Keeping it real

Fixing the small stuff matters

It Don’t Come Easy

When I started looking at the world of work, the big thing was employee engagement. Everyone and their dog was talking about Gallup’s annual employment survey and the shockingly low levels of engagement.

It was the silver-bullet/gravy train du jour. The evidence was that organisations with high levels of engagement had higher productivity, lower employee turnover and were more profitable. It seemed that happier employees were more productive and were willing to put in more discretionary effort. What CEO wouldn’t want that? But how do you make your employees happier and more engaged?

(At this point we might reflect that if a CEO didn’t already know the answer to this, they probably aren’t the sort of person who should be in charge of other human beings, but that ship had sailed a few decades ago.)

Fortunately, there were a large number of consultants and HR professionals ready to answer that question. And so an inordinate amount of time, money and effort was ploughed into employee engagement programmes. Billions of dollars were invested in improving the levels of engagement.

And the result of all this? The numbers have barely moved. In fact, they’ve declined in some countries. (That’s not ignoring that some companies have made a real shift but, on the whole, most haven’t).

I am not surprised by this. My response at the time was this - “If you want to improve employee engagement, then you should start to give a shit about your employees”.

I got so frustrated that no-one seemed realised this evident and simple truth that I started writing LinkedIN posts and, later, this newsletter. I originally was going to talk about ‘deshittification’* but that didn’t scan very well, so I changed it to ‘decrapification’, and here we are.

Because the other simple truth that was being ignored is that, for many, many people, work is just crap. Even those who have jobs they enjoy have to wade through unprecedented levels of crap to get anything done. For many, that effort has to be expended in order to do work that has become meaningless, tedious and boring. And all the time, the environment that this labour has to be done has become more oppressive, restrictive, and contradictory. Oh, and less well paid and more precarious.

All these employee engagement initiatives failed because people know that the organisation doesn’t give a shit about them, it just doesn’t care for them. They also know that things aren’t going to get better and quite probably will get worse.

Disengagement is a self-defence mechanism, one of the few ways in which they can protect themselves and maintain a modicum of dignity in what is, in many cases, an abusive relationship with their employer.

* Cory Doctorow has since coined the phrase ‘enshittification’ with regard to the internet, to describe the deliberate degradation of online services in order to manipulate us and extract more profit. I still think it sounds rather inelegant and jarring but that rather suits his point, I suppose. Anyway, at least there’s no confusion between us, so that’s a win!

Can You Feel The Force

In my original diagnosis, I came up with the ‘Forces of Crapification’, which are:

• 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

These are still true and are, if anything, more intense. They are also interrelated, of course, and so there’s a bit of a multiplier effect going on. What they lead to is people feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, confused and near to breaking point.

These macro forces are often hard to identify when you are at the workface. They are driven by the inexorable logic of neoliberalism and the late-stage capitalism that has led to. In addition, the pursuit of profit has now been turbo-charged by the demand for growth. Costs must be continually cut to improve profits, you must always do more with less. Growth must be achieved by increasing profits and capturing more market share, through any means necessary. A bigger business with less people is the constant imperative (which is why they are all having wet dreams about AI) and so something has to give. And it’s always the employees.

But that’s all a bit beyond most of us. How do you affect any of that?

So it lurks in the background, this existential threat, and we try to get on with our lives. At least we can enjoy the day-to-day, right?

Except there we find a million daily frustrations and annoyances. Look, jobs have always and will always have bits that are tedious and seem pointless. There will always be bureaucracy that seems to be designed simply to annoy and frustrate us. There will always be people we don’t like working with or for. But has it ever been as bad as now?

Some of the crap is:

- IT and information systems that are old and clunky and worse than we use at home (even after a degree of ‘enshittification’).

- Having to use, on average, 30-40 different passwords to do our job (and over 100 for some people).

- Having to go through kafkaesque procurement processes and get approval from God himself to get the tools we need to do our job, like a mobile phone, because someone once bought a better model than that CEO had.

- Having to attend numerous pointless meetings because your input might be required for one item on the 20-point agenda - if they actually get to it. Meanwhile, you can’t organise a critical project meeting for 2 months because everyone’s calendar is full of meetings they need to go to in case their input …

- Spending nine months building up to your product launch event only to find that someone else has an event on the same day that will take all the media attention away.

- Hitting all your KPIs but still not being marked as ‘excellent’ because you got marked as ‘average’ on competencies that you don’t display because they have nothing to do with your role.

- Spending your own time to file your expenses in a system that seems to have been designed by psychotic elves trained in witchcraft in order to get to argue with someone in finance about why you needed to get a bottle of water out of the minibar after travelling all day to arrive at a hotel after midnight, so that they might grudgingly agree to pay you the money that you have lent the company for the privilege of being away from your family for the night, in order to do your job.

These are a few examples of the type of crap that people have to wade through just to do their job and it’s by no means an extensive list. Individually, they are bearable but cumulatively they can drain your spirit and drag you down, even in a good work environment and a job you enjoy.

