In My Life

The Crapfication of Work

A Change Is Gonna Come

My Decrapify Work journey began with a piece I wrote reflecting on how many people’s experience of work had been degraded since I started my first full-time job in 1981. I identified a process that had been at work during my working life that I titled ‘The Crapification of Work’.

This process is the interplay of a number of separate but interconnected trends:

• Putting profits before people

• Valuing efficiency over effectiveness

• An obsession with process and measurement

• The spread of mobile phones and the ‘always on’ culture

• Tech replacing human interaction

• Increasing work loads, hours and stress

The cumulative effect of these trends has grown over time, slowly but relentlessly. This is what has led to so many workplaces having raised levels of toxicity, with too many being downright harmful to those who are subjected to them.

Because I have been around for a long time and I know what work was like before most of these trends started, I can see the impact that they have had. Their influence has been insidious, it’s been a gradual chipping away rather than any dramatic change. Actually, it’s been more of a hollowing out, like woodworm eating away at a wooden beam. It looks OK from the outside but it’s been fatally weakened and is near to collapse. What we’re seeing at the moment is a number of ceiling collapses as beams suddenly fail.

And because I’ve been around a long time I know that it doesn’t have to be like this, that there are better ways of organising  ourselves and our work and that we can put the human back at the centre and be successful.

I started Decrapify Work to begin the process of unwinding these trends and creating workplaces where people can thrive. But before you can solve a problem, you have to acknowledge and define the problem(s). So I have been posting and writing about these and I am now developing some talks and other content (hint: I’m open to offer to speak or write or be interviewed about this).

The response I’ve had to Decrapify Work has made one thing clear - an awful lot of people agree that work is crappy and things need to change. They aren’t the ones at the top, who are trapped in the current orthodoxies and in denial about the extent of the woodworm. They are the junior and middle managers, the ones who actually make stuff happen, who manage people day to day, who hold the organisation together. They have more power and influence than they know and I am encouraging them to use that to make change happen.

There is risk but the the risk is doing nothing and having the ceiling fall down on your head.

Push It

All of this has been thrown into the air by the pandemic. Working from home has given people distance from the soul-sapping commute and the office environment. It’s broken the enchantment that corporate life has held over many people as they have been jolted out of their automatic behaviours and routines.

People have seen that there are alternative ways of doing things, that they can have more autonomy over their work and how they integrate that into their life, that change for the better is possible. They’ve had time and cause to reflect on their priorities and the life they want to have. And they want it to be different.

Working from Anywhere, which has been possible for decades, has moved from early adopters into the mainstream, crossing the chasm in a chaotic fortnight in March 2020. Whether ‘The Great Resignation’ is a real thing or a media confection (and frankly it’s not a debate I’m interested in having), the balance of power has shifted towards the employees, reversing a trend that has persisted and grown all through my working life. What’s more, they are using it to get what they want.

The shackles to the office have been broken, opening up great new opportunities for people to live where they want to, to prioritise family, community, interests and other ambitions rather than subjugating their whole life to work.

So much change has happened, the appetite has been whetted. Now what else is possible?

It’s time to find out. Because whilst this has heralded an improvement for many, for others it’s made their work experience worse, and there’s still an awful lot of crap to be removed.

The stone has started rolling, now we need to get behind it and keep it moving.

Live And Let Die

My logo for Decrapify Work bears the legend ‘Decrapify Work or Die’. It’s not a joke, crappy workplaces are killing people (as Jeffery Pfeffer details in “Dying for a Paycheck’). But they are also killing organisations.

The Crapification of Work leads to fragility, rigidity and sterility in organisations, making them particularly unsuited to today’s VUCA world and ill-equipped to navigate the uncertainty and ambiguity that the future holds. These organisations are designed to quash the very things they need to be ‘future fit’, such as autonomy, creativity, innovation, collaboration - in short, humanity.

It also breeds bureaucracy, which is a source of much of the discontent that employees feel but is also an enormous drag on organisational effectiveness (and profitability). In ‘Humanocracy’, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimate unnecessary bureaucracy costs US businesses $2.6 trillion a year.

Now there are new problems arising, as organisation struggle to adapt to the new pandemic environment and the demands for Working from Anywhere. Weighed down by crap, hindered by hierarchy and penned in by poor culture, they are making mis-step after mis-step, staggering around like a drunk man at a party trying to find the door.

They are facing new demands from employees, many of whom, often the best, are voting with their feet. They are then strugging to recruit new talent because their policies are not attractive and they have restricted the labour pool they can address by holding onto an office-centric approach.

Organisations that do not respond to the new realities of the pandemic world will fail. Those that grasp the opportunities will thrive.

If you are a CEO, which path are you going to take?

Are you going to decrapify work, or let your organisation die?

Start!

Whatever path you take, you have to forge your own. No consultancy can tell you the answer. No coach can tell you what to do. Each person, each team, each organisation has to create their own approach, constantly changing and adapting it as they progress through a series of small experiments and prototypes.

Humility is key. No-one knows what’s coming next, or what the best way to deal with it is. The only guarantee is that you will get some it wrong. Just be sure you can afford those mistakes.

It also takes a big dollop of courage. If you stand up for change then you will be seen as a maverick and, in the past at least, this has been seen as deviant behaviour and punished accordingly. This is where you draw upon the ‘Be More Pirate’ approach, finding your crew (your allies), starting with small, bold steps, collaborating with other crews in an agile and responsive way.

You can also access your ‘inner pirate’, channeling the attitude and mindset of the Golden Age Pirates as a way of stepping beyond your usual self-imposed boundaries and stepping up to the challenge. And, of course, you have your crew behind you too.

The world of work is ready for change. Now’s the time to stand up for a better future and takes some actions, no matter how small. Even the slightest shifts all add up, ripples merge to become a wave which can overwhelm the biggest defences.

You just have to start.