Work isn’t working
There is nothing management gurus like better than rubbishing the theories of their fellow gurus. One debate that encourages the taking of entrenched positions more than most is how we best structure the workplace.
One side argues that in the 21st Century hierarchical organisations are no longer fit for purpose. In their view hierarchies lead to power silos, politics, mistrust, and even bullying. As early as the 1980s Peter Drucker imagined that the business of the future would be like an orchestra. A single conductor marshalling the talents of hundreds of specialists (musicians and singers) to create beautiful music. (1)
The opposition counters that the need for hierarchy, ‘is part of our DNA,’ that we are hard wired to seek status, power and approval, and that hierarchies satisfy our deep-seated needs for security and order. They point to the fact that even some companies, formed by reliably iconoclastic Millennials, still have hierarchies. Furthermore, they observe that employees like the reflected glory of powerful peoples’ successes. As Pfeffer (2) writes, when it comes to power and leadership we generally presume that someone who is successful has positive traits, ‘regardless of whether they actually possess these characteristics’.
Meanwhile, armies of change agents continue a grail like quest for the perfect structure. This leaves many companies in a cycle of organisation and re-organisation, where the new organogram is revered as law, and the old order is buried along with the memory of its advocates. Perhaps the failure of this ineffectual tinkering with hierarchies points to a need for more radical thinking.
So, while the management gods fight it out, most of us mere mortals remain stuck in the default setting of the hierarchical workplace. And the plain fact is that work isn’t working for the majority. Here is some of the unedifying proof.
We are less and less engaged in our work and we consequently lose trillions of dollars because of lower productivity. (3)
Millennials, who will be 50% of the working population by 2020, are so exhausted and disillusioned by work, that they would sacrifice income to get a better work life balance. (4)
Not surprisingly job hopping is becoming the new normal, or, to put another way, Millennials are in a constant and seemingly unrequited search for greener grass. (5)
How do we make work work?
First, we should replace the debate about organisation with a more productive debate about purpose and culture. We don’t go to work to be organised. In fact, as Laloux has found, we can work quite happily and productively without hierarchies, even in complex industrial processes. We work, at least in part, to give our life meaning. At its best, work can give our life dignity and purpose.
Second, let’s not set the bar of employee satisfaction at being ‘engaged,’ for which the thesaurus offers ‘busy’ and ‘occupied’ as synonyms. How about we set the bar at energised? Perhaps if we were energised by work we would be less exhausted by it, and we would be happy to blur the line between work and life.
Third, let’s stop being mean about Millennials, who many dismiss as insubordinate, lazy, and disloyal. They aren’t setting out to be behave like recalcitrant adolescents for the sake of it. They have grown up in the disruptive world of the internet, where influence is based on knowledge, contribution and reputation, not position. This leads them to ask pertinent questions, which to the old power-based hierarchies feel as uncomfortable as those asked of the naked Emperor.
Finally, and most importantly, we need to find ways to encourage real ownership of our work. Not in a financial sense, though that can help, but in the sense of what we do and why we do it. If we believe in the purpose of our work, it’s amazing how the other two Ps, profit and productivity, will follow.
(1) Indeed, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has already gone a stage further and done away with the conductor altogether, with amazing results.
(2) Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB.
(3) In a 2017 survey Aon Hewitt found that global employee engagement was in decline with only 24% of employees claiming to be highly engaged in their work. Gallup’s 2018 Employee Engagement survey found that only 15% of the global workforce are actively engaged in their work, with a consequential loss of $7 trillion dollars to the global economy.
(4) As survey by The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants suggests that work lfe balance is now more important than pay, and a 2016 YouGov poll showed that 25-34 age sector are the most dissatisfied with their work life balance.
(5) According to the 2018 Deloitte Millennial survey 43% of millennials expect to leave their current company in the next two years. Alarmingly this rises to 61% amongst Gen Z’rs
(6) Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organisations
