Imagine a world where driverless cars are the dominant mode of transportation and how this will change everything. Think about how the driving experience will be transformed into a sleeping, reading, movie-viewing, or working experience. Consider the spillover effect on the economy and how it will change the entire automobile industry. Think of the implications of a world without traffic jams, accidents, or parking lots.
As you reflected on this transformed universe, perhaps you thought about the implications of an employee-free workplace. No, I don’t believe that employees will disappear, but I absolutely believe that what we’re seeing today is only the start of a trend. As increasingly digitally dominant workplaces proliferate, we’re in danger of losing crucial elements of organizations. The losses are insidious, doing their damage incrementally. They are eating away at the values, intrinsic satisfaction, and fun of work.
To understand what we’re in danger of losing, we have to lift our eyes above the daily grind and see the big picture. We need to ask ourselves tough questions: What’s wrong with everyone working from home in their pajamas? What do we lose if too many of us become figuratively or literally remote workers? The best companies will reflect deeply and continuously on these and other issues. And then they’ll create policies and programs that prevent these losses.1
Go back to the opening analogy of driverless cars and consider not what is gained in this new digitally dominant world but what is lost: the feeling of joy and control when driving on a country road on a beautiful summer day with the windows down and the radio blasting a great song. This is the story side of driving, and it may be impossible to maintain this in the future.
But we can maintain story in a digitally transformed workplace if we’re conscious of the issues. To foster this consciousness, let’s look at one type of loss that’s occurring.
The Loss of Deep Engagement
Companies used to talk about their people as family. In the wake of downsizing and in the midst of workplaces where people work remotely, travel constantly, and change jobs frequently, family no longer seems an appropriate term. But should workplaces be the opposite of family—impersonal environments where people measure their satisfaction by the size of their paycheck and bonus?
To address this question, let’s start with the highly influential paper “Measuring Meaningful Work,” which examines a number of studies and concludes that this type of work is aligned with passion and seen as a higher calling; growth in a job and making a difference in the world represents a greater purpose than income.2
Similarly, CEO Tony Schwartz identifies twelve attributes of a great workplace and notes that a key to these attributes is standing “for something beyond simply increasing profits. Create products or provide services or serve causes that clearly add value in the world, making it possible for employees to derive a sense of meaning from their work, and to feel good about the companies for which they work.”3
Most organizational leaders probably agree with these notions of meaningful work, at least in the abstract. Yet in reality, many don’t create the necessary conditions. Willis Towers Watson, a global advisory firm, found that two out of three workers were not fully engaged at work, with almost one-fifth completely disengaged.
“The most significant factors relate to how their supervisors support them on the job, their levels of stress and the severity of their workloads. For the detached, by contrast, company leadership stood as the focal point. Detached workers lack an emotional connection to the organization, stemming from feelings that they do not work for a company with strong values, clear vision, and a leadership team that takes employees’ interests and needs into account” [emphasis added].4
Organizations possess a lot of physically and emotionally detached workers these days. Think of it from a landscape perspective. There’s the physical landscape of offices, common areas, off-site meeting spaces, and so on. There’s also the emotional landscape of relationships with bosses and fellow employees. People feel spaces and connections both emotionally and physically, and therefore work environments are key for establishing meaning and purpose. This is where the culture of a company is created and sustained.
In these spaces, stories are told: stories about values as related to customers, employees, communities, and shareholders. Stories about the company’s founders, how it was founded, and why it exists beyond creating products and services. Stories that employees create as they find purpose and growth and meaning.5
These stories are lost, or at least diminished, when people fail to occupy physical and emotional spaces. When they’re enmeshed in data, working remotely, transfixed by screens and not fully present for other reasons, people don’t tell or hear the stories that imbue the workplace with meaning.
Companies such as Apple are brilliant at merging stories and spaces. In their offices, spaces become art, expressions of its stories and related values. As dependent as they are on digital, they keep the stories flowing.
This is the challenge in spreadsheet-dominant companies across the world. We need to make sure that we don’t lose our stories as we become increasingly dependent on data. We need to make an extra effort to facilitate conversations and relationships in the spaces we occupy.
