Let’s Fix Work
“Something has gone wrong with work” is the opening line of the most recent month’s centerpiece article in Harper’s Magazine by Erik Baker (May 2023). The line echoes something I began feeling not long before the pandemic. Working remotely, as I had been doing for nearly a decade, it was very easy for me to start to feel disconnected from coworkers, end users, and eventually the mission of the organization.
Recently we’ve been introduced to the term “quiet quitting,” in which workers merely pretend to work while continuing to receive a paycheck. It’s just one example of why Baker argues that work is broken.
Can we fix it? Good question. It helps first to understand the full nature of the problem Baker is describing. I’ll attempt to paraphrase (though I recommend you seek out the full article itself. It’s short but very nuanced and powerful).
It all started a little more than a hundred years ago when workers in the United States were building the infrastructure which we, to a large degree, still can see around us today.
The tunnels and the bridges. The national highways. The levees and dams. Building these behemoth projects was difficult, dangerous work, but there was an overall sense of pride on the part of laborers, too. They were part of something significant.
Coming out of that flurry of effort, meanwhile, was a growing realization that there were just a few mega tycoons profiting off this backbreaking, life-taking labor. The Great Depression further pulled wool from a number of eyes as unregulated financial speculation sunk the American Dream for the Little Guy.
The labor movement was born, forcing government regulation in the form of anti-trust legislation, the 40-hour work week, paid vacation, workplace safety, Social Security, and Medicare, to name just a few of the initiatives that culminated in FDR’s New Deal.
Baker goes on to point out that, even in the midst of all that initial loss of innocence around work, there were the seeds of an entrepreneurial message: that individuals could make and remake themselves through work. There came the first wave of consultants and self-help business books (my, this is embarrassing. Moving right along…)
Then, as companies grew, the economy grew a managerial class of worker — the white-collar crowd — who began to invent new ways to describe and define work, jobs and career. They ate up the business self-help messaging.
With the rise of the service industry, and later the information economy, work-positive messaging went viral, and it was thus: Work can turn us all into happy, fulfilled people, so long as we can just figure out how to align our strengths and our desires to the right job or career. Find the work you love, the saying goes, and you’ll never work a day in your life.
What Baker in his article concludes is that, for most people anyway, this promise of work is no longer legitimate. At least, workers no longer believe that work can make them somehow better, or more self-actualized.
Maybe they watched as their jobs were deemed “non-essential” during Covid, maybe they saw their job lost to a robot, or maybe they had already long determined their daily computing tasks (the digital version of “pencil-pushing”) to be busy work at best.
In other words, “enough with the speeches and slogans, just give me my paycheck and maybe — maybe — I’ll see you on Monday to do this again.” The majority of employees no longer believe there is any meaning to their work beyond trading their time for cold, hard cash. Their work became a mere commodity.
Baker also in the article points to the political strife in the country, in which, in order to drum up angry voters, some pundits and politicians consistently tell people that their neighbors and coworkers are enemies of America for believing x, y, or z. It’s harder to feel part of a team at the office when you suspect that half the people there either despise you or are part of a conspiracy to destroy the country or both.
Due to this poisoning of the well and so many other causes, it’s plain to me that people come to work burdened in a way they didn’t, say, twenty years ago. The weight of the world is on their shoulders thanks to the doomsday hype of media, legitimate fears for their children’s safety in the form of drugs, guns, and social media, and an automating economy that squeezes budgets, especially in the areas of housing, education and healthcare. Meanwhile, the burden of caring for children and aging parents remains unrelenting.
We cannot “fix” all of these issues all at once. Some of these things we may never fix. But I do think that we can start somewhere.
Let’s start where we have some control, and where the incentives to change already exist. Managers and executives have the power to change the way work is organized so that an employee’s experience of work becomes meaningful again and the organization simultaneously becomes more effective and profitable. A virtuous cycle.
How do we inject meaning into work again? It so happens that meaning for people typically comes from various levels of connection. In workplace terms, that equates to employees becoming:
More connected to the mission of the organization. Most of us like to be part of a cause much bigger than ourselves.
More connected to a team, working alongside others to do something incredible we didn’t think we could really accomplish.
More connected to results, including the experience of the client or customer. Perhaps that end-user’s burdened world is made a little more manageable thanks to something we, personally, have done.
More connected to personal success, as we learn and grow in skills and experience. It still feels good to get better at something we have worked hard to master.
Each of these capacities of “good work feeling” are within us. It’s just that organizations, undermined by their own complexity, often lose sight of human psychology and what has worked in the past. Managers and directors are not in general taught the best practices of successful teams, how to coach their people, how to tackle conflict, and all the other skills that are required to orchestrate a positive, even thrilling work experience for their employees.
But they can learn these skills, and that’s where an Organizational Detective comes in. We get to know a company, talking with executives, managers, and even front-line staff to understand where the pain points are. After that deep dive, we share our findings with leadership and then come up with a plan to tackle the various issues together.
These workplace issues are fixable—not all at once, and not overnight—but definitely fixable. It just takes good faith, an intentionality, and an unwillingness to settle for mediocrity and the pain that comes with it. Because going to a job you don’t feel connected to can be extremely painful. At the very least it can numb us, robbing our daysof a vital connection to those around us and to ourselves. It can make us despondent, apathetic, prone to “quiet quitting,” if only in our mind.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
This is why I started The Org Detectives, a company that makes work visible at organizations so that disconnections can be mended. I have always thought that work can be meaningful (and subsequently profitable) so long as teams and workers are aligned with the mission and strategy of their organization.
It is why I love my work, and why I even think The Org Detectives can help America fix its work problem starting by helping leaders like you fix the work at your organization. Starting right now.
Eric Larson is CEO and Lead Consultant of The Organizational Detectives. He is also a writer of the Rett Swinson Mystery novels under the pen name Eric Lodin. Learn more at http://www.theorgdetectives.com.
