Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace

MELISSA SWIFT

WORK HERE NOW

THINK LIKE A HUMAN AND BUILD A POWERHOUSE WORKPLACE

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To my husband, Artem, who changed my life, and my daughter, Mira, who changed my life again

And to my mom and dad, the clinician and the researcher, who taught me two equally valid ways of looking at the world

LIST OF STRATEGIES

What to Do: Strategies at the Organization Level

Strategy 1: Regularly reexamine work for signs of being dangerous (directly or indirectly), dull and annoying, or frustrating and confusing.

Strategy 2: Don't take intensified work for granted—and don't be afraid to de‐intensify.

Strategy 3: Question long‐held assumptions and unintentional choices about work to revolutionize your DEI strategy.

Strategy 4: Seek to understand work, even if it's painful.

Strategy 5: Deliberately hold performative work in check.

Strategy 11: Unpack your foundational talent management assumptions—what decisions have you made on the basis of believing folks are lazy or slow?

Strategy 12: Regularly examine the jobs that impact your organization the most—have they changed in a way that affects how people's performance of those jobs looks (i.e., do they look lazy or slow because work is changing fast?)?

Strategy 13: Map how your customer experience and your employee experience interact.

Strategy 14: Tread carefully in how you talk about seamlessness and frictionlesness—internally and externally.

Strategy 15: Actively promote replacements for the anxiety monster and the boss baby customer.

Strategy 21: Create a single account of the truth on the workforce of your organization—however you employ them—and systems and processes to maintain it in real‐time.

Strategy 22: Maintain and periodically energize an organization‐wide conversation about how work gets done.

Strategy 23: Optimize how work gets done by different populations—tackling one chunk at a time.

Strategy 24: Reinvent HR—on your organization's terms.

Strategy 25: Just do less!

Strategy 31: Understand when you're making a decision that impacts your human workers, know who owns that decision, and identify who's truly impacted.

Strategy 32: Look at the key roles in your organization, and remove any unneeded qualifications or aspects of work that are limiting the talent pool of who can do that work.

Strategy 33: Smash your technology silo.

Strategy 34: Make humanism an acceptable part of corporate discourse.

Strategy 35: Examine roles designed for obsolescence—do they have features you'd consider unacceptable in longer‐term roles?

Strategy 41: Obsess over tech governance.

Strategy 42: Make sure you're choosing tech for the right reasons—and then make sure you're re‐choosing it.

Strategy 43: Marie Kondo your tech stack—using an employee's‐eye view.

Strategy 44: Have an honest conversation about cybersecurity—and what it's going to feel like.

Strategy 45: Make sure tech is working at the speed of humans, and not vice versa.

Strategy 51: Rigorously and regularly audit your performance management results for bias—and be prepared to take dramatic action to address.

Strategy 52: Cultivate thoughtful ways of managing performance by team or unit, avoiding the hand‐to‐hand combat of measuring individual by individual.

Strategy 53: Bring your contingent workforce up to measurement parity with your full‐time workforce, including shared governance, capture in organizational systems, and centralized budgeting.

Strategy 54: Rigorously and regularly audit your pay philosophy and pay equity—are you paying for what you think you're paying for, and are you paying fairly, in real time?

Strategy 55: Figure out which employee groups are burnt out, and which are fed up, and design differentiated strategies to address each set of issues.

Strategy 61: In your DEI efforts, consider a broader array of populations, including foreign‐born workers, previously incarcerated populations, etc.

Strategy 62: Dramatically up the inclusion factor on your talent acquisition process.

Strategy 63: Understand the role of foreign‐born workers at your organization, including the household workers who support your employees, and actively create support programs for this group (including naturalized/green card workers and workers on visas).

Strategy 64: Take a searching, quantitative and qualitative look at your remote and hybrid work policies in the context of geographical talent markets, those markets' trends, and with a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens.

Strategy 65: Scenario plan your flexibility and location strategy versus possible changes in your talent markets as well as in the way we work.

Strategy 71: Evaluate what you're seeking from your leaders at each stage versus structural cues at prior career stages, and seek to eliminate disconnects.

Strategy 72: Create more fluidity for junior talent, in both how you manage talent and how you hire for early‐in‐career roles.

Strategy 73: More love for middle managers!

Strategy 74: Figure out your organization's drivers of greedy work, and seek to kill them off.

Strategy 75: Provide concrete incentives to combat greedy work.

Strategy 81: Deploy increased levels of asynchronous work to create greater flexibility—borrowing helpful practices from organizations where asynchronous work is more prevalent.

Strategy 82: Teach better written communication skills to help fuel asynchronous work.

Strategy 83: Dig into deconstruction possibilities for talent crisis roles.

Strategy 84: In an environment of increasingly deconstructed work, explore novel roles with comprehensive talent accountability, especially with a wellness lens.

Strategy 85: Find opportunities for transparency to drive greater accountability and thus equity.

