Loves Me Like A Rock
The starting point for Decrapify Work was employee engagement and my simple observation that most companies could save themselves the money they were spending on ‘employee engagement programmes’ AND get a significant uptick in engagement by just giving a shit about their employees.
It was evident to me that most people felt that their employers didn’t really give a shit about them and most organisations behaved as if they didn’t give a shit, despite all the rhetoric about ‘our people are our most important asset’ and all the other corporate hogwash and grade-A gaslighting.
Then I came across the Gallup survey and it not only showed I was right but that the situation was worse than I imagined. To my astonishment, it has remained in exactly the same parlous state (although, having dug into this for the past few years, I’m not really surprised at all).
So I was intrigued when I saw a graph of yet another survey, this time by McKinsey’s (flag bearer of the evil empire), that @Sanda Panera had created.
So much of the discussion has been about ‘Thriving Stars’ (or ‘A players’ as Steve Jobs called them) and the ‘Mildly Disengaged’ but, as Sandra pointed out, the biggest group by far are ‘Reliable and Committed’.
There’s even been some media froth around the ‘Double Dippers’, who are so small that their impact on the organisational performance is negligible, other than distracting senior leaders into fighting this imagined peril and blinding them with moral outrage (which, to be fair, is likely to have a positive impact on the business…)
But the ‘Reliable and Committed’ are the bedrock of any successful organisation. They are the skeleton that the organisation hangs from, the vital organs that keep the organisation alive and functioning. If you could get the majority of your employees into this group, your organisation would be thriving. If you could get the ‘Mildly Disengaged’ to move up to ‘Reliable and Committed’, you’d have a big win for the organisation and for the employees, due to the improvement in wellbeing and increased performance they would experience.
Surely that’s where attention should be focused.
Ain’t Nothing Going On But The Rent
McKinsey’s say that the difference between these two groups are that the ‘Reliable and Committed’ group not only “execute on business-as-usual activities” but also “go above and beyond for their employer”, whilst the ‘Mildly Disengaged’ “… should not [be expected] to make sacrifices for the company over their personal lives.”
McKinsey put those who are “Quiet Quitting” in the ‘Disruptor’ group, although I think that label (which I hate) applies more to the ‘Mildly Disengaged’. To me, “Quiet Quitting” is about doing what you are paid to do and no more, but McKinsey have a darker definition, of people who are “emotionally—and in some cases, cognitively—disengaged”, although they don’t explain why that is not OK. They complain “that quiet quitting makes it seem like you don’t care if you get fired” i.e. they can’t use fear to motivate you.
That seems to me to point to the heart of the problem. Organisations have an expectation that employees will deliver more than they are contracted to do, they believe they are entitled to people’s discretionary effort. Yet on what basis, moral or otherwise, do they deserve this? Over the past few decades employment has been made less secure, less rewarding, more demanding and fundamentally more transactional.
The rational response for employees is to do what they are paid for and no more, something that the employers have attached the pejorative label of ‘Quiet Quitting’. Yet employees are simply reflecting back the same ineluctable logic that employers use when they push through downsizing programmes and global relocations. It’s the cold hand of market economics.
Unless employers reframe and reimagine the relationship they have with their employees, they will never improve engagement. The status quo is determined much more by the intrinsic motivation of people, the desire to do a job to the best of one’s abilities and to support your coworkers, than anything that the organisation does. That’s why the numbers don’t shift. They just reflect that about 40% of society likes to do whatever they do as well as they can.
An example of a reframing is the one that by Bob Chapman came up with as CEO of Barry Wehmuller, when he decided that the company’s purpose was the stewardship of the people they were fortunate to have under their care.
That’s the sort of fundamental change we need to see. Without it, Gallup’s report in 10 years time will look much the same as it did 10 years ago.
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way
There are a few other ideas around engagement and performance that I don’t agree with.
Not every person has to be an ‘A player’, as Steve Jobs asserted.
