Work Reimagined
WHAT IF WE COULD START AGAIN? What if we started a colony on Mars, or a new super-Earth orbiting a nearby star, and decided that the way we ran things on our original home wasn’t quite ideal (hence the need to escape to a new planet), and that we needed to examine society in its entirety, including this thing called work.
We have a blank whiteboard, fresh markers of every color, piles of sticky notes, and a wealth of knowledge about what worked and what didn’t in the old system. No idea is too outrageous.
What would our constraints be when we’re not attached to the previous ideas of what work should be? We built our rules for what work looks like around arbitrary concepts that exist simply because someone thought that was the way it should be.
The five-day workweek, for instance, has no biological or astronomical or any other tangible foundation. It exists merely because it was a slight step away from the six-day workweek we had in the industrial 19th and 20th centuries, which itself was founded on religious ideals, incredible power imbalances between employers and employees, and a complete lack of understanding of how much damage could be done to health and safety by working too much.
The eight-hour workday was, again, super random. The concept was introduced in 1817 by textile manufacturer and philanthropist Robert Owens in an effort to curtail the negative effects of the ten-or-more-hour days common at the time. He even made a catchy slogan: “Eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest.”1
This gained footing across the Western world in the following decades, and although it was a step forward for working humans (and their families) in those days, it unfortunately became the standard unit of a workday. It stuck. And we built the workplace, and society in general, around it, and we haven’t since seriously questioned why we’re still using this two-hundred-year-old concept as our standard for work.
So, let’s start again, with our blank whiteboard and sticky notes and markers.
One constraint is that we’ll still need money to live. I would hope that in our new world some sort of universal basic income exists so that everyone, regardless of their employment, can afford the basics of life (or that we’ve gone full Star Trek and erased the need for currency altogether). But to keep this new world relevant to ours in the present, let’s keep money as a necessity, and we’ll (mostly) receive it through work.
Another constraint is that humans will still be required to do things in this society to keep it functioning. This isn’t a Wall-E situation where the robots keep everything in functional order without any interference by people. Humans will still need to be involved roughly as much as we are now: collecting rubbish, laying bricks, operating on brains, driving cars and trucks, writing reports.
Those constraints out of the way, we’re going to introduce some new rules. The first will be that work is universally seen not just as a means for making money, but as an important satisfier of several fundamental human needs: subsistence, participation, affection, creation, identity, understanding, and protection.
Work, in one form or another, is vital for full and sustainable lives. It’s therefore crucial to make it available to as many people as possible, and to ensure that the work itself is indeed providing opportunities for growth and learning, for participating with other people and making connections, for allowing creativity and problem solving, and so on.
The second rule is that work won’t be allowed to produce poverties of any of our fundamental needs. Anyone who employs another human being to work for them will be held to the standard of some measurement system that determines whether that work is increasing or reducing that person’s capability to fulfill their own human needs.
Employers, as suggested by Jeffrey Pfeffer in Dying for a Paycheck, will face severe penalties for reducing anyone’s ability to be fully human, in the same way they would be penalized for dumping toxic waste into a local stream. This is regardless of the size of the business: being small won’t be an excuse to contribute to social pollution.
To ensure that this happens, flexibility will be inherently built into every job. It will be a given. What it will look like, from job to job and industry to industry, will be different, but any business that employs a human will be measured and held to an objective standard, such as the Flex Scale introduced in Chapter 2, or a broader human-centered index. Either of these will measure fundamental aspects of work, such as the quality of management, level of work-life balance, and commitment of executives to the health and well-being of employees.
We’ll know if a business is a net polluter or developer of life.
And with greater knowledge of how work flexibility or lack thereof contributes to various other issues in the world, such as traffic congestion, air pollution, gender equality, health, and so on, the government will have a powerful lever to influence development outcomes.
In this chapter, we’ll take a look at some changes that accompany this reimagining of work: other human-centered shifts in the workplace that will occur as a result of greater use of flexibility, but that are also necessary for flexibility to become accepted and normalized.
Managers (Lives Are in Your Hands)
I’ll start with the biggest shift that needs to happen in the workplace for flexibility to become normal, which will happen naturally as we tend toward more human ways of working: redefining the role of managers.
Now that we know the degree to which work cultures and structures influence lives for better or for worse, the role of managers – the people with the power over these work cultures and structures – becomes much more significant than we ever imagined, both in the workplace and society.
Lives are in their hands.
They can either kill employees slowly (or quickly) by emptying their buckets and keeping them dry – literally poisoning their brains and bodies – with poor management practices, or they can enrich and enhance lives, and allow people to reach their full potential by creating work and workplaces that fulfill human needs without producing poverties.
