Just passing Labor Day in the USA makes an excellent time to consider something we all know and feel instinctively: Work is fundamentally broken. I used to think it was just a little chipped in the corner, so we turned it around to show another face and pretended no one would notice. No, it is not just chipped. It is not simply a large unsightly-but-innocuous crack. It is wholly broken through and through.
Managers, academics and pontificators like myself have been gluing together the pieces for ages trying to pass it off as whole to others. Sooner or later a butterfly flapping its wings will shatter the entire illusion of structural integrity. First, we will sit around gob-smacked that it could even happen, and then we will look for someone or something to blame.
The problem isn't in any particular piece. It isn’t in the baking process, nor in the glazing. It would be easy to blame the quality of the ingredients--the people involved in the work. We can scurry about looking for better quality ingredients to see how they settle into the system, but that only asks us to start over or redo some of it. What is wrong is in the binding agent that holds it all together.
Any guesses on that binding agent? Is it management? Perhaps. More accurately, it is how we manage our work. Rather than looking the problem laying with the workers or with the management, I look at it in terms of the holistic system of how we coordinate and execute work. Before I offer an explanation of what that means, we should look at what this pain means to us.
Companies are certainly running faster, but not getting further with all that speed. In fact, companies are dying faster and organizational performance has been deteriorating for decades, regardless of economic or cyclic conditions. Since 1965, Return-on-Assets of US firms has fallen 75%, according to the Deloitte Center for the Edge’s Shift Index report. Companies have tried to avert this, however as the report indicates:
"The long-term trend is still an underlying reality and there is no reason to believe that these short-term adjustments,
achieved largely through significant layoffs, mark a reversal of the long-term trend...Layoffs and other short-term measures taken by firms are largely the cause of the recent uptick in ROA. As performance pressures mount, firms are reacting by taking short-term measures and pushing hard on employment and payroll as the principal cost-cutting levers. While offering short-term relief, current efforts taken by firms to eliminate jobs are not sustainable drivers of firm performance going forward."
Organizations and workers alike continue to suffer headaches of a matrixed cross-boundary work environment. According to the IBM Global CHRO Study Working Beyond Borders, a “number of boundaries—functional, cultural, geographical, generational and informational—constrain workforce productivity and prevent enterprises from realizing their full potential.”
Workers are in pain with complex, overwhelming, matrixed responsibilities. Employee engagement in the workplace continues to fall when they consider their employer's loyalty to their "most-valued-assets" simply as lip service. In turn, employees continue jump from company to company seeking greener pastures. The Gallup State of the American Workplace study (2013) shows a continuing trend:
“While the state of the U.S. economy has changed substantially since 2000, the state of the American workplace has not. Currently, 30% of the U.S. workforce is engaged in their work, and the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is roughly 2-to-1, meaning that the vast majority of U.S. workers (70%) are not reaching their full potential — a problem that has significant implications for the economy and the individual performance of American companies.”
Together, they point to a longer term trend that accounts for more than that which can be attributed to the economic conditions of the past decade. Looking at the challenges more broadly, the business thinkers of the Stoos Network point to the economic conditions as a result, rather than a cause, of these inherent enduring problems with the way we work (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Why Organizations Need to be Transformed, according to the Stoos Network (from their site)
Even this diagram may not include everything that seems broken. The challenges and issues emerge in many shapes and forms. I would welcome any stories and views you might have on this plight of the modern organization to help us complete an even more thorough visualization.
When employees are no longer engaged and invested in their work, they simply phone it in to collect a paycheck. There is a reason that people say TGIF and not TGIM: most employees aren’t looking forward to going back to the grind of 9-to-5. The hours worked in a day is progressively getting shorter in Western countries according to Harvard historian, Niall Ferguson, in his TED talk The 6 Killer apps of Prosperity. What we all know but isn’t said is that some of the work in a day is shifting to off-hours. Increasingly, today’s knowledge workers face a constant reality of always being at work mentally by being available via their smart phones and home computers. The nostalgic 5:30pm Happy Hour with Colleagues has been replaced with the 7:30pm Check-Work-Messages-While-At-Dinner and the 10:00pm Respond-to-Work-Messages-Before-Tomorrow.