If George Orwell Could See Us Now
In Orwell’s 1984, he introduces the notion of Big Brother. If he were alive today, he might write about Big Employer. For years, blue-collar workers have complained about feeling like their every move is being monitored, first through punch-in time clocks and supervisors and more recently through video and digital techniques. Now this sense of being watched also applies to white-collar professionals. We know that our organizations are aware of when we’re on our computers and phones, when we’ve stepped out of the office (via scanning technology), and when we’re at our desks. They are especially aware of the apps and sites we’re visiting on our devices and the messages we’re sending via text and email.
This feeling is not paranoia if you’re actually being watched. Workplaces are diminished when people feel as if they’re being spied on. The loss of privacy is the initial problem, but it leads to a loss of free will—it feels like your choices are limited to what Big Brother wants you to do.
In this environment, we are less likely to share stories that we think might be interpreted negatively. Yes, digital vigilance can be warranted if shrinkage is occurring or productivity levels are low. Organizations also believe that by monitoring screen activities, they may be able to make suggestions to employees about how to improve their performance (i.e., “Mary, we noticed that you’re overly blunt in your emails to your customers”). But what is lost because of this digital monitoring?6
It’s not just the monitoring that affects corporate cultures and employee attitudes but also the overemphasis on translating everything into measurable terms. The eminent management theorist Peter Drucker is often misquoted by having the following attributed to him: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” He never said nor wrote this. Instead, Paul Zuk notes that Drucker’s take on this subject was more qualitatively than quantitatively focused:
[He] certainly did believe that measuring results and performance is crucial to an organization’s effectiveness. . . . Drucker also knew that not everything could be held to this standard. “Your first role . . . is the personal one,” Drucker told Bob Buford, a consulting client then running a cable TV business, in 1990. “It is the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence, the identification of people, the creation of a community. This is something only you can do.” Drucker went on: “It cannot be measured or easily defined. But it is not only a key function. It is one only you can perform.”7
Another quote about this issue has been attributed erroneously to a famous individual known for his emphasis on measurement. Albert Einstein supposedly said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”8 It was actually sociologist William Bruce Cameron who made this statement in his 1963 text Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking. Cameron’s quote is over five decades old and is from a time when computing machines were on the rise: “It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” [emphasis added].9
Over the years I have watched presentations go from being about perspectives, words, and nuances that were supported by numbers to spreadsheets, displays, and mathematical probabilities with little insight or discussion. We are confusing numbers with facts, data with insights, and computation with decisions.
Think back to the Willis Towers Watson study that found two out of three workers weren’t fully engaged. How can we expect to engage our people when data is so dominant? People feel constrained by all the data flowing across their screens, by their hyperconsciousness of being measured, by their knowledge that too soon their jobs may be replaced by AI.
On top of that, their jobs have become boring and unchallenging. So much of what people do at work these days is dictated by studies, reports, and trends. They aren’t asked to use their experience, their gut, their creativity. Instead, they’re asked to follow the numerical analysis.
Data is critical, but too much of it too much of the time sucks the meaning and joy out of work tasks. When our jobs lose excitement and challenge, we’re never going to perform at as high a level as we should.
A Win-Win Scenario
Leaders don’t want to lose the essence of their cultures, the values and practices and traditions that make their companies good places to work. They don’t choose to sacrifice any of these assets. But the speed of the business, the need to be “always on everywhere,” the ability and impulse to measure everything—all of this can overwhelm best intentions.
Walk through a large corporation today and observe what people are doing. What you’re likely to find is that they’re checking in, leveraging Slack, managing and monitoring social media feeds, creating “agile” routines and “scrum” meetings, and receiving alerts from mobiles at the slightest irregular data heartbeat. In this environment, people often aren’t motivated to tell their stories, to go to the adjacent office or cubicle and shoot the shit. Leaders can preach the importance of this behavior, but their words often bounce off the data-buzzed brainpans of their people.