With this awareness, wouldn’t we be much more rigorous in choosing who is allowed to be put into management positions and require that they’re trained – even licensed! – before they’re given this power?
We do the same for bus drivers and airline pilots and doctors.
Managers need to be skilled in more than balancing a budget or signing a timesheet or the technical aspects of the department or company. They should have advanced knowledge of people, of humans and their requirements. They should have highly developed empathy and the entire gamut of emotional intelligence, to be able to understand another person’s emotions and needs. They should be able to coach someone holistically on their goals, both professionally and personally, and have challenging and difficult conversations in constructive ways.
I remember being thrown straight into a management role as a manufacturing engineer the month after graduating from university. I had nothing but a piece of paper and ambition, and here I was with lives in my hands (not that I realized that at the time).
Looking back, it’s obscene, but unfortunately not uncommon: people being put in charge of others merely because they have technical knowledge or a degree completely unrelated to human behavior, people who lack any knowledge of humans or life experience as a coach or mentor or leader.
I’ve been on the receiving end of that structure – having a manager who was brilliant at the technical aspect of the work I was doing, but with severe shortcomings in knowing how to lead or manage others.
She micromanaged every aspect of my day, to the point where I felt it was quite unnecessary for me to be there. She reprimanded me loudly in front of teams I was leading for breaking arbitrary rules I had no idea existed. She insisted that we couldn’t leave until five every day, “just because” (coincidentally, this was one of my prompts to start looking into flexibility).
Starved of autonomy and understanding and creation and various other needs, I left the company within six months and needed an extended break to recover my sanity.
This person should not have been a manager. She should have been a subject matter expert, and potentially a technical trainer, or something – anything – other than someone with power over the lives of other humans.
She should have been paid just as much as a manager and given a career pathway that allowed her to continue progressing in seniority without needing to be a manager.
But this is rare, and that’s the reason we have so many non-appropriate people in management positions. People who are good at their jobs need to progress somehow, otherwise they’ll leave, so they’re put in charge of other people and given pay raises (because if you’re good at one thing, you’re obviously going to be good at everything else …).
At the very least, this former manager of mine should have been given training on the practicalities of what she could and couldn’t do when she was in charge of other people, even if she didn’t have an inherent understanding of human needs.
This training is also surprisingly rare. In a CareerBuilder survey of workers in the United States, it was found that 58 percent of managers hadn’t received any management training.2 Also, 87 percent of middle managers “wish they had received more management training when they first became a manager.”3 People often know whether they’re ready or not to take on a job.
Can you imagine the public outrage if a city’s bus driver was found to have not received any training before being sent out to drive people around? Or if they didn’t feel like they were well-equipped enough to confidently drive a bus?
Now imagine 58 percent of all bus drivers in your city driving people around without having received any training and 87 percent driving around without feeling confident about driving.
“Here are the keys, off you go.”
Henry Stewart, the founder and chief happiness oicer of Happy Ltd., author of The Happy Manifesto, and avid supporter of work flexibility, has come up with an ingenious way of promoting the best people-leaders
When managers account for 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores, and when only 13 percent of the global workforce is engaged with their work (each of these facts found by Gallup4) there’s not just a high human cost to having bad or ill-equipped managers, there’s a high cost to businesses and economies worldwide. and the best technical workers into higher positions in the company in a way that benefits everyone.5
Stewart saw that there were two different types of leaders in his business:
• Type A, who are great at the technical stuff, including making decisions and developing business strategies
• Type B, who are great coaches and challengers and supporters of other people
And he put these different types of people into leadership roles that suited them. At Happy, they have managers who look after the technical and strategy stuff, and managers who look after the people. It’s stinkingly simple, yet a seemingly profound concept based on how little it’s used in the business world.
The technical maestros can keep doing what they do and progress in the business and feel appreciated for their talents, without having to worry about motivating people or helping with personal problems. And those with highly developed soft skills (e.g., empathy, ability to lead and inspire, ability to communicate clearly and listen) can also progress into senior positions, even if they’re not the best at the technical stuff, and make an incredible impact on the organization by helping employees, including other managers, reach their full potential while also making them feel valued and cared for.
What they’re doing at Happy is just one way to ensure that the best people are in the right type of management positions, and it has also made it possible for them to have a highly successful flexible work environment.
Their focus on developing and coaching and supporting people, not just managing or supervising them, is crucial for successful flexible work.
People managers need to develop trust with their employees and between team members, they need to understand the lives of employees inside and outside the workplace, they need to be strong communicators and listeners, and they need to be whole themselves for this to happen.