He was one, although it seems that the A also stood for arsehole. This is not unusual, especially amongst ‘The Bro’s’.
A team of A players can get very toxic and dysfunctional. You need a diversity of personalities and capabilities. Jobs’ definition clearly didn’t include Emotional Intelligence, essential to any good team.
Not every team is going to be ‘high-performing’.
In fact, they are pretty rare. It takes time to build the relationships and understanding that are necessary to reach high levels of performance. The problem isn’t that organisations don’t have enough high-performing teams, it’s that they have too many ineffective and dysfunctional teams because they don’t train people to work in teams - even though that’s the only place that value gets created and work gets done.
Not every organisation has to have a ‘purpose’.
We need our bins emptied, we need toilet paper to be manufactured, we need shoes to buy. Sometimes, we just need organisations to do what the do, effectively and without any harmful consequences. There’s dignity enough in that.
Not every person has, or needs, a ‘purpose’.
What we actually need is meaning. We can find meaning in anything we do, in even the most mundane of tasks. Looking after a small child can be extremely tedious, not to mention exhausting and boring. Is it meaningful? Absolutely.
Besides, our purpose changes according to our context and over time. We can serve more than one purpose at a time, most of us do.
Work does not have to be the dominant factor in our lives.
I’d go further and say it’s extremely unhealthy for work to be the dominant factor in our lives. It is a very small group for whom this is true and it is to the exclusion of much else that is good in life. They may achieve great things and acquire riches and status but it’s often at great personal cost.
Most of us want work to be a useful and positive part of our lives, not just a way of providing for our needs but enriching us in other ways. Through the camaraderie we have with coworkers, the opportunities develop and grow, learn new skills, challenge ourselves and have new experiences. We want it to be additive to our life experience, which means there must be lots of space for other parts of our life.
Yet we are constantly fed the narrative that our work is central to our life, our identity and our status. It’s not, nor should it be. We actually do better when it’s not.
Man In The Middle
All of this made me think about a piece by Paul Millard, author of ‘The Pathless Path’, entitled “The Way of Mediocre Man”.
His point is that, for most of us, being mediocre is likely to yield much better results than trying to be a ‘Great Man’ achieving great things. If we put a bit of effort into something we enjoy over a long enough period of time, we will be surprised at what we achieve and the ease with which we do so.
Whereas as striving for great achievements, pushing for our ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal’, is going to be a heavy and unpleasant experience and most likely to end in failure. How many attempts to write the next ‘great novel’ lie unfinished, when a more moderate attempt to write a story would have yielded a book that brought joy to some? Better to be a mediocre writer than not be a writer at all.
What’s wrong with being mediocre? We use the word as a derogatory term but if we look at it’s definition we see it is:
of only ordinary or moderate quality; neither good nor bad; barely adequate:
I don’t know about you but I have a long list of things I’d like to be “neither good nor bad”. Virgin Media’s customer service, the website for paying the ‘Dart charge’, the UK train network, the water industry, buying new car insurance …
In fact, if most things could be ‘neither good nor bad’, it would improve the quality of my life immeasurably. And reduce my blood pressure significantly. I don’t need most things to ‘delight’ me, I just need them to work as advertised. ‘barely adequate’ is, after all, still adequate.
Most of us are nearer to being average than we are to being ‘great’ or ‘terrible’. We’re mostly muddling along in the middle. Yet we are constantly being urged to strive to be better, to do great things, start a side hussle, do volunteering, learn to play the ukulele, bake a vertical sponge, write the next ‘great novel’ …
Maybe we would just do better if we revelled in our mediocrity, embraced our moderateness, were proudly average, and get on with doing what we can.
Released from the burden of expectations, the terror of achievement, the effort of striving and the crushing weight of perfectionism, we could just do our best.
We’d find that we did more and produced more than we expected, and be pleasantly surprised to find that some of it would be not half bad (which is not half good as well).
In fact, it would be mediocre. But it would be something. Which would be fantastic.
Great stuff Colin!