It takes more than talk to preserve cultures, and Starbucks is a company that has done a good job in this regard. Starbucks is at the leading edge of data and technology. With ninety million transactions a week in twenty-five thousand stores worldwide, the coffee giant uses big data and AI to help direct marketing, sales, and business decisions. Its mobile app is consistently one of the most downloaded apps. Starbucks leverages data to decide where to open stores and what flavors of coffee to promote at retail, and they are leveraging AI to create virtual baristas.10
At the same time, however, the company strives to be values-driven, inclusive, and cognizant of the individual requirements and development of employees. This starts at the top with founder Howard Schultz and flows down through the organization. The emphasis on story is consistent and wide-ranging. You can see it even in data-centric operations—the company has more than thirteen million rewards members, and the data derived from this usage helps the company personalize services and build relationships.11
For years, Starbucks has been recognized as a leader in providing extremely generous benefits for employees; they even offered health insurance for part-time employees. They also provide excellent education stipends for their people who want to go back to school. The company is environmentally conscious and supports good causes. And even though they’ve received their share of criticism in some areas (e.g., an incident in a Philadelphia Starbucks when the manager called police because two black men refused to leave the store12), they have a remarkably positive record when it comes to diversity policies and environmental issues.
Howard Schultz recently said, “Everyone one [sic] of us here, regardless of product or service, we are all in the people business. It’s the humanity of a company that is going to create the long-term value. Without humanity and without values, you end up with a company that makes money but doesn’t stand for anything and really has nothing to be proud of. So, lead with your heart.”13
Companies like Starbucks have strong humanistic streaks. They do a lot of good in the world, donating money to worthy causes as well as being active philanthropists in a variety of ways. For them, doing and being good go hand in hand with making money and other performance measures. Making life better for others and making money are not mutually exclusive.
Schultz recognizes that people—both customers and employees—need to believe in stories that are more than data stringed together. From a barista’s innovative solution, to a customer’s problem, to the company’s commitment to recycling and reducing waste, Starbucks attempts to do far more than pile up the numbers.
Contrasts: You Can Choose Not to Lose
Organizations need to ask themselves: Do we want to be like Southwest or United Airlines?
When I give talks about spreadsheet and story, an audience member often protests that at his or her company, tech is advancing so fast that people are devoting all their time and energy to just trying to keep up; that new software, social media initiatives, and technologies are being introduced daily, and leadership has to focus myopically on the tech side of things or they’ll fall behind competitors; and that their workplace represents a new world of work where people are clicking, coding, and measuring constantly.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to work in such a place. More to the point, I don’t believe people can work effectively when they’ve lost the ability to hang out, brainstorm, reflect, and feel free of the pressure to constantly measure what they’re doing. Even more to the point, people don’t want to do business with organizations where the spreadsheet-story balance is out of whack.
Look at Southwest and United. Both companies are absolutely dependent on data and technology, and they’re measuring their performance consistently. Employees at both companies must have an almost religious adherence to processes and procedures, given how crucial safety and timeliness are in their industry.
At Southwest, though, they prioritize customers over process (though certain processes must be followed), view employees as family, avoid layoffs, and encourage people to express themselves creatively. At United, individual expression is discouraged. That’s why a captain flying a Southwest plane might get on the intercom and provide passengers with the score of a pivotal game being played in the city they’re flying to or from. On United, they act like this game doesn’t exist.14
It’s not surprising that United has been grappling with a series of ugly PR incidents recently, while Southwest boasts the following results:
• 2.4 percent voluntary turnover
• 44 consecutive years of profitability
• Lowest number of customer complaints
• 85 percent employees proud to work for Southwest
• No layoffs and no furloughs ever15
United is not alone in their focus on the spreadsheet. In fact, it’s alarming how many companies have fallen into this trap. Wells Fargo continues to struggle with a culture built on driving results at all costs, even if it meant selling completely irrelevant and costly services to their customers. The University of Phoenix has been the subject of a series of state and federal investigations that allege the company used aggressive and deceptive recruiting, advertising, and financial aid practices. Negative perceptions of the University of Phoenix may be one factor contributing to the decline in the school’s enrollment. In 2012 the university announced it would be closing 115 locations and laying off 800 employees—5 percent of its workforce. Between 2010 and 2017, student enrollment fell by 70 percent.16
I’m not suggesting that all companies obsessed with profit and measurement are guilty of unethical or illegal practices. I do, however, think that every company in every field is feeling the competitive heat, and the response can be to cross a line in order to make more money. As a former math major, I know how seductive the numbers can be. It’s easy to become enmeshed in numerical calculations and manipulations and fail to see the larger picture.
But even if companies don’t commit ethical breaches, an obsession with digital and data can diminish their cultures. In the coming years, more companies are going to be introducing sophisticated blockchain and AI systems, and these systems can dominate the workplace. Do we want to entrust decision-making to machines? And if we do, how will this affect the morale and creativity of the people who remain?