Which brings us to the flip side of this coin: with greater flexibility, more people will have the time and energy and resources to develop themselves in well-rounded ways so that they can become whole and much more adept at understanding and leading other people, resulting in more people who are whizzes at both the technical stuff and dealing with emotional situations.
We wouldn’t need Type A and Type B managers in this situation; we can have Type X managers, who can lead both the technical and people sides of a business.
This is not to say that people don’t have natural propensities for one or the other (as found and practiced by Henry Stewart), but that it’s possible for each type of person to develop strengths in other areas, given the space and opportunity.
We can extend the description of flexibility onto the description of what makes a good manager, which we would use in our new world. How about this:
Good managers increase the positive effects of work on their employees while reducing or removing the negative effects. They realize that they don’t own anyone’s time, but rather have the privilege of being in a position where they can help others flourish, or destroy them from the inside; they have an enormous responsibility.
Good managers consistently ensure that employees are able to be fully human, for the benefit of the employee, society, and the business. Their goal, from both a human and a business perspective, is to maximize human potential. And they’re consistently focused on living sustainably and developing themselves, thus leading by example and improving their capacity to lead.
I’m excited! What’s next?
Working Together
We saw in Chapter 7 the case of the Ctrip.com employees who became isolated and lonely while working at home four days a week, but I argued that when it’s done properly, flexibility (such as working from home) shouldn’t create loneliness. If people can balance remote work with on-location work and are allowed the time to develop other parts of their social lives, then loneliness shouldn’t be a problem.
Taking it a step further, in our new world, where flexibility is normal, we see that due to increased freedom of when and where we work, our social network outside of work improves. And working together with other people in the office can also be much more fulfilling and transform to a more natural, human way of collaborating with others.
For those in-office connections, it all comes down to the quality of the time people spend together rather than the quantity. We’ve found in rigid workplaces that there can be people who sit in adjacent cubicles for forty hours a week and know nothing about each other except their names; time spent breathing the same air isn’t what binds us as humans.
But given space and freedom, and not feeling forced to be in the same place with the same faces all the time, people end up appreciating and valuing their coworkers and the connections they have with them much more. This can and should also be fostered with purposeful time together, such as retreats, lunches, quiz nights, etc.
In this new world, there would no longer be the separation of work and life that we have traditionally held dear. We wouldn’t be afraid of revealing too much or want to keep people at a professional distance. We can make that change by creating a culture of celebrating non-work successes, or mourning non-work losses, with the team. We’ll value each other as humans with diverse lives and interests and passions, and not use this information as ammunition against each other.
The flexible workplace can broaden our professional network and collaboration with people outside the companies we work for as well, for the benefit of our own professional and personal lives, and for our companies. We can use coworking places, meet people to work on projects that have nothing to do with our normal work, or go to cafés.
I won’t talk too much about coworking spaces because my experience with them is limited. I will say that I’ve read both pros and cons about the level of connection that people actually find while working there – some preach about how good it is, while others say they feel more alone there than at their home office. Some have said that it’s just an expensive way to simply get out of the house, which can be done more cheaply by going to a café, my favorite option for escaping the home office. But whether it’s a café or coworking space or library, these locations open up the possibilities to meet people who we can work with in all sorts of different ways.
We can also benefit from being around these other people (at our choosing), without needing to work directly with them. Sometimes called soft accountability, the mere presence of other people can generate a creative and productive atmosphere, perhaps due to subconscious social pressure or pride, where it becomes easier to avoid distractions (like Netflix) and focus on getting work done.
(Added to that, the Parkinson Effect can be countered if there’s a time factor in these locations. My regular café only allows three hours of free WiFi, so I have a three-hour window to get shit done, and it works like magic.)
Recruitment
Recently I spoke to a group of social work graduates about toxic workplaces, living sustainably through fulfilling human needs and (of course) work flexibility. One of the students had a great question: “How will I know if my new job is going to be in a toxic workplace or not? It’s not like they’re going to tell me in the interview!”
In our new world, where flexible and human-centered work are normal and expected, this won’t be a problem because flexibility (and an overall prioritization of the employee’s life) will be found throughout the recruitment process, from the job advertisement and career website, through the interview and selection process, to the onboarding process and subsequently the job.
This also addresses the problems, described in Chapter 8, caused by earned flexibility, in which employees have to undergo a period of non-flexibility before they’re allowed flexibility, which discriminates against people who require it from the first day.
When flexibility runs throughout the entire process, discussions can be open and positive, with the employer showing how committed they are to the practice, and the employee talking about how they can help make it work for the business.
