work is changing fast?)?
Strategy 13: Map how your customer experience and your employee experience interact.
Strategy 14: Tread carefully in how you talk about seamlessness and frictionlesness—internally and externally.
Strategy 15: Actively promote replacements for the anxiety monster and the boss baby customer.
Strategy 21: Create a “single account of the truth” on the workforce of your organization—however you employ them—and systems and processes to maintain it in real‐time.
Strategy 22: Maintain and periodically energize an organization‐wide conversation about how work gets done.
Strategy 23: Optimize how work gets done by different populations—tackling one chunk at a time.
Strategy 24: Reinvent HR—on your organization's terms.
Strategy 25: Just do less!
Strategy 31: Understand when you're making a decision that impacts your human workers, know who owns that decision, and identify who's truly impacted.
Strategy 32: Look at the key roles in your organization, and remove any unneeded qualifications or aspects of work that are limiting the talent pool of who can do that work.
Strategy 33: Smash your technology silo.
Strategy 34: Make humanism an acceptable part of corporate discourse.
Strategy 35: Examine roles designed for obsolescence—do they have features you'd consider unacceptable in longer‐term roles?
Strategy 41: Obsess over tech governance.
Strategy 42: Make sure you're choosing tech for the right reasons—and then make sure you're re‐choosing it.
Strategy 43: Marie Kondo your tech stack—using an employee's‐eye view.
Strategy 44: Have an honest conversation about cybersecurity—and what it's going to
feel
like.
Strategy 45: Make sure tech is working at the speed of humans, and not vice versa.
Strategy 51: Rigorously and regularly audit your performance management results for bias—and be prepared to take dramatic action to address.
Strategy 52: Cultivate thoughtful ways of managing performance by team or unit, avoiding the “hand‐to‐hand combat” of measuring individual by individual.
Strategy 53: Bring your contingent workforce up to “measurement parity” with your full‐time workforce, including shared governance, capture in organizational systems, and centralized budgeting.
Strategy 54: Rigorously and regularly audit your pay philosophy and pay equity—are you paying for what you think you're paying for, and are you paying fairly, in real time?
Strategy 55: Figure out which employee groups are “burnt out,” and which are “fed up,” and design differentiated strategies to address each set of issues.
Strategy 61: In your DEI efforts, consider a broader array of populations, including foreign‐born workers, previously incarcerated populations, etc.
Strategy 62: Dramatically up the inclusion factor on your talent acquisition process.
Strategy 63: Understand the role of foreign‐born workers at your organization, including the household workers who support your employees, and actively create support programs for this group (including naturalized/green card workers and workers on visas).
Strategy 64: Take a searching, quantitative and qualitative look at your remote and hybrid work policies in the context of geographical talent markets, those markets' trends, and with a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens.
Strategy 65: Scenario plan your flexibility and location strategy versus possible changes in your talent markets as well as in the way we work.
Strategy 71: Evaluate what you're seeking from your leaders at each stage versus structural cues at prior career stages, and seek to eliminate disconnects.
Strategy 72: Create more fluidity for junior talent, in both how you manage talent and how you hire for early‐in‐career roles.
Strategy 73: More love for middle managers!
Strategy 74: Figure out your organization's drivers of greedy work, and seek to kill them off.
Strategy 75: Provide concrete incentives to combat greedy work.
Strategy 81: Deploy increased levels of asynchronous work to create greater flexibility—borrowing helpful practices from organizations where asynchronous work is more prevalent.
Strategy 82: Teach better written communication skills to help fuel asynchronous work.
Strategy 83: Dig into deconstruction possibilities for “talent crisis” roles.
Strategy 84: In an environment of increasingly deconstructed work, explore novel roles with comprehensive talent accountability, especially with a wellness lens.
Strategy 85: Find opportunities for transparency to drive greater accountability and thus equity.
What to Do: Strategies at the Team Level
Strategy 6: At a regular cadence, talk to your team about their everyday experience of work—what are they doing, and how are they feeling, day to day and minute to minute?