Let’s flip to the organization point of view. Increasingly, the best talent is leaving to seek greener pastures in another organization. Some are fleeing their companies for life as an independent professional, to be their own boss. Why? Because their corporate culture and the organizational structure were dysfunctional, and harming their physical and emotional well-being. Even when they hire talent away from another organization, it takes time and effort to rebuild relationships and a productive network for the new entrant. The cost is more then lost talent, turnover and recruiting dollars. It is fractures in the very culture of the organization and its collective intelligence that together make it uniquely valuable.
Managers feel beat down with changing priorities, accelerating market pace, and a lack of resources. The advancement of social and digital technology has shifted the balance of power to individuals, changing how teams communicate and influence each other. The need to collaborate with more people across geographically dispersed teams with numerous contractors and agencies, creates a spaghetti (alt Jackson Pollack inspired maze) of responsibilities that is difficult to track and measure. Executives don’t have clear visibility into how well their teams are actually executing on their strategic initiatives. Management is failing. Leadership in many organizations is practically non existent.
Yet we continue to perpetuate the organizational models we inherited from the birth of the Industrial Age because the litany of changes that we envision need to happen seem too daunting to set in motion. We have a plethora of social business and enterprise tools that are supposed to free us from these limitations and forms of control, but the tools alone are not enough to transform our organizations and their cultures.
To summarize, I posit that:
- the general present model work is broken
- a web of negative constraints (including those suggested by the Stoos Network) keeps reinforcing this model limiting performance
- it is felt in the employment relationship and in worker engagement
- It is seen in organizational productivity
- It is visible in its effect on leadership
- It doesn’t stem from any one side or party, it is in the system itself. It isn’t about the plight of the long-suffering worker, or about management vs. the workers, NIMBYism, or the regulatory framework. It is inherent and omnipresent in the system that exists.
When it comes to such an inherent force, it is far too easy to feel helpless and at a loss of what can be done. We need new thinking and new levers of change that empower us as individuals to be able to break this status quo. The good news is that I am far from alone in thinking this.
In addition to thought leaders like Steve Denning and the many bright minds of the Stoos Network, and those at the Management Innovation Exchange (led by world-class business thinker, Gary Hamel), there are many others who echo this sentiment. John Hagel of the Deloitte Center for the Edge reshared his Labor Day Manifesto of the Passtionate Creative Worker from a year ago asking all “to reflect on what we each can do to make our work more meaningful and have greater impact.”
Daniel Debow, former CEO of Rypple and now VP at Salesforce, describes Hacking Work as a mindset, a conscious desire to challenge the conventional ways of working. Tom Foremski aka SiliconValleyWatcher, among the most influential in the tech meccas of San Francisco & Silicon Valley, recently posted Building a Movement to Fix Work on the same subject. He also points out the upcoming Work Revolution Summit in New York on September 20-21st that aims to provide startups and entrepreneurs with the tools “to maintain a human company culture that helps both employees and the company reach their full potential as the organization grows.”
We need a new movement of Work Hackers, change agents actively transforming how they work on an individual level, and collectively becoming a powerful lever. The change begins with individuals to consider new, perhaps unconventional, approaches to create, to contribute to, and to fix work.
Bill Jensen and Josh Klein in their book, Hacking Work (Portfolio, 2010) asked the quintessential questions:
“Pssst. How do you really get work done? What are your workarounds? The ones that keep your company afloat, keep customers happy, teammates employed, and keep doing your best?”
Ponder on how you might answer these questions on the road to becoming a #workhacker. Ask yourself, are you destined to always being a part of the problem, protecting the status quo? Or, are you going to be a force for implementing the solution, teaching others how to hack work and make it better for everyone?