Some interesting elements that we may regularly see in job ads for employees and managers to describe the business and the position in a world where flexibility is normal and expected (excluding the details of an actual role) include:
For employees
• Flex Scale: Level 4 Certified: Ascended Program. (An external accreditation based on the Flex Scale described in Chapter 2.)
• Life quality score for department: 92 percent (Some form of life quality or human sustainability index, based on flexibility, working times/shifts, exposure to physical labor and harsh environments, stress of responsibility, customer contact, quality of management, etc.)
• Low hours but high-value work. We aim for five- to six-hour days and four days per week. Salary doesn’t depend on time worked.
NOTE: this is not a part-time role; it’s a full-time position, but our organization has full flexibility, and we truly focus on getting the best out of our people by helping them have the best possible lives.
• Ability to work wherever is best for you, including your home. We encourage balance between remote and in-office work, but you will work with your team to figure out specifics for what works best.
• Requires ownership of role and commitment to quality and continuous improvement. People who enjoy being busy and boasting about long hours, who can’t see the forest for the trees, will not do well.
• We have full training for those who are motivated to be the best they can be, and your reward is the opportunity for a full life.
Extra details for management positions
• Demonstrated empathy (and other emotional intelligence and leadership attributes).
• Training and/or qualifications in management. (Part of the accreditation cited above can also be training for management, similar to Lean Six Sigma training for continuous improvement.)
• Coaching and talent developer rather than manager. Our employees are experts in their fields or on their way toward being so. Your job is to help them on that path, ensure they have everything they need, and help find solutions to their problems. It’s not your job to check if they’re working.
• With our fully flexible workplace, we’re more of a community than colleagues – we look at employees’ lives holistically and make sure that work is adding and contributing to a full life rather than hindering the ability to live fully.
These are simply some ideas for what we may see (probably with better wording by actual recruiters!). But my point is that information about the flexible and human-centered aspects of work won’t be crammed awkwardly into the end of interviews; it will be out there, in the open, verified, for all to see.
On Holidays
I spoke a little about leave and long-term flexibility in Chapter 2, but the subject deserves at least one more diatribe on our current practices, and how they could be improved in our new world.
The one thing I missed the most about university when I began my professional career was time off, leave, holidays. Being able to get to the end of a year or a semester and then stop working. Shutting down that part of the mind, the work part, to completely disengage, and to celebrate what was a tough period and a lot of work, for weeks or even months at a time.
Then came the workplace.
With four weeks of “leave” in a year, I had two weeks I had to take off over the Christmas period when the business shut down, then one week I had to spend in Malaysia with my then-partner’s parents for Chinese New Year, and then one week I could finally take off to … finish all those jobs around the house I hadn’t been able to do during the year, or to move house, or wait at home for packages or plumbers, or various other random things that conspired to steal these remaining precious days off.
What fresh horror was this?
There were no longer opportunities to fully shut down and do something else, or nothing, for weeks or months at a time; just short gasps of respite and then straight back into it. No opportunity to sit back and let all that work and those achievements settle in, or to rest and refocus on what will come in the new year or period. Nope. It was just work. Life was work.
Those brief periods of leave provided barely enough time to even approach unwinding, and there was definitely no recharging; then – bam! – back into it. This is one of the biggest reasons that, after only a couple of years in the workplace, I was already plotting my escape.
It seems insane to me that we allow children at school to have this great balance in life where they work for a certain number of weeks and then can go away and do other things and rest and play, but as adults we’re in a constant state of work.
In most areas of life there’s a natural ebb and flow of things. The sun sets, the sun rises. We wake, we sleep. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. The moon wanes and waxes. The seasons change from hot to cold, or rainy to dry, and back again. People are born; people die.
We’re used to a rhythm of ups and downs, hot and cold, light and dark, on and off. It gives us a rest from monotony, from one singular state of being. But work has been designed differently. We’ve ended up with a structure where work never ends. It’s a constant. And we’ve normalized that concept. “Holidays” are an exception, a deviation from “normal,” rather than simply another part of the rhythm of life.
With most of our year working, we don’t get an ebb and flow; it’s just flow. And then we’re surprised that people get depressed and burned out or become completely disengaged from their jobs. This pattern of not having a pattern is completely unnatural, and our bodies and minds know this at the core of our being.
Before I spiral off any further into my whirlpool of woe, there are two interesting and practical points regarding leave in terms of flexibility:
1. Increasing daily and weekly (short-term) flexibility, as we’ve examined already in detail, increases the sustainability of life in the long term and makes leave somewhat less necessary.