Strategy 7: Quiet your “suck it up” voice.
Strategy 8: Be humble and curious about the parts of your team's work you don't understand.
Strategy 9: Create metrics to measure and monitor work intensity.
Strategy 10: Take a searching look as to where you might be encouraging performative work.
Strategy 16: Examine your feelings about your team—are you seeing them through an anxiety monster lens?
Strategy 17: Talk to your team about pace—why are you moving at the speed you're moving?
Strategy 18: Examine whether you're inflicting anxiety monster thoughts on yourself.
Strategy 19: Talk to your team about their experience of your customer—whether they are customer facing or not!
Strategy 20: Create a team mechanism for calling out appearances of the anxiety monster and the boss baby customer.
Strategy 26: Figure out your worst patterns—and have an honest conversation on how to break them within your team.
Strategy 27: Build your replicant—then destroy them.
Strategy 28: Turn your reasons not to hire into reasons
to
hire.
Strategy 29: Test and learn on disruptive approaches to getting work done, utilizing team contracts if helpful.
Strategy 30: Not to sound repetitive, but just do less.
Strategy 36: Model humanism—including self‐care.
Strategy 37: Identify and obliterate “kludges” and temporary solutions that have accidentally become permanent.
Strategy 38: Plan like a pessimist.
Strategy 39: Figure out your hidden talent acquisition hurdles to maximize inclusion.
Strategy 40: Have a few mental models for what “overwhelmed” looks like—and a playbook of strategies to address issues before individuals are in full burnout.
Strategy 46: Agree on your comms tech.
Strategy 47: Take tech gripes seriously—and
ask
about your team's experience of tech.
Strategy 48: Set realistic expectations around software and hardware.
Strategy 49: Volunteer your team aggressively as beta testers.
Strategy 50: Make friends with your CIO.
Strategy 56: Confront your contractor addiction.
Strategy 57: Regularly unpack the work/reward balance for your team, and teach them how to do the same for their teams—in real‐time, not just at year‐end.
Strategy 58: Identify your “talent competitors,” especially those who are not your business competitors.
Strategy 59: Rigorously train on bias before each performance management cycle.
Strategy 60: Embed “everyday workforce analytics” into how you and the team work.
Strategy 66: Drive an ongoing, two‐way onboarding journey—especially for diverse or nontraditional hires.
Strategy 67: Incorporate trauma‐informed ways of operating.
Strategy 68: Cultivate an “immigration aware” mindset—including the foreign‐born populations who work in the households of your team.
Strategy 69: Continuously audit your leadership messaging about location in response to changing external and particularly labor market conditions.
Strategy 70: Look at how you can create dimensions of flexibility across whom you hire and how they work.
Strategy 76: Model nongreedy work. Over and over.
Strategy 77: Regularly “keep things out of the boat.”
Strategy 78: Think about your team members by career lifecycle stage, and consciously broaden their vantage points.
Strategy 79: Don't let your own career journey shape your assumptions about your team members (or potential hires).
Strategy 80: Make sure you're not paying and promoting people for the wrong things.
Strategy 86: Use asynchronous work to make sure some meetings, especially standing meetings, die a gruesome death.
Strategy 87: Create a team culture of “working out loud” so that asynchronous work doesn't inhibit development of more junior team members.
Strategy 88: Make work deconstruction an everyday tool.
Strategy 89: Drive an open and ongoing conversation about the impacts of greater transparency.
Strategy 90: Role‐model asynchronous work, deconstructed work, and greater transparency in how you do your own job as a leader.
