I’ve put this quote in for my pal Penny, who calls me Fezziwig Portas. It always makes me laugh. We share many moments chatting together about ideas on how to play our part in making the world a better place. (Usually over a couple of bottles of wine.)
And, happily, more and more businesses are doing the same: thinking about how to do their bit to improve the way they work and we live – from looking at their environmental impact or supply chain to working with the wider community.
I’d love to be around in fifty years to see what effect it’s all had.
Getting more women to the top is also on the list of necessary changes, and a key argument is that diversity is good for the bottom line.98
But should making work more fair and inclusive really just be a question of opening up opportunities for making more money? Isn’t it just the right thing to do in a world that has changed so much?
I’m in no way implying that ‘business’ and ‘profit’ are negatives of course. Not all companies are reckless profiteers who mindlessly destroy the environment or capitalize on the misery of their disenfranchised workers. (Although, sadly, there are too many of those idiots out there.)
I certainly enjoy the basic principle of working to make money and realizing personal and collective potential. It is one of the things that drive me. I started work with very little and have enjoyed building a business and making myself financially secure.
But should the maximization of profit be the only measure of success?
There are plenty of people – including chief executives and company directors – who don’t believe it is, and companies can now also be ranked on the happiness of their workers. So can countries, as the idea of national happiness – instead of just the numbers involved in GDP – takes hold as a way to grade a nation’s prosperity.
But even if new ideas are starting to gain momentum, the old one that financial success – or failure – is the key assessment of a business still retains an iron grip.
And what’s the point of a nation, a company or a person being financially wealthy but miserable as sin? If money is the sole motivator for making work more equitable, aren’t we just using the same old alpha mindset to justify the measures being put in place?
Money is certainly important. It pays wages and bills, drives national and global economies. But making the most possible money can also come at a huge cost – socially and environmentally. Yet we still celebrate it.
Take The Apprentice: the most high-profile business TV show on UK telly is driven by the ethos of maximizing profit.
Never mind the backbiting seen during the boardroom firings that are a dog-eat-dog blame fest overseen by Lord Sugar. Or the power-playing apparent in the Final Five ‘interviews’ – in which contestants are mauled by a grandstanding panel of ‘experts’. Week in, week out, a team can mess the whole thing up and behave like buffoons but still win if they make the most money.
And while Lord Sugar inevitably saves the day and lets common sense triumph by stopping someone who’s good at making money but impossible to work with winning the title, the focus of the show still comes down to who makes the most profit each week. And this prioritizing of short-term profit over any other consideration reflects much of our wider working culture.
I know The Apprentice is entertainment TV but it pays little attention to a host of other vital business skills, like leadership, teambuilding and not being a total ****** to name a few. It is the show that gave the world Katie Hopkins, after all.
(Just for the record, if The Apprentice does end up on the TV in my house when my kids are home, I usually spend most of it screaming: ‘You’re all fired because you’re all crap.’)
But it wasn’t always this way.
For a long time, many businesses embraced a wider commitment to community and society. Just look at the Quakers who built British institutions like Rowntrees and Cadbury, Lloyds Bank and Clarks shoes at the same time as housing their workers, and giving them pensions and access to medical care. But in the 1970s the mindset shifted after influential economists argued that the primary function of any business was to maximize shareholder value – otherwise known as making the most money.99
Soon Margaret Thatcher had taken power on one side of the Atlantic and Ronald Reagan on the other. The idea of maximizing profits took hold.100 And CEOs had an increasingly vested interest in maximizing shareholder value as stock options became a common perk.
The rise in CEO pay is quite frankly jaw-dropping. The average US CEO now makes 271 times what the average worker does. In 1989, it was fifty-nine times and in 1965 a mere twenty.101 In the UK, a CEO makes £129 for every pound the average employee makes. In 1987, it was £45.102 You can see how things have spiralled out of control. Even some of those running public bodies and not-for-profit organizations are on salaries that would make most British workers gasp.
How can these people look themselves in the eye and justify this kind of money? It’s sheer greed.
Of course there are specific challenges for companies that are answerable to shareholders who rely on a good stock price for their income. I have ultimate control over my business because I own it.
But a shift is happening even in big businesses as influential leaders begin to call for change.
And if companies are embracing this kind of social responsibility, we also need to do our bit. As consumers, we demand fast fashion that’s often made cheaply by women and children in lower-income countries. We want food prices to be as low as possible, regardless of economic impact, animal welfare and environmental issues. We order taxis or deliveries at the cheapest possible price – with people on often unstable and low-paid zero-hours contracts providing the services.
In many instances, alpha culture has put maximizing profits at its heart. But we’re often the ones keeping it there.
If moral imperatives aren’t your thing, here’s another key driver for changing the way we work: Millennials and Generation Z.
As Generation Z are starting to work, Millennials are now already well into their careers and will make up three-quarters of the global workforce by 2025.103 But while they’re often portrayed – in the media at least – as free spirits who want to acquire multiple skills across a varied career path (or, depending on which newspaper you’re reading, feckless opportunists with little loyalty and a bad phone habit), I’ve found that Millennials are none of the above, having employed many of them.
They are committed, energetic, and often want to make the world a better place. They’re also much more like the rest of us than we’re often led to believe.
Research shows that Millennials share a lot of common ground with older employees, including the desire for decent pay and flexible working, and aversion to excessive overtime.104
In fact, if anything, older workers are the takers because they focus on pay, development and control over their work, while Millennials place greater importance on team cohesion, supervisor support and flexibility.105
Despite the similarities, though, we know that younger workers are prepared to leave jobs if they don’t feel they’re getting what they need from them. I don’t blame them. I got to exactly that point myself. Many women do. But it’s an increasing problem for businesses that are competing to recruit and retain talent.
Younger workers are not less ‘loyal’ or difficult to please. Like all of us, they see work as a financial exchange. It’s just that they want it to be part of a whole life, and there’s less reason than there used to be for them to stick with jobs that don’t either pay well or satisfy other aspirations.
Jobs for life are mostly a thing of the past. The portfolio career has been embraced and, in an economically unstable world with little promise of financial security, why stick around if your job isn’t giving you what you want from it? Alpha culture survived on financial reward and linear advancement for a long time but it’s no longer enough.
And, luckily for women, what Millennials want from work is fundamentally what we have been wanting, too, for a long time – more flexibility and a better balance between work and family life. The younger generation might well be the catalyst to the kind of change we’ve wanted for years but been denied.
And it’s imperative that we find a way to work that better reflects all that we want from work. Because it’s not just a pay cheque.