We saw this cumulative impact when COVID hit and the subsequent move to hybrid work. Although it is by no means a solution to the broader malaise, it has relieved the pressure. First and foremost, it has reduced the burden of the commute. However, it has also given people more freedom and autonomy over their work and enabled them to better balance the competing demands of work and the other aspects of their life. It hasn’t decrapified work but it has made it more bearable.

Taking action to reduce the daily burden of crap that people have to endure is something organisations can and should address to improve the employee experience. It may be too much of a shift for organisations to show they care (a hard thing to pull off when mass layoffs are a favourite tactic to massage the quarterly figures) but they can show they are not entirely indifferent about their employees.

There are some quick wins to be had here. A programme to identify the causes for irritation will, in itself, make employees feel heard. Some solutions will be little or no cost and easy to implement. Removing pointless bureaucracy is a win for the organisation as well as the employees.

So why aren’t organisations focusing on this? Is it just too mundane? Is it because it’s not being sold to them by McKinsey’s et al? Is it because it won’t get the CEO a glowing profile in some business publication?

Is it because, well, they really just don’t care?

Roadrunner

And so we come to topic that we’d really like to ignore but can’t avoid because it’s all over everything like a rash - AI. (Or ‘Synthetic Stupidity’, as I saw it referred to the other day).

I listened to the latest episode of Bruce Daisley’s podcast “Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat’, titled ‘Getting to grips with workplace AI’. It’s a recording of a live discussion he did with Jerry Ting, founder of Evisort and a senior leader at Workday, who also teaches at Harvard Law School; and Angelique de Vries Schipperijn, EMEA president for Workday (Workday sponsored the event).

I had been avoiding listening to it (even though I rate Bruce’s podcast highly) because I felt sure it would annoy me intensely and would not be good for my blood pressure. I expected more ‘moon on a stick’ promises of a glorious AI future where we’ll all be free to pursue our passions whist the robots run everything, all we have to do is give up our free will and torch the planet.

But I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, yes, there was some of the usual nonsense about us coming to the point where ‘machines can actually think like humans’ and, yes, I did shout “No they bloody won’t!” at my phone. And yes, there were the usual false analogies, non sequiturs and logical disconnects that litter these conversations about AI. However, then one of them said “So it’s the technology and it’s the adoption…”, and I said, “YES!!!”

It is all, as a former American colleague of mine used to like to point out, about ‘where the rubber meets the road’.

What followed was a conversation about uses of AI that will remove the tedious grunt work that plagues much of modern working life. They shared examples like using it to speed up the review of contracts to make sure they comply with all the relevant regulations, which is a complicated matrix for a bank operating across multiple countries and legal jurisdictions.

Like a large multinational using it to match skill profiles to role and project requirements to get the best out of their talent (I can remember this being a pipe dream in BT some 30 years ago).

Like using an AI agent to answer queries about company regulations. The example given was being able to ask about maternity benefits and get a quick, concise and accurate summary (I know someone who has just been through this and it was a real challenge to get all the information, mostly achieved through personal contacts who had already wrestled with the system).

Like using an AI agent to find documents that might be relevant to an audit question that can then be reviewed for relevance by a person, saving them the lengthy and onerous task of locating them.

This is where AI can and should make a difference. So how about pointing it at some of those intensely irritating bits of crap that everyone is struggling with? Focus it on removing that burden from every employee, at eradicating the bureaucracy that accounts for large amounts of overhead cost and 80% of which is unnecessary, according to Gary Hamel.

This is where I get so frustrated about the discourse about the world of work and, yes, particularly AI. There is plenty of low-hanging fruit that will improve the work experience for employees, make the organisation more effective and more profitable and improve engagement and happiness. But that isn’t what gets talked about.

We keep hearing about how AI is going change the world and do miraculous and transformational things. And it’s always ‘1 to 5 years away’ (that’s taken directly from the latest ‘prediction’ by Sam Altman for something or other that I can’t even be bothered to remember).

We don’t need another ‘moonshot’. What we need is a reliable bus service.

Everybody

I’ve had an influx of subscribers recently, many from Dr. Richard Claydon’s newly launched substack ‘Leadership, Rewritten’. I have learnt a great deal from Richard, both through his posts on LinkedIN and by taking part in his ‘Drinking Dialogues’ sessions and am very much a fan. He has a unique take on leadership and I recommend to all my readers that you go and subscribe to his substack and also follow him on LinkedIN. The first few editions are extremely promising.

I’ve also added ‘Disruption Space’ by Paul Seeney to my recommendations. Paul has a similarly acerbic take on the world of work and leadership and writes admirably brief posts.

Whilst we’re on recommendations, you will already know I am a fan of Ed Zitron, an expert and forensic ranter on the follies of Big Tech and, especially, AI. He has just released a three-part series on his podcast entitled ‘The Business Idiot’. (also as a blog)You will know these people, you’ve probably had the misfortune of working for them and you’re certainly suffering from the consequences of their rise. I agree with much of Ed’s analysis, I could almost have written it myself, so enjoy! (Although I warn you he is quite sweary, should you be of a delicate disposition).