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.1
My March 2020 desk setup
Figure 1.2
Overloaded milkshake
Figure 2.1
TBWA Chiat Day office, 1990s
Figure 2.2
The changing face of skills
Figure 2.3
Bike delivery person
Figure 3.1
LA Times
bombing
Figure 3.2
The Human Resources Function,
by E. Wight Bakke
Figure 3.3
How companies rank HR performance versus effectiveness
Figure 4.1
An early 20th century Manischewitz factory
Figure 4.2
A Framework for human‐centric decisions
Figure 4.3
r/thereifixedit
Figure 4.4
Stanislav Petrov
Figure 4.5
How Mercer views workforce transformation
Figure 5.1
2001: A Space Odyssey
poster
Figure 5.2
Agile Manifesto
Figure 5.3
I Love Lucy,
“Job Switching”
Figure 6.1
From Mercer Data, who's thinking about quitting?
Figure 7.1
A U.S. “Green Card”
Figure 7.2
New York is pretty charming
Figure 8.1
Picture of Sammy's Steak
Figure 8.2
Don't let greedy work ruin your vacation!
Figure 8.3
Don't turn into this little guy
PREFACE
Bob:
Peter Gibbons:
—Office Space, 1999
The world of work can seem to be an intractable beast. Whether you're running a team, running an organization, or running away from a soul‐sapping job, all too often you may be slamming your head against your desk (literally or figuratively) as you ponder how to get work done well, humanely, and cost‐effectively. It's a riddle wrapped within an enigma bundled up in complexity, right?
This book takes the opposite view. Fixing present‐day work isn't easy, but it can be remarkably straightforward. If we're willing to look at the basics with a fundamentally human lens, we can begin to solve seemingly impossible problems like breaking historical productivity barriers or shaping a truly diverse workforce. Want to build a powerhouse workplace? Think like a human—at organization and team level. When brought to practical reality, statements like “Work shouldn't be boring” or “Job descriptions shouldn't rule out most of the workforce” can forever change how your organization or your team work.
This book focuses on two goals. The first goal is establishing language to speak about work problems you've likely long experienced but have never been able to fully articulate. Whether you're dealing with Boss Baby Customers or fighting the curse of performative work, being able to name the problem—and describe it to the stakeholders all around you—is often half the battle. The second goal is putting forth a toolkit of 90 strategies to address these gnarly workplace problems. You'll find these strategies at the end of every chapter. Forty‐five of these strategies can be implemented at organization level—the macro view—while 45 take the micro view and can be implemented at team level. There's no “right” set of strategies, or right order to implement them in, only what's effective for your organization or your team as you test and learn in real time.
The insight from this book comes both from my own work across my career and the insights of my colleagues across Mercer, the more than 75‐year‐old consultancy redefining the world of work, reshaping retirement and investment outcomes, and unlocking real health and well‐being. In Mercer's work with organizations, we find that embracing an array of strategies in a coordinated fashion generally trumps a single‐point approach. People problems are more like a friendship bracelet, with many strands woven together, than a single‐piece metal bangle.
How do we unravel the problems of the present and weave a new future? We'll start by learning the language of the ways work is broken, and then dive into how, having named the problem, we can begin to use a humanistic lens to fix it. We'll then meet a couple of nefarious characters—the Work Anxiety Monster and the Boss Baby Customer—whose efforts deform even the best workplaces. Having slain some monsters, we'll take a sledgehammer to the Workforce Copy Machine—the mechanisms that keep the future of work looking a lot like the past. From there, we'll look at a couple of basic resets that powerfully change how work gets done: making decisions in a more human way and thinking about populations instead of individuals. We'll then examine a trio of underappreciated forces (immigration, migration, and incarceration) that might be affecting your workforce and workplace far more than you thought. We'll also examine how to think about technology such that it works for, not against, your human workers—and we'll talk about how to stop humans from undermining themselves via greedy work, Animal Farm syndrome, and organizational structures and processes that ask too much of them. Finally, we'll turn our eyes toward the end of the rainbow: What does a real, attainable, future of work that works for both employers and employees look like?
It's going to be a fun, thought‐provoking, and deeply practical journey. I'm thrilled you're along for the ride.
