Decrapify Work or Die (again)
The other type of virus
So that LinkedIN post that I said had gone ‘gangbusters’ last week? It went to a whole new level of viral (275K views and counting) and I’ve spent most of the week answering comments and connecting with people as a consequence. This is clearly a subject close to people’s hearts!
The conversations have been really interesting, lots of great contributions and perspectives I hadn’t considered. Some of the thoughts and conclusions that have come out of it have been:
You either trust your employees or you don’t. That’s the real binary.
People want autonomy and choice. Autonomy is essential to motivation (Dan Pink identified it, along with Mastery and Purpose, in his book “Drive - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”), whilst choice is essential to wellbeing. This latter point was made by Laurence Barrett.
The employees perspective has changed and, with it, the power balance. Jay Stone said “I can’t help but feel that the idea that I should be forced to put a huge portion of my pay check to commuting on a stuffy and overpacked tube for two hours a day, just to get into the office in central London, to sit at my desk and do what I could have easily done at home, is simply ridiculous!”, which rather puts the boot on the other foot, doesn’t it?
Much of corporate life is based on a parent-child relationship and this has been brutally exposed by ‘Work from Home’. People now want more of an adult-adult relationships with their employer.
It’s clear that this touches upon a lot of the issues around ‘Decrapify Work’. Working from Home has changed the conversation around work, pushing wellbeing right to the top of the agenda, as well as the issue or trust. Perhaps people just feel less like cogs in the machine, now they don’t have to sit in the ‘machine casing’ all day long?
Build back better …
It may be a trite political slogan but it does speak to the opportunity to create something new and better from the wreckage of COVID.
Someone said it should be like the “Homes for Heroes” programme after the First World War, which was positioned as a reward for those who’d given so much to the cause. Maybe the COVID equivalent should be “Workplaces for Wonders” - because most employees have been a wonder to their managers?
OK, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch but … people DO feel they deserve something for what they’ve been through and the way they responded to the crisis. They have adapted really quickly, been creative and innovative and ‘gone the extra mile’. Organisations should be wanting keep these people and if they’ve got any sense they will furiously consulting them to find out what they need and want from the post-COVID workplace.
I mean, I know actually asking your people what they need is pretty radical but these are ‘unprecedented times’ (as the government keeps telling us).
Ignore the experts
Most articles about the ‘future of work’ are so laden with bias and the protection of certain interests that they are of little value. And pretty tedious to read.
The fact is that there is no ‘future of work’. There isn’t going to be one destination, there are going to be many because there are multiple futures.
This should be obvious but it’s not. It’s actually what Laloux says in his book - TEAL is just his guess as what might happen next but he says he expects many other types of organisation to emerge.
The hubbub around the death of ‘the office’ and ‘hybrid working’ have thrown this into stark relief. We are now in a period of great uncertainty and companies are already running experiments (having run a massive, if unplanned one, with work from home) to see what works and what doesn’t.
At the same time, there’s a whole load of new tech being built to improve virtual interaction and provide a seamless experience across mixed environments. We are just at the start of this, in a few years time Zoom is going to look unbelievably crude and limited.
This had opened up whole new world of possibility. The work experience is about to undergo a revolution.
This also goes for the way that organisations' actually structure themselves. I’m a big fan of self-organisation myself but every company is going to have to figure out what’s best for it. (I found out the other day that ‘self-organisation’ is a feature of complex adaptive systems, which is how we should be think of organisations rather than machines or organisms - but more on that another day).
We’re moving away from the proscriptive rinse-and-repeat methodologies favoured by the big consulting firms and moving towards a bespoke approach where, through prototyping and experimentation, each organisations designs its own environment to suit its particular context.
Bad news for McKinseys et all, but a big step towards decrapifying the workplace, IMHO.
Still stumbling forwards ...
I’m trying to do a couple of things with Decrapify Work
One is to simplify all the information, data and theories that are out there to create some simple, memorable narratives and actions that people can use in their day-to-day to start to decrapify work for themselves.
The other is truth-telling (which is very pirate!), cutting through the crap and getting to the real heart of the matter. Like the little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.
Most of the time I feel like I am riding two wild horses trying to go in different directions. It's exciting but a pain in the balls at the same time.
Still, some of you have said some nice things about my paranoid burbling, for which I am very grateful, so I'll carry on trying to figure out what it means.