In her book Retirement and Its Discontents, Michelle Pannor Silver’s research reveals that for millions of people work is much more than the output or income they generate. It is a source of meaning and social identity. It is where they feel intellectually stimulated and can express their creative selves. It is where they feel a sense of community and connection.17
If organizations lose these attributes, they will struggle to attract and retain the best talent. Admittedly, this is a challenge when they feel in a mad competitive scramble and think that only by devoting all their time and money to data, measurement, and the like can they survive. At the same time, they need to find a middle ground, a place where they make room for story, for meaning and identify. If they lose these crucial elements, what does it matter that they can measure stuff in nanos?
Why We Can’t Lose Community
When workplaces become as bland and impersonal as a room at a discount hotel, organizations are in a lot of trouble. Though we’re not there yet, we’re heading in that direction. In companies with high turnover rates, where people do a lot of traveling and often work remotely and on screens, it’s difficult to develop relationships and an esprit de corps.
People are looking for work to provide a sense of community as never before. In a Harvard Business Review article, Lori Goler and her colleagues identified three factors as necessary for job satisfaction: career, community, and cause: “Community is about people; feeling respected, cared about and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.”18
You might think that community is only important to certain types of people holding certain types of jobs in certain countries. Goler, however, found that community (as well as the two other factors) transcend types. In fact, on a 5.0 scale, engineers rated the importance of community at 4.18—a surprisingly high rating from a group that is often thought of as idiosyncratic loners.
Think about community as a forum for storytelling in the broadest definition of that term. In any organization where people have a strong sense of community, they also are constantly telling and listening to stories—stories about the behavior of bosses, about the machinations of teams, about the heroic efforts of one leader and the villainous actions of another. More than that, stories about the organization reside in all employees’ heads. A major merger with a competitor a few years ago is analogous to a historical treaty signing between formerly warring nations—this event and everything that led up to it is embedded in people’s consciousness.
The multiple stories of an organizational community provide people with common language, ideas, and personalities, offering a narrative of which they are a part. As Goler asserts, community fosters a sense of “connection and belongingness,” and these positive attributes emanate from the ongoing organizational story.19
At a time when people change jobs with almost the same regularity with which they change their passwords, community keeps people loyal to their organizations. More than that, in a volatile, uncertain world of work, it provides certainty and satisfaction. We need to be aware that in our rush toward all things digital, we’re endangering this sense of community.
In author Don DeLillo’s landmark novel Underworld, he writes:
I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. This is a car assembled in a work area that’s completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat, except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant—allow a little moisture when they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement back-referenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments of coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead.20
This paragraph has stayed with me for a long time, particularly these three lines:
Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence.
There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. . . .
Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead.
All industries are becoming increasingly automated. While DeLillo’s book described robots in an auto plant, we now see robots of some type nearly everywhere. With the dawning of AI, the rise of intelligent objects with the IoT, and new interfaces such as voice, we will see our workplaces augmented, encrusted, and infested with machines of every type.
In today’s distributed workplace, where we interact across screens with machines that spew data that is collated and compiled by computers, how do we maintain a sense of community? If people don’t gather regularly around the water cooler or in the coffee room, if they don’t each lunch together, if they don’t gather after meetings to dissect and discuss what took place, if they are 50 percent less physically present in the office than ten years ago, then how can we create work communities?
Yes, they can be created virtually, but I guarantee you that online gatherings do not provide the same meaning and satisfaction as getting together after work for drinks or exchanging stories about the brilliant speech a company leader just made.
To understand the value of community, consider that one of the fastest-growing and most valuable private companies in America is WeWork. Their selling proposition includes creating a sense of community and connectedness among professionals, particularly today’s growing cohort of freelancers, remote, and gig-economy workers, who are willing to pay for connection versus working in isolation.21
This hunger for community and connection can be seen everywhere, from Starbucks to SoulCycle. The more we glower at screens and the screens glow back, the more we need to feel connected with others even if all of us are sitting side by side, glowering and basked in glow. If organizations do a good job of creating a community within an increasingly digital space, they increase the odds that we will strike up a conversation, share a smile and a story, and build a resonant bond, which is hard to do with machines—even if they now speak back to us.