1The Great Work Unpack: Understanding and Fixing Broken Work
“That for a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never‐ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society.”
—William Morris, Useful Work and Useless Toil, 1885
Work sucks.
It's important that we start there, because part of what's gone wrong, across centuries and continents, is that we've shied away from this fundamental truth. We've gone after a monstrous problem with carefully chosen words and some light waving of hands, when what we actually needed to do was stake it through the heart, cut its head off, stuff the head with garlic, and expose the mangled corpse to the sunlight so it could catch fire and evaporate.
You might read this and say, “Work doesn't suck! I love my job.” Many folks do love their jobs—but at any time, according to Mercer's data from our employee listening work with more than 8 million employees over decades, nearly a third of workers are seriouslythinking about quitting. And those are just the folks who've been pushed to the point of no return.
For the rest of us, even when we're most excited about work, the dirty little secret is we kind of hate it too. I love my job—leading Transformation Solutions in North America for Mercer; I get to partner with brilliant, deeply kind colleagues to help an array of interesting organizations reshape their workforces and ways of working for the future.
But part of why I love my job is the opportunity to fix all of the things about work that I know are absolutely awful. Throughout my career, I've seen it all, across large and small firms, great and terrible leaders, and an ever‐blossoming array of tech successes and failures. I've worked to solve hairy, gnarly workplace problems for my clients, but also, all too often, for my own teams. For every triumph, there are a million frustrations, and I've been plagued for decades with the sense that we could do this all better.
As we grapple with the seismic changes in work that have come with the COVID‐19 pandemic, the silver lining to a dark cloud that has killed millions may be that we have a once‐in‐several‐generations opportunity to genuinely reset how we work.
My personal epiphany about work came in the spring of 2020. COVID‐19 had turned the city I love into a horror movie—empty and silent, with sirens wailing all night. My husband works in air cargo, so as shoppers moved from buying in person to buying online, demand for his company's services boomed, and he found himself working 24/7. My daughter's kindergarten was being taught virtually, which we now know is barely possible for that age group. At my former employer, we'd experienced layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts. I was tapped to lead two series of global webinars, which I did from my dark bedroom, sitting in a teeny chair with my computer propped on a squeaking, uneven end table that threatened every day to tip over and cause an electronics disaster (see Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 My March 2020 desk setup
One day, sitting in the gloom with my computer swaying back and forth on the precarious end table, trying to juggle the chaos of creating just‐in‐time business commentary on a set of conditions frankly none of us knew how to manage even as I tried to shepherd a 5‐year‐old trying to properly draw an outline of her own face, a moment of pure terror came over me. What if I couldn't actually do this? Was this the moment when I tapped out? An anxious voice was loud in my head: “You're not good enough. If you were more organized, more dedicated, a better worker, a better mom…, this wouldn't be so tough.”
Luckily for me, some survival instinct kicked in, and I stopped gaslighting myself. Was the problem me, or was it…oh… . I don't know…the global pandemic? For sure. But the problem was also a way of working—across every organization in the world—that operated like a battering ram, even when confronted with obstacles that were not necessarily in its power to knock down. “Let's all just pull together and push through” seems to work great until you can feel it not working. There's a seminal moment in The Wizard of Oz when the average man pretending to be a great wizard is revealed, and he screams, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” This was that moment for me—I saw the way we work for what it was, a collection of human foibles, absent of any true magic.
Once you start to see a way of working that doesn't work, you can't unsee it. Horror rose up for me in the most banal moments. One day a few months later I was on the phone with two beloved coworkers. I was cooking fried rice for lunch for the family, all still stuck at home, and they were sitting in front of their video cameras. I had a moment of total cognitive dissonance that spiraled and spiraled: Why are these guys on video? We all know what we look like! Why are we in this meeting? Should this have been an email? Why can't I find 15 minutes in my day to just fry some rice in peace? Are we doing this all wrong?
