A Fork In The Road

Which one will your organisation take?

Breaking In Two

What direction is the future of work heading in? Will it, as I believe it should, move towards more people-centric (and community-centric) structures and practices? Or will it continue down the exploitative, extractive, profit and growth focused path it has been on for the past 40 years, driven by the inexorable logic of neoliberal capitalism? In the latter case, people are a consumable, an input, an afterthought.

These two visions were shown up starkly over the summer through the announcements of two workplace leaders. One is John Starkey, CEO of AT&T and the other is Lord Mark Price, former boss of Waitrose supermarkets, former Trade Minister in the UK government and founder of WorkL, a digital platform and app which helps individuals to have a better working life.

I’ve come to the view that we will see a split in organisations based on their organising principles, a bifurcation between the progressive and regressive. The statements of these two are a clear demonstration of this split, of the two opposing philosophies to work and to employees.

In this ‘sweet and sour’ edition, let’s first bite into the sour and leave the sweet for later.

Losing My Religion

When I joined the workforce back in the 1980s, there was a clear social contract between employers and employees that was born in the post-war period and was based around the ‘job for life’. If you joined a company, they would look after you and develop you and in return you would be loyal and hard-working. It was quite a paternalistic approach, particularly in the UK.

It was already being eroded as I started but that accelerated under the Thatcher government (and Regan in the US) as employee rights were reduced, Trade Unions attacked and benefits withdrawn. But the idea lived on and companies still demanded loyalty whilst they salami-sliced away what they offered in return.

This loyalty has been misplaced for some time but organisations continued the pretence and benefited from the discretionary effort that people felt obliged to give. Gen Z, and to some degree Millennials before them, saw through the fiction that this had become as they experienced the tactics of pay suppression, cost cutting, excessive workload and mass sackings to juice the quarterly numbers.

The social contract (which was really a psychological one) had become highly unbalanced and largely broken but now John Starkey has said was we have all come to realise - it’s over. AT&T aren’t even going to pay lip-service to it anymore. He’s said it - Loyalty is no longer part of the package.

AT&T have also implemented a 5-day Return-to-Office (RTO) policy (with the predictable problems of insufficient desks and parking spaces…) and this is being presented as part of a restructuring of the organisation. In his memo to Managers, he describes it as a shift away from some elements, including "loyalty, tenure, and conformance with the associated compensation," to "a more market-based culture —focused on rewarding capability, contribution, and commitment."

The memo was in response to an employee opinion survey. As reported by Business Insider

The note was, in part, to help workers identify where their "professional expectations" might be "misaligned with the strategic direction of this company," he wrote.

"If you are of the small minority that shared comments similar to, 'I have heard this nonsense before and I'll ignore things until this goes away…' or 'things were just fine the way they were…' there might be a disconnect between you and your current professional choice," Stankey wrote.

That’s quite the response to a ‘listening exercise’ isn’t it?

He also says, “When I read comments lamenting disruption, I tried to pick my brain for an example of another 100+ year old company that didn't have to disrupt itself to secure sustainable relevance," he wrote. "I am still searching for the first example."

This is an interesting perspective considering that AT&T was split up in the 1980s into the core (Ma Bell) and the ‘Baby Bells’, the regional operating companies. One of these subsequently bought the core AT&T (Ma Bell) business, and also many of the ‘Baby Bells’, with the result that it is now pretty much reconstituted in its original form. It also merged with Time Warner along the way, so the idea that this current disruption is something unique seems odd.

Some say that Starkey should be credited for his honesty. Other industry leaders say his position is ‘bold’ (you never want to hear people saying this about what you are doing unless you are really being radical). I think his memo is rather tetchy, to be honest. But really it’s a signal to Wall Street that he is embracing ‘hardcore working’ and Wall Street love it.

But it relies on finding enough people who either buy the line, are desperate or just don’t have other choices. It’s regressive, despite being couched in the progressive sounding terms of a ‘more market-based culture’. It will narrow the talent pool, suppress innovation and limit the future development of the company.

It’s fear-based management and it makes me feel sick.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

So, now for something completely different! (Thank goodness).

Lord Mark Price says that people have a right to be happy at work.

Let’s be clear, he’s not just saying that it would be good for the economy (more on that later) but that people have a right to be happy at work. For far too long, every change has had to be couched in the terms of how it impacts the bottom line, it has to be justified by the business case. Well, it’s actually simpler than that, it should be done because it’s the right thing to do. That is justification enough.

The contrast with John Starkey’s position could hardly be greater, could it? So dominant has this reductive, profit-oriented mentality become that actually companies frequently do lots of things that are clearly the wrong thing to do because the business case justifies it and it boosts the bottom line. This upside-down view of the world has become so normalised that Mark Price’s statement seems radical, rebellious even. Whereas 50 years ago, it would have been seen as the norm.