What to Do: Strategies at the Team Level

Strategy 6: At a regular cadence, talk to your team about their everyday experience of work—what are they doing, and how are they feeling, day to day and minute to minute?

Strategy 7: Quiet your suck it up voice.

Strategy 8: Be humble and curious about the parts of your team's work you don't understand.

Strategy 9: Create metrics to measure and monitor work intensity.

Strategy 10: Take a searching look as to where you might be encouraging performative work.

Strategy 16: Examine your feelings about your team—are you seeing them through an anxiety monster lens?

Strategy 17: Talk to your team about pace—why are you moving at the speed you're moving?

Strategy 18: Examine whether you're inflicting anxiety monster thoughts on yourself.

Strategy 19: Talk to your team about their experience of your customer—whether they are customer facing or not!

Strategy 20: Create a team mechanism for calling out appearances of the anxiety monster and the boss baby customer.

Strategy 26: Figure out your worst patterns—and have an honest conversation on how to break them within your team.

Strategy 27: Build your replicant—then destroy them.

Strategy 28: Turn your reasons not to hire into reasons to hire.

Strategy 29: Test and learn on disruptive approaches to getting work done, utilizing team contracts if helpful.

Strategy 30: Not to sound repetitive, but just do less.

Strategy 36: Model humanism—including self‐care.

Strategy 37: Identify and obliterate kludges and temporary solutions that have accidentally become permanent.

Strategy 38: Plan like a pessimist.

Strategy 39: Figure out your hidden talent acquisition hurdles to maximize inclusion.

Strategy 40: Have a few mental models for what overwhelmed looks like—and a playbook of strategies to address issues before individuals are in full burnout.

Strategy 46: Agree on your comms tech.

Strategy 47: Take tech gripes seriously—and ask about your team's experience of tech.

Strategy 48: Set realistic expectations around software and hardware.

Strategy 49: Volunteer your team aggressively as beta testers.

Strategy 50: Make friends with your CIO.

Strategy 56: Confront your contractor addiction.

Strategy 57: Regularly unpack the work/reward balance for your team, and teach them how to do the same for their teams—in real‐time, not just at year‐end.

Strategy 58: Identify your talent competitors, especially those who are not your business competitors.

Strategy 59: Rigorously train on bias before each performance management cycle.

Strategy 60: Embed everyday workforce analytics into how you and the team work.

Strategy 66: Drive an ongoing, two‐way onboarding journey—especially for diverse or nontraditional hires.

Strategy 67: Incorporate trauma‐informed ways of operating.

Strategy 68: Cultivate an immigration aware mindset—including the foreign‐born populations who work in the households of your team.

Strategy 69: Continuously audit your leadership messaging about location in response to changing external and particularly labor market conditions.

Strategy 70: Look at how you can create dimensions of flexibility across whom you hire and how they work.

Strategy 76: Model nongreedy work. Over and over.

Strategy 77: Regularly keep things out of the boat.

Strategy 78: Think about your team members by career lifecycle stage, and consciously broaden their vantage points.

Strategy 79: Don't let your own career journey shape your assumptions about your team members (or potential hires).

Strategy 80: Make sure you're not paying and promoting people for the wrong things.

Strategy 86: Use asynchronous work to make sure some meetings, especially standing meetings, die a gruesome death.

Strategy 87: Create a team culture of working out loud so that asynchronous work doesn't inhibit development of more junior team members.

Strategy 88: Make work deconstruction an everyday tool.

Strategy 89: Drive an open and ongoing conversation about the impacts of greater transparency.

Strategy 90: Role‐model asynchronous work, deconstructed work, and greater transparency in how you do your own job as a leader.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 My March 2020 desk setup

Figure 1.2 Overloaded milkshake

Figure 2.1 TBWA Chiat Day office, 1990s

Figure 2.2 The changing face of skills

Figure 2.3 Bike delivery person

Figure 3.1LA Times bombing

Figure 3.2The Human Resources Function, by E. Wight Bakke

Figure 3.3 How companies rank HR performance versus effectiveness

Figure 4.1 An early 20th century Manischewitz factory

Figure 4.2 A Framework for human‐centric decisions

Figure 4.3 r/thereifixedit

Figure 4.4 Stanislav Petrov

Figure 4.5 How Mercer views workforce transformation

Figure 5.12001: A Space Odyssey poster

Figure 5.2 Agile Manifesto

Figure 5.3I Love Lucy, Job Switching

Figure 6.1 From Mercer Data, who's thinking about quitting?

Figure 7.1 A U.S. Green Card

Figure 7.2 New York is pretty charming

Figure 8.1 Picture of Sammy's Steak

Figure 8.2 Don't let greedy work ruin your vacation!

Figure 8.3 Don't turn into this little guy

PREFACE

Bob:

Looks like you've been missing quite a bit of work lately.

Peter Gibbons:

Well, I wouldn't say I've been missing it, Bob.