The ongoing labor crisis makes it clear: we are. With workers walking away from their jobs in droves, we no longer have the option to just keep muddling through. The Great Resignation has led to record‐high quit rates in the United States—with more than 4 million Americans leaving their jobs each month in 2021, a historic high.1 Frankly, we should have stopped muddling a long time ago. Even with the incredible technological gains of the last 40 years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that business productivity grows less than 3% a decade.2 We've had winners and losers—companies have skyrocketed or gone out of business—but on a basic level, we're not getting things done any better than we did a generation ago. Companies are finally acknowledging people are hitting their breaking point too—a MercerMarsh Benefits survey from during the pandemic period showed that employers thought workforce exhaustion was a top‐five people risk. Before the Great Resignation, worker exhaustion didn't even blip on companies' radar.
This book makes a simple argument: maybe if the everyday experience of work sucked a little less, we'd get more done. Our inclination as folks analyzing a business—and it's not a bad one—is that we need to focus on the “big rocks” that mostly fill the jar of work, and not the “sand” that just fills in the gaps between the rocks. In general this is a good way to look at business and at life.
But let's think about one of the core properties of sand for a moment—it's abrasive. It really wears things down. That's what's going on with the long‐neglected everyday experience of work—it's wearing workers down every day. Unintentional, unexamined choices lead to serial minor irritations that grind all of the edges off everyone, hurting workers mentally and physically, and over time dramatically diminishing the productivity of the organizations that employ them.
Admirably, organizations have begun to focus more on the employee experience, honing in on how critical life cycle moments feel. Are performance conversations robotic? Do first days feel perfunctory? When you get promoted, does it feel special? Do compensation and benefits feel like the bare minimum, or do you feel cared for? Trying to understand and improve the employee experience is a meaningful step forward—a critical acknowledgment that the happiness of employer and employee might be far more interdependent than we've admitted in previous decades. And it's necessary, but not sufficient.
Work Sucks
Examining and improving the everyday experience of work is a step we've been afraid to take. While employee experience analysis takes into account a million different aspects of being employed by an organization, the experience of work grapples with one issue and one issue only—how does it feel, day to day, to actually do your job? If we can crack the code on this one, the pent‐up productivity gains will begin to flow at pace.
The everyday experience of work is in fact going wrong in three key ways: it's dangerous, it's boring, and it's frustrating and confusing. If you have a really terrible job, it's all three at once!
So let's start with all the ways work sucks.
Work Is Dangerous
Let's start with the lowest hanging fruit: work can suck because it kills you. There are two ways work can kill you: directly and indirectly. The direct route is easy to document: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) notes that in a normal (non‐pandemic) year, someone in the United States dies at work about every hour and a half.3 Heartbreakingly, about 12% of those deaths are suicides or overdoses. Twenty percent of those deaths occur in a job with a lot of driving involved—unsurprising in a country when car accidents kill more people than strokes, Alzheimer's, or diabetes,4,5 And perhaps most shockingly, 9% of those deaths are murders—a subset of the more than two million people in the United States who experience some form of violence at work each year.6
Even as I was writing this book, shocking deaths occurred in the workplace. In December 2021, a terrifying T5 tornado ripped through three states, throwing debris 30,000 feet into the air—as high as planes fly. The monster tornado killed dozens of people from a candle factory in Kentucky and a warehouse in Illinois, who were tragically at work around the clock as organizations powered frantically through the pre‐Christmas rush.
Work doesn't even have to kill you directly to kill you. The United Nations' labor agency attributes 2.8 million deaths each year to a bundle of work‐associated effects (stress, long hours, disease),7 while the World Health Organization (WHO) believes that nearly three‐quarters of a million people around the world die every year8specifically due to working long hours. In the United States, researchers tied 120,000 excess deaths to a bundle of issues at work (everything from a lack of health insurance to poor work–life balance to organizational injustice),9 which would put work in the running with car accidents as a top‐five cause of death overall!