There has been moral decay in business, which is really the source of the crapification of work. This was kicked off by Milton Friedman’s infamous polemic “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, in which he asserted that managers have a moral responsibility to act always in the long-run best interest of the shareholders and that they should not concern themselves with increasing social welfare. He said that businesses might, and were likely, do things to increase social welfare, and also argued that that free-market capitalism itself increases social welfare. However, such benefits were incidental to optimising shareholder returns. A happy accident, if you like.

This was not an academic paper, it was an article in the New York Times, which is why I call it a polemic. It is ironic that Friedman’s framing of this as a ‘moral responsibility’ should lead to such a level of moral decay that we end up with John Starkey’s statements. It was seized upon by business leaders and the investment community to mean that no attention should be given to social welfare, or the impact of business decisions on it.

Friedman’s paper was published 55 years ago. And here we are.

Let’s hope Price’s statement is the start of the pendulum making a much-overdue swing back the other way. Although I say that more in hope than expectation.

Happy

So let’s get to why Mark Price is promoting the right of employees to be happy at work. As well as the moral case for it, Price contends that solving widespread worker unhappiness would be good for the UK’s army of workers and getting people back into the workforce, as well as being the answer to many of Britain’s economic woes.

“If people are happy in their jobs they don’t leave, you retain knowledge, you have lower levels of sick absence, all of which leads to more profitable and more effective organisations. And it’s good for individuals,” says Price.

He has the data to back this up too, as his company, WorkL, runs the survey ‘How happy are you at work?’, which 1.5 million workers have responded to (50% based in the UK). Price explains,

“All our research shows that if you are happy in your job, you work harder, you’re more productive, you’ll give extra discretionary effort, you’re more likely to be paid more highly than your unhappy colleagues, you’re more likely to be promoted, your mental health will be better and your wellbeing in general will be better.”

Pay, according to WorkL’s data, is not the main motivator for most employees, with workers reporting they “want to feel that they’re being paid fairly for the job that they’re doing”. This holds true for jobs across all sectors, even lower-paid or lower-skilled roles.

“People want to feel valued,” Price says. “It’s not a pay issue. It’s about how you are being treated in the workplace, the value that you feel you are getting from that, and how your employer is developing you.”

(I will refrain from quoting the whole Guardian article, you can read it for yourself!)

Much of this, as regular readers will know, is a statement of the perfectly bleeding’ obvious. Common sense, one might call it. It will never catch on…

It needs saying, though. Repeatedly and loudly. It’s good to see someone with real profile and credibility (he’s a Conservative peer, so hardly some bleeding-heart liberal) joining the voices of us lot in the progressive work movement.

Love Story

Price can back his argument up with data but this is hardly new. There have been studies that show that companies that put their people first outperform their competitors. We know they are more resilient and adaptive, more creative and innovative. We know that decrapifying work is a win-win-win, for the employees, the companies and the economy.

And yet the belief that optimising for efficiency will maximise profits and growth persists, even as its failings become more evident. Diminishing returns are now becoming negative returns for many businesses. Massive concentration of market power is leading to systemic weaknesses in countries’ economies and becoming a destabilising political force (Friedman’s ‘moral responsibility’ having been abandoned in pursuit of growth and power).

So why are things not changing?

One reason is that is working for those that are beneficiaries. The stock market is booming, profits are higher than ever and the rich are getting richer. So what’s the problem?

Meanwhile, employees are getting unhappier and struggling with a cost of living crisis. Social cohesion is breaking down and division is growing. But if you’re rich, that doesn’t bother you, you never have contact with that world.

But aren’t businesses data-driven these days? Surely, all the evidence should be causing them to think about changing their approach? At least the smarter ones?

And here’s the problem. The myths we have developed over the past half-century are firmly established (which is why’s Price’s comments seem so radical). We all think in terms of profit and loss, in terms of efficiency. We still believe it works, even when the evidence before our eyes contradicts that belief.

Myth-busting doesn’t work. Data and facts don’t change beliefs. Often, they just cause people to double down, to entrench themselves even further.

You see, data is complicated. It needs to be understood, evaluated, interpreted. Facts need to be considered and their implications deduced. It takes effort to come to a considered opinion, as well as a level of intellectual capacity and ability (the latter can be learnt but many aren’t taught it).

Whereas stories are simple. Everyone can understand them, remember them, tell them to others. We can present all the data we like, make all the fact-based arguments we like, but the story will persist. What we need to do is create a better story that replaces the current one.

(As an aside, ever wonder how this odd little religion started by some sect in Palestine came to be rapidly adopted by the might Roman Empire? Well, a devastating plague struck Rome and the population found the Christian story of a loving god and an eternal afterlife much more attractive than the disdain and cruelty of the pantheon of Roman gods, who’s position Shakespeare described thus:
‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport.’
The Christians just had a better story.)

There is a better story to be told about work. I hope people hear it before some catastrophic event forces them to. That would leave a very sour taste …