—Office Space, 1999

The world of work can seem to be an intractable beast. Whether you're running a team, running an organization, or running away from a soul‐sapping job, all too often you may be slamming your head against your desk (literally or figuratively) as you ponder how to get work done well, humanely, and cost‐effectively. It's a riddle wrapped within an enigma bundled up in complexity, right?

This book takes the opposite view. Fixing present‐day work isn't easy, but it can be remarkably straightforward. If we're willing to look at the basics with a fundamentally human lens, we can begin to solve seemingly impossible problems like breaking historical productivity barriers or shaping a truly diverse workforce. Want to build a powerhouse workplace? Think like a human—at organization and team level. When brought to practical reality, statements like Work shouldn't be boring or Job descriptions shouldn't rule out most of the workforce can forever change how your organization or your team work.

This book focuses on two goals. The first goal is establishing language to speak about work problems you've likely long experienced but have never been able to fully articulate. Whether you're dealing with Boss Baby Customers or fighting the curse of performative work, being able to name the problem—and describe it to the stakeholders all around you—is often half the battle. The second goal is putting forth a toolkit of 90 strategies to address these gnarly workplace problems. You'll find these strategies at the end of every chapter. Forty‐five of these strategies can be implemented at organization level—the macro view—while 45 take the micro view and can be implemented at team level. There's no right set of strategies, or right order to implement them in, only what's effective for your organization or your team as you test and learn in real time.

The insight from this book comes both from my own work across my career and the insights of my colleagues across Mercer, the more than 75‐year‐old consultancy redefining the world of work, reshaping retirement and investment outcomes, and unlocking real health and well‐being. In Mercer's work with organizations, we find that embracing an array of strategies in a coordinated fashion generally trumps a single‐point approach. People problems are more like a friendship bracelet, with many strands woven together, than a single‐piece metal bangle.

How do we unravel the problems of the present and weave a new future? We'll start by learning the language of the ways work is broken, and then dive into how, having named the problem, we can begin to use a humanistic lens to fix it. We'll then meet a couple of nefarious characters—the Work Anxiety Monster and the Boss Baby Customer—whose efforts deform even the best workplaces. Having slain some monsters, we'll take a sledgehammer to the Workforce Copy Machine—the mechanisms that keep the future of work looking a lot like the past. From there, we'll look at a couple of basic resets that powerfully change how work gets done: making decisions in a more human way and thinking about populations instead of individuals. We'll then examine a trio of underappreciated forces (immigration, migration, and incarceration) that might be affecting your workforce and workplace far more than you thought. We'll also examine how to think about technology such that it works for, not against, your human workers—and we'll talk about how to stop humans from undermining themselves via greedy work, Animal Farm syndrome, and organizational structures and processes that ask too much of them. Finally, we'll turn our eyes toward the end of the rainbow: What does a real, attainable, future of work that works for both employers and employees look like?

It's going to be a fun, thought‐provoking, and deeply practical journey. I'm thrilled you're along for the ride.

1

The Great Work Unpack: Understanding and Fixing Broken Work

That for a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never‐ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society.

—William Morris, Useful Work and Useless Toil, 1885

Work sucks.

It's important that we start there, because part of what's gone wrong, across centuries and continents, is that we've shied away from this fundamental truth. We've gone after a monstrous problem with carefully chosen words and some light waving of hands, when what we actually needed to do was stake it through the heart, cut its head off, stuff the head with garlic, and expose the mangled corpse to the sunlight so it could catch fire and evaporate.

You might read this and say, Work doesn't suck! I love my job. Many folks do love their jobs—but at any time, according to Mercer's data from our employee listening work with more than 8 million employees over decades, nearly a third of workers are seriously thinking about quitting. And those are just the folks who've been pushed to the point of no return.

For the rest of us, even when we're most excited about work, the dirty little secret is we kind of hate it too. I love my job—leading Transformation Solutions in North America for Mercer; I get to partner with brilliant, deeply kind colleagues to help an array of interesting organizations reshape their workforces and ways of working for the future.

But part of why I love my job is the opportunity to fix all of the things about work that I know are absolutely awful. Throughout my career, I've seen it all, across large and small firms, great and terrible leaders, and an ever‐blossoming array of tech successes and failures. I've worked to solve hairy, gnarly workplace problems for my clients, but also, all too often, for my own teams. For every triumph, there are a million frustrations, and I've been plagued for decades with the sense that we could do this all better.

As we grapple with the seismic changes in work that have come with the COVID‐19 pandemic, the silver lining to a dark cloud that has killed millions may be that we have a once‐in‐several‐generations opportunity to genuinely reset how we work.

My personal epiphany about work came in the spring of 2020. COVID‐19 had turned the city I love into a horror movie—empty and silent, with sirens wailing all night. My husband works in air cargo, so as shoppers moved from buying in person to buying online, demand for his company's services boomed, and he found himself working 24/7. My daughter's kindergarten was