Complicated
I got got a great challenge about last week’s newsletter by Terry Bohn, who asked,
"Colin, is "work" crap, or - for most people - is the toxic / mindless "workplace" crap?”
My initial response was ‘it’s both’, then ‘and it’s more’, and then ‘it depends’. I concluded I needed to give it more thought.
Part of the problem here, as is often the case, is terminological inexactitude. We use words loosely and interchangeably, which gives them different meanings in different contexts, and then we pretend we’re all talking about the same thing, which we rarely are.
Work, for starters, can mean the workplace, or our job, or the actual activity we do, or just the stuff we don’t like doing. So we need to try and break it down a bit and get more precise.
I came up with four main categories: ‘The Work’, Culture, Workspace and Management/Leadership. Let’s dig a bit deeper.
‘The Work’ actually breaks down into three further categories.
The type of work we do, the actual activities that fill our day. There’s six different types that I’ve referred to before:
Focused, individual
Collaboration
Learning
Relationships
Networking
‘Busy’ work (aka ‘crap’!)
Issues can arise here because there’s is an imbalance in amounts of the types of work, and /or you do not have the space and resources to carry them out properly. For example, if you have to do focused work in a noisy, open plan office, you’re going to get pissed off, even if the work is really interesting (if fact, the more absorbing the work, the more pissed off you will get).
Or perhaps you have to do lots of collaboration and networking but that doesn’t suit your personality. And absolutely no-one enjoys doing ‘busy work’, so too much of that is a real drain.
Then there’s the meaning that you derive from the work. If you think what you do is pointless and you’re just going through the motions to get the pay-check, that’s very dispiriting and demotivating. I’ve already mentioned busy work but even quality work can be draining if it produces nothing.
Having worked on a project that was challenging and enjoyable but got canned at the end of it, I can tell you it is crushing to have all that time, energy and emotion spaffed up the wall.
And finally, there’s the volume. Workloads have been increasing over the past few decades to the point of overwhelm. Even if you love your job, you can have too much of a good thing. Just ask a teacher, or a doctor, nurse or social worker.
Next, there’s ‘Culture’, not exactly a favourite term of mine because if there was a word that is more bandied around without anyone knowing what THEY mean by it, let alone anyone else, I don’t know what it is. However, it is what is used so we have to go with it.
The recent Gallup report showed that ‘Culture’ is a major factor determining whether people are engaged at work and whether they are looking to change jobs or not. Whether we quite understand what we mean by it or not, I think we all know it sets the tone for how we feel about work.
The Workplace is also an important factor, although perhaps ‘workspace’ would be a better word because we need to include the virtual spaces and well as the physical. It’s not just about the desk and the office, it’s about the systems and the tools you are given to do the job. The swishest of offices does not compensate for crappy IT, arcane systems & byzantine processes to get the simplest of things done.
I went for a consultation recently and the doctor told me he had over 40 passwords for the different systems he used, all of which worked differently; and he had to do it on a ropey old desktop PC. This is not uncommon across all types of organisation, using systems and kit that is much worse than you use in your personal life is a major bugbear.
And finally, there’s Management/Leadership. We know that over half of people who leave their jobs do so to get away from their boss. We also know that a boss has more impact on a person’s wellbeing than anything else, including their personal life. Often, when we say ‘work’s crap’, what we really mean is ‘my boss is crap and making my life a misery’, or ‘or leadership is terrible and making everyone’s life a misery’.
So, the answer is not only ‘it depends’, but ‘it’s complicated’ too.
What Do You Want
In Christine Armstrong’s vlog this week (they’re excellent an entertaining too, you should follow her on LInkedIn), she shared the responses she got when she gave 11 different workshop teams a magic wand and asked them to create “the most appealing and productive world of work they could imagine.”
The answer were surprisingly quotidian. This is Christine’s summary
🍔 Lunch breaks
🖨 Tech that works (printers were mentioned a few times)
📒 Clarity about their roles and those of others
✅ Clear deliverables
📅 Development plans
🤷🏻♀️ Good inductions for new people
💡 Fewer and shorter meetings (ban PowerPoint!)
📑 Shorter documents (maybe four pages max?)
⛔️ Boundaries
I mean, that almost overwhelming in its underwhelm-ment, isn’t it?
(No, I don’t know if that’s a word but it is now. If it was good enough for Shakespeare…)
They also said they thought almost all of these were things their boss could get sorted or at least influence. So why aren’t they?
It seems that what people want is the means to do their job well.
They don’t want vision and mission statements, they don’t want bright offices with slides and fussball tables, or fresh fruit and yoga sessions. They don’t even want more money!
They just want the basics done well. They want their bosses to do their job. They want less crap.
If You Don’t Know Me By Now
To get to the bottom of why bosses AREN’T doing what employees want, even though it is quite simple stuff, we have to look at the perception gap between them and the people at the work-face.
I’ve talked about this before. We know the number of bosses who think we need to get back to the office is about 3 out of 4, and the number of employees who agree is exactly the opposite.
Deloitte’s latest ‘Wellbeing at Work Survey’ gave further illustration of this gap. Whilst two-thirds of employees reported that their well-being was the same or worse than last year, three-quarters of Executives believed their employees well-being had improved!
So what causes this disconnect?
A factor is that Executive lifestyles are almost entirely detached from that of their employees. They are not just in a different financial sphere (the salary gap continues to increase at an alarming rate), they are also in a different work and social spheres. They don’t understand their employees lived experience not just because it is different to their own but because they don’t spend any time with their employees and have no visibility, and therefore no empathy, for their circumstances.
However, there’s plenty of evidence to inform them. There seems to be a survey out every week reporting some aspect of employee experience, and many organisations carry out their own surveys and even extensive listening exercises. There’s really no excuse for their lack of understanding and this disconnect of perceptions.
Anecdotally, it seems that this is just so much ‘inconvenient truth’. They don’t want to believe the data, they don’t want to adjust their worldview, so they ignore it. It’s wilful ignorance, deliberate inactivity.
It’s made doubly worse by the fact that most of these issues are easy to deal with. You don’t have to do all that messy people stuff, you don’t have to be a bleeding heart liberal, you just have to make sure things work like they are supposed to.
But that would mean focusing on the boring operational stuff and doing a competent job, and that’s not going to get you into the corner office, is it?
All I Need
So, in summary, work is crap because people want to do a good job without hassle and organisations won’t let them.
The answers are not new. Ryan and Deci published their ‘Self Determination Theory’ in 2000 and said
“We're interested in what we would call high-quality motivation, when people can be wholeheartedly engaged in something and really can have both their best experience and their best performance.
We've always been interested in factors that facilitate or undermine that motivation, and in investigating that, we came on the idea that there are some really basic psychological needs that everybody has, whether they're in the classroom, workplace, or sports field, that help them thrive and have their highest quality motivation.
Those basic psychological needs are
autonomy, competence, and relatedness.”
Too complicated? Dan Pink published ‘Drive’ in 2009 and simplified it to
“Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose”
The response of ‘leaders’ of organisations? Well, they use the words but they don’t deliver any of it. Instead, they remain fixated on salary, compensation packages and financial incentives.
If your work is crap, for whatever of the above reasons, it’s not because it has to be that way. It’s because your management prefers it that way, or they can’t be bothered to do the work to change it.
That’s why you have to do it yourself
.