How Tech Companies Fight Against Loss of Meaning
You would think that Silicon Valley companies would be the most unbalanced of them all, that because they’re all about digital and data, they would be spreadsheet-focused to the extreme.
Yet that’s not the case. Jeff Bezos spoke to the Economics Club of Washington and said, “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts . . . not analysis. . . . If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.”22
Not coincidentally, Amazon is one of the few companies that has banned people from using PowerPoint presentations and insists on written narratives.23
Similarly, when Marissa Mayer became the CEO of Yahoo a few years ago, she insisted that remote workers return to work so they could reignite teams and connections that she believed were keys to innovation.24
Surprisingly the most technology-oriented and left brain–oriented companies are often the most driven to create community at work and encourage their people to take risks, to express their feelings, and to work in teams. They value play more than many traditional corporations, and they recognize that innovation often starts in the heart or the gut rather than the head. Perhaps it’s because they’re more aware than most of the effect that a digitally intense environment can have on policies and practices. Perhaps because tech is in their blood, they’re more sensitized to what happens when people spend most of their day staring at screens.
This sensitivity may explain why so many tech companies have integrated the university campus model into their organizations. Campuses represent places to study, places to play, places to congregate, but most important, communities of students. The ultimate value of the experience is as much learning from other students, forming relationships, and making connections as it is the classroom experience. University campuses prevent the loss of creativity, cognition, collaboration, and communication.
Apple, Facebook, Google, and others have modeled their office headquarters after university campuses. We see this same model used by tech companies around the world, including Tencent in China and Infosys in India.25 A cynic might say that these companies like the campus model because it enables people to spend their entire waking hours at work and therefore become more productive. With food and laundry facilities and break rooms with video games and exercise equipment, there’s all the comforts of home—and all the more time to spend writing code or selling product.
No doubt, there’s some validity to the cynic’s perspective. Still, the bigger issue is the type of culture and work environment these campuses foster. The leading tech companies know that providing work spaces that are warm, comfortable, and offer all types of resources and activities are preferable to cost-efficient, relatively spartan, traditional office spaces. In fact, it would not surprise me if a growing number of employees are provided “bed and board,” encouraging an integration of the personal and professional.
A Cautionary Note: The Loss of Ethics
In recent years some spreadsheet-dominant companies, feeling the pressure from Wall Street as well as motivated by their own personal gain, have done everything possible to make their companies look great on paper—downsizing, insisting on across-the-board cost reductions, pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term sustainability, and even fudging the balance sheet. This mercenary, short-term numbers approach can create a loss of a different sort—the loss of morality.
One of the world’s premier cancer institutions is Sloan Kettering in New York City. By mid-2018 the institution was facing turbulent times as it became increasingly clear that top executives and doctors there were leveraging clinical data to help start-ups that they were investing in on their own. This was after the chief medical officer resigned when it became apparent he had failed to disclose some of his financial ties to the health and drug industries in dozens of his research articles.26
Today the institution is facing a breakdown in trust across various stakeholders as its lack of transparency and increasing focus on personal and financial gain versus medical service is impacting its reputation and its ability to attract government and charitable funding and pioneering research.
If a well-regarded brand like Sloan Kettering that is not even focused on making money begins to get greedy, we can only imagine what happens to institutions where intense pressure exists for profit. When companies focus on financial as well as other numerical metrics and leadership creates a culture of short-term urgency and importance on making the numbers at all costs, the companies begin to rot; their leadership has stopped managing the firm and is being managed by numbers.27
In turn, employees quickly understand this focus and work at optimizing their own numbers at all costs since they see all decisions are short term and that helping others or thinking long term will put them at risk.
Fortunately, most organizations have not lost their ethics completely. Most are fighting to retain their values. But my warning about this loss is not hyperbolic. The more we become obsessed with measurement and the need to produce better numbers, the easier it is to rationalize behaviors that value performance to the exclusion of all else.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• People need more than their screens and social media. They need purpose, meaning, and community. They do things that do not compute and are moved by things that do not fit in algorithms.
• The best businesses find ways to marry the math and the magic, the silicon, digital, data-driven landscape with the analog, carbon-based, feeling souls that fill the landscape.
• Focus on goals beyond the immediate and measurable, if sustained success is the goal. Weigh the balance sheet of numbers and assets against the balance sheet of reputation and goodwill, and accommodate both.