These statistics are depressing. But they should be energizing too, because in many, many, many cases these are things we can fix. With proper attention to work efficiency and financial wellness (particularly for part‐time workers), no one should have to work excessively long hours—a discussion we'll examine in a further chapter. We may struggle to limit suicides or overdoses at work, but if we could really solve the puzzle of iffy, unreliable work technology (an issue we'll dive deeply into in another chapter), we could automate our way out of the most dangerous pieces of dangerous jobs (BLS statistics show workplace deaths concentrated just where you'd expect, unfortunately—fishing, logging, roofing, etc.).
We can stop work from killing you. We've made major progress already. It may sound awful that someone dies at work every 90 minutes, meaning about 16 deaths a day, but in 1911, the AFL‐CIO estimates 100 workers died on the job every day.10 In the 2020s, we're ready for another step‐change in progress—the next generation of what it means to be “safe at work.”
Work Is Dull
Remember when technology was going to save us all? Sweep up all the repetitive work, smooth off all of the rough edges of tasks, and catapult us into the charming world of the Jetsons where everyone worked by pushing a button?
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Spacely Sprockets. Despite an absurdly accelerated rate of technological progress over the last 30 years, work remains soul‐crushing and dull for many people. A 2016 Udemy survey of office workers cited that 43% were bored, and about half of the bored workers were bored more than half the week.11 That's a lot of boredom.
We've long had clues that a more technologically advanced working world could actually make work duller. I don't agree with a lot in The Communist Manifesto, but Marx and Engels did have an eerily apt observation in their 1848 work about more machines in the workplace leaving crummy, low‐paid work for humans:12“Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman…as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.”
There's a decent insight here: technology doesn't just take away lowest common denominator work. When deployed thoughtlessly, technology and industrialization often drive the reorganization of work in ways that are not necessarily appealing. Technology thrives on repetition; humans don't. The idea is that technology takes on all of the repetition, but the reality is that it often forces humans into repetitive environments where the tech itself feels at home—and people's brains don't have enough to work on. Consider any highly automated environment: a data center, a factory. Are the humans doing creative work or empathic work, or are they doing relatively repetitive work? In virtually every case, instead of doing “more human” work, humans are just working similarly to machines.
In Chapter 5 we'll dive deeper into the tortured relationship between work and technology, but for now let's move on to the next way work sucks.
Work Is Frustrating and Confusing
What's the difference between “dull” and “frustrating and confusing”? “Dull” is “I can do this work, but it's repetitive/requires too little brainpower.” “Frustrating and confusing” is “I want to do this work, but dumb things are preventing me from getting it done.” We've all been there: the 37‐step processes, the computer crashes, the boss who gives you a different mission every day. Everything from TPS reports and PC Load Letter to congressional filibusters. Everyone's got an ever‐increasing list of “this job would be great if not for… .”
The statistics on frustration make those on boredom look like small potatoes. One stunning study of 7,000 office workers in Europe estimated that a full 97% of those workers were frustrated at work.13 (At that point, I'm starting to question the mentality of the 3% who weren't frustrated.) What's driving folks crazy? The same bogeyman emerges: tech. According to a group of researchers across U.S. universities, 42% to 43% of time spent utilizing workplace technology is completely wasted.14 As a friend of mine joked, we spend enough time dealing with technology failures and frustrations in the professional services space that it would make sense to have a billing code for it!
Critically, work being frustrating and confusing hits you right where it hurts—your workers who care the most. The more motivated someone is to do a terrific job, the worse they feel about being frustrated and confused on the way to doing it. And as we'll examine in future chapters, frustrating and confusing work puts an inordinate burden on human workers—asking them to do more and more with diminishing returns.
Okay, Work Sucks—But Why?
Now that we've got a decent working taxonomy of how work sucks, let's dive into an even more interesting question: Why does work suck? What are the underlying mechanisms making work dangerous, boring and annoying, and/or frustrating and confusing?
The answer is, again, threefold:
Work has intensified—workers are challenged to do more with less.
