Everyday People
I recently listened to Zeynip Ton talking about her new book “The Case For Good Jobs”, her follow up to “The Good Jobs Guide”, on Bruce Daisley’s excellent ‘Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat’ podcast. I was struck by her observation that companies with a high turnover of employees had lower productivity than the norm and that by creating good quality jobs you can retain staff and improve your productivity.
I like the work that Ton does but what she says always strikes me as statements of the perfectly bleeding obvious. Clearly, for many, that’s not the case. She’s done the fieldwork and gathered the data to prove the point and she bangs the drum for creating a better work experience for all employees, particularly those who are regarded as being at the bottom of the pyramid and somehow dispensable.
Her focus is the retail sector, one where employees are regularly treated as inefficient meat puppets, interchangeable operatives who will one day be replaced by machines. After all, anyone can stack shelves right? It’s home to some of the worst attitudes to employees, especially in the US.
The experience of people on the shop floor is greatly impacted by the actions of people who are far removed from what they do. They are bombarded with initiatives and programmes from marketing, product development, HR, IT, and all the many head office groups who push stuff out without any co-ordination and without communicating with those who have to do the work. This can make the job intolerable for many, which leads to a high staff turnover. (The comedy series ‘Superstore’ has a lot of jokes about this stuff, and it’s a good watch too).
So what? There are plenty of people out there to fill the gaps and they’re cheap to hire. (Say the bosses).
Well, it seems a lot is lost in terms of expertise, local knowledge, camaraderie and the intangible things that make everything run more smoothly. On top of that, training all those new people diverts experienced staff away from serving the customer, whilst the newbies take a while to get up to speed, giving a double whammy to service levels.
See what I mean about obvious?
And this is true outside retail, for much the same reasons. If you’ve ever taken on new recruits, you know the extra effort you have to put in to onboard and train them, and the time it takes before they become productive. When your increasingly desperate pleas for more resource get answered, it can turn out to be a mixed blessing. You find yourself working even harder before they start to contribute and your workload starts to drop, as the old adage “Be careful what you wish for” runs through you mind.
There’s a reason why teams often move from one project to another, or from one company to another. The relationships and the tacit knowledge really have a pay-off. High-performing teams are often very settled and well-established.
We are arguably seeing the proof of this, as productivity has fallen since the end of the pandemic. Whilst some dinosaurs blame this on ‘hybrid working’ and drag everyone back to the office, is a more likely explanation the impact of ‘The Great Resignation’, which is actually just the turnover of a large number of people into new jobs (28% of the US workforce in the past year). This increase in employee turnover has disrupted the teams that do the work and lost that tactic knowledge and those valuable relationships.
Given that productivity actually rose when people were ‘Working from Home’, which is the worst type of hybrid working, this seems a much more plausible explanation to me.
Something Stupid
The whole conversation about productivity is fraught with the problems of measurement. Most of the time we bandy the word around without a shared understanding of what we mean by it, in what context, and how we evaluate it.
The common measurements, GDP per Hour Worked for countries and Revenue per Employee for companies, are both very crude and deeply flawed. In the absence of anything else, they are an indicator of something but whether that’s important or not is moot. These simplistic measures lead us to simplistic actions that are often counter-productive, as Ton points out. We chase efficiency to change the numbers in a spreadsheet rather than looking for effectiveness, which requires us to delve into the complexity of the system and the humans within it.
Listening to a recent podcast about what the benefits of AI could be and to whom, someone made the point that we had a similar tech wave, of productivity tools, in the 80s but it did not lead to the realisation of Keynes’ prediction that we’d all be working 15 hour weeks because we had found all sorts of new things to do to fill the freed up time. In fact, we’re doing more work now than before, yet I am sure many of us questions whether we are actually more productive.
Much of that new work is ‘busy work’; dealing with emails and a plethora of other messages, coping with the endless stream of information that bombards us, writing ever more elaborate and complex reports, producing increasing polished and lengthy PowerPoints. How much of this is actually adding to productivity?
That’s without getting on to the mushrooming of ‘Bullshit Jobs’ that was so eloquently identified by David Graeber, meaningless roles that add nothing to the output of the organisation. Up to 40% of employees believe their jobs probably aren’t necessary and are bullshit jobs, servicing the bureaucracy and the egos of senior managers rather than doing something purposeful and productive.