I won’t say it becomes outright unnecessary (more on that in the second point), but with more rest and relaxation and other human needs being consistently fulfilled, that complete escape from work isn’t as critical as it is with an unsustainable, rigid work style that leaves people desperately starving for respite.
When I interviewed Jonathan Elliott about the five-hour workday, he said that one employee had stockpiled massive amounts of leave for her honeymoon because she never “needed to take it” – she was living sustainably and happily day to day.
Flexibility also takes care of those one-off moments where you need to be home for electricians or plumbers. You can simply continue working as per usual at home, or you can just come to the office after or before the interruption. No need to take leave or inconvenience anyone. Easy.
2. But, providing more leave to people than the general two to four weeks is absolutely one of the most important types of flexibility you can offer, regardless of what other types you’ve already implemented.
Being able to properly shut down and disconnect from work for long periods is enormously beneficial to the individual, to their mental health specifically, but also to the quality (and length) of their life in general.
Also, being away from work on a truly disconnected break is when many of those paradigm-changing aha moments arrive that could revolutionize the business. Certainly going away and filling their buckets to the brim turns employees into productivity monsters when they return to work!
Practically, what do I recommend for this new colony on Mars when we get to start again? What is the ideal number of weeks of leave?
There is no ideal. As with any type of flexibility, it’s about finding out what your people need, and finding innovative ways to give it to them by working on solutions together.
And it comes down to what sort of business you want to run. Do you want to be one that gives employees the bare minimum that you are legislated to give, and end up with burned out and unproductive people who struggle to learn and grow? Or do you want to do what’s best for them and what’s best for you?
The two (or less!) weeks of leave per year offered by U.S. businesses (on average) is not ideal. It doesn’t take a study to show you that working for 96 percent of the year isn’t good for you. But just to add some rigor, research on businessmen in Finland found that those who took less than three weeks leave per year had a 37-percent increase in the risk of dying from health problems than those who took three or more weeks of leave per year.6
A survey of American workers found that the ideal amount of leave per year would be fifty-two days, or ten weeks.7
Another interesting indicator of how much leave is a good amount is that businesses that have provided unlimited leave (as described in Chapter 2) found that employees took, on average, five to ten extra days of leave on top of their previous allocations, and that even that small amount was a great benefit to their lives and productivity.8
And business could be even more creative with long-term leave and flexibility. For example, they could have job-share teams that, instead of dividing the workweek between them, divide the entire year, alternating six months on and six months off, or three months on and three months off.
Or a business could let teams have free reign with whatever sort of leave works best for them. Does it matter? If they’re getting everything done and achieving great results?
Have fun with it!
At a bare minimum, businesses need to provide more weeks of leave across the board than we have in most countries, like those poor suckers in the United States with their two weeks. Two weeks?!
This sort of practice completely disregards the human side of humans and treats them as nothing more than machines. In our new world, this will, thankfully, be outlawed and forgotten.
Words
Something else we’ll change regarding work is the language we use.
We’ve been stuck in a linguistic box of calling forty-plus hours of work per week full time and anything less than that part time. I’ve seen job ads where a position is for four days per week, or five days per week and slightly shorter days, and it’s called part time. It’s rubbish.
As we discussed in Chapter 2, this term tends to diminish the value perceived in the job and in the employee. It’s right there in the term part, which is often read as part of our effort, part of our ability, part of a bigger whole that would be possible if we were more committed.
But after reading this book, and seeing that someone can easily do just as much or even more work in thirty hours than others do in forty hours, can we finally put both part time and full time in the bin where they belong? They’re pointless and damaging.
Other terms destined for the scrapheap, my guess is in the next five to ten years, are those I’ve used countless times throughout the book (and you’re probably sick of reading): flexibility, telecommuting, remote work, flexitime, and many other flexibility-related terms will no longer be needed because they’ll be expected in any workplace.
These words only needed to exist in a world where rigidity was the norm and we had to name the opposite of this practice – what stood out as different. When rigidity is gone there won’t be any need to talk about flexibility, or telecommuting, or remote work. These will just be how we work.
The term rigidity may still be used, and become more popular, because it will be used to describe the few outlying businesses that aren’t flexible by default. But they won’t last long into the future, either because of legislation or because no one will work for them.
We Don’t Have to Wait
We don’t have to wait to go to Mars or some other new world to have these changes. We can do all of this right now, here on our little blue marble. We don’t have to wait for new laws to force us to make big changes, we don’t have to wait for someone else to make the first move, and we don’t have to wait for someone’s permission.
We can start now.
We’ve already seen examples throughout the book of companies taking the lead and doing exactly this. They’ve reimagined what work could be. These companies will be ahead in the near future when other major developments will continue to impact what work looks like.