So when people are talking about productivity, I take it with a very large pinch of salt. It’s one way of looking at things but it’s far from the whole picture. In fact, it may be a rather insignificant perspective. We should instead direct our attention to looking at outcomes, value-creation and impact.
Try A Little Tenderness
Having said all that, we can make some basic observations from looking at these crude measures of productivity.
One is that the UK has a productivity gap with its main competitors, of something between 10 and 20%, and is not yet back to pre 2008 Global Financial Crisis levels.
The problem is not universal across the economy, either. The top companies are competitive globally, it is the mid-sized and small ones that lag. This means it’s even worse than it looks because they are behind by even more than the headline figure.
We have seen the blame for this laid at the door of the workers, who have been labelled as lazy and feckless by many current and former members of the government. The population in general are castigated for lacking the work ethic of asian countries and the entrepreneurialism of the US. However, UK workers are working longer hours and, anecdotally, harder than ever.
This is deflection by the government from the failings of their own policies. A study by PWC concluded that the solutions lay in ‘Higher investment levels, a stronger education and skills strategy and improved adoption of existing technologies’. These are all under the influence of government and could be addressed through policy.
Instead, policies have favoured financial speculation, weakening investment in the productive part of the economy; reduced funding in the education & skills sector as part of austerity measures; and provided a low-wage workforce that has discouraged investment in technology.
As you may note, none of this touches upon the adoption of progressive working practices or creating better work experiences for employees, both of which will lead to more effective and productive organisations.
The pandemic forced many organisations down this desired path. It necessitated investment in technology to enable remote working and necessary changes to customer servicing e.g. contactless payments, reduced staffing levels. It also forced them to focus on the experience of their employees, increasing the attention they paid to their needs and treating them with greater compassion.
Whilst the former has, to some degree, stuck (the money’s been spent, after all), we’ve seen a rowing back on the latter. Return to Office dictats neatly combine the two, being both an abandonment of progressive practices and a downgrading of the needs of employees.
A recent study showed that US employees felt that the level of empathy (I think compassion is a better term but they framed it as empathy) shown by their leaders had dropped since the pandemic. This is not surprising as we’ve seen both layoffs and Return To Office mandates as employers feel the balance of power has returned to them. At the same time, Gartner show that employee engagement (in the US) has dropped from an all-time high of 40% during the pandemic to 30% today.
As they often ask in Private Eye, ‘Are they perhaps related?’
Reach Out I’ll Be There
Gartner identify one of the most important indicators of engagement, resulting in higher retention and higher productivity, is to have a friend at work. It’s simple to understand, if you have work colleagues that you enjoy being with, then you’re going to enjoy being at work. I’ve certainly experienced that. Indeed, having close friends, who I am still in contact with many years later, was the main reason I stayed in a toxic environment.
You’d think, then, that organisation would encourage these relationships to form, wouldn’t you? And yet what we see is increasing workloads and greater stress that have squeezed out the time to connect and develop friendships. Indeed, in many workplaces any time that’s spent without your head down in from of your computer is frowned upon and seen as wasted. The use of surveillance technology that measures keystrokes and physical presence in front of the screen, even when remote, eliminates it completely.
When I started work, many companies had facilities to encourage these relationships, and provided the time and resources for socialising. Some had sports and social clubs with extensive facilities. Most would run social clubs for a variety of hobbies and interests, from darts teams to amateur dramatics. Employees were encouraged to join in and get to know others from across the organisation. All of these have been stripped out to serve the gods of efficiency and provide rewards for shareholders.
This has degraded the work experience of the employees and removed opportunities for friendships (part of the ‘Process of Crapification’). These are sources of meaning and joy that have been ripped out in acts of corporate vandalism, cheered on by the ghouls of the financial markets, needless sacrifices to the gods of neoliberalism.
Whilst these moves tricked up the balance sheet for while and pumped up the stock price (and Executive bonuses), we are now seeing the chickens coming home to roost in stagnant productivity, employee disengagement, and the many ails that beset organisations today.
Organisations are collections of people and networks of relationships. They are an expression of humanity, coming together to pursue common goals and provide mutual support. Productivity is incidental to that.
We’ve been putting the productivity cart in from of the people horse for far too long. It’s time to put them back in the right order and to make work about human thriving, not human driving.
As Zeynip Ton says, it’s time to create ‘Good Jobs’ for everyone.