Personalisation: part two
Future Work/Life is a weekly newsletter that casts a positive eye to the future. I bring you interesting stories and articles, analyse industry trends and offer tips on designing a better work/life. If you enjoy reading it, please SUBSCRIBE HERE, and share it!
I'm glad many of you enjoyed the first of this two-part series on the personalisation of work. I'll come back to the subject again before long as there's plenty more to explore.
In the meantime, for any subscribers, new or old, who would like to read previous newsletters, you'll find a link to them at the bottom of the page. And, of course, feel free to share with anyone you think will find them interesting.
Last week I touched on a couple of macro trends that offer opportunities to leverage and monetise our unique skills. This week, I'm turning to possibilities for personalisation within organisations, which should provide food for thought for executives, managers and individual team members.
First up is job crafting - an approach to job design that is ideally suited for SMEs but, equally, valuable in larger organisations that encourage a culture of intrapreneurship.
Why is culture important?
Simply put, it's going to be tough out there for a while, which means we've all got to become more adaptable, play to our strengths and embrace the opportunities that come from a new way of working together. The companies that thrive will be those that successfully foster a sense of collective purpose while giving people the autonomy and support to craft their own way of working.
The scientific management approach born out of the industrial revolution is looking rather tired today. The idea that one job title or description neatly encapsulates the roles of several individuals performing in that role is incompatible with many aspects of modern work.
Bringing your knowledge and interests to bear on your job makes eminent sense since it carries the dual benefit of increasing engagement while making work feel more meaningful. Critically, it works, as proven in industry tests.
Crafting your job presents an opportunity to create more value by matching your skills with the needs of your employer.
As Jane E. Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski write in this Harvard Business Review article...
"First, there is task crafting, which involves altering the type, scope, sequence, and the number of tasks that make up your job. Next, you can relationally craft your job by altering whom you interact with in your work. Finally, there is cognitive crafting, where you modify the way you interpret the tasks and/or work you’re doing. To illustrate what each of these types look like, here are stories of three people who redesigned their jobs to unlock more meaning.
Why does this work?
Daniel Cable talks in his book, Alive, about the neuroscience behind making people happy at work. It seems that engagement isn’t just about motivation; it’s biological. Humans crave ‘exploration, experimentation and learning. Cable calls this the ‘seeking system'.
“Maybe for us humans, this is what the seeking system is urging us to do: to explore our environment in order to discover our personal potential in the world in that way. Following our seeking system urges makes us feel good in a purposeful way, which makes us healthier and happier.”
Importantly, Cable presents a whole series of case studies and evidence-based research on the positive impact both on employees and company performance, one example of which he gives in this video.
He also emphasises the need to balance freedom of expression and purpose with more pragmatic considerations, illustrating this through Google's famous "20 per cent time" policy.
"Freedom must be within the frame of what an organisation needs to deliver. Twenty per cent time might balance well when you have a hundred engineers, and every few months, a good idea emerges that attracts other employees, and the idea becomes a movement.
However, that same freedom may not fit into an organisational frame with 20,800 engineers. Encouraging that many people to spend 20 per cent of their time in discovery led to "too many arrows with not enough wood behind them" as Google CEO Larry Page explained.
Most large organisations err on the side of too much frame and not enough freedom, but perhaps 20 per cent was too much freedom. I'm proposing that leaders need to encourage enough freedom so that the frame does not become an iron cage, and employees feel they can experiment and learn."
It's easy to see how this approach is effective in smaller, more agile organisations. What can large companies do?
A recent MIT Sloan Management Review survey of global executives identifies the design of opportunity marketplaces as, 'perhaps the key leadership challenge for organisations seeking to ethically maximise human capital returns.'
"We see opportunity marketplaces as systems, digital platforms, and virtual places where organisations provide — and workers find — the opportunities most relevant to their mutual benefit and success. In an effective marketplace, the enterprise offers its workers defined options for professional development, mentorship, project participation, and networking, among others.
Empowered workers, in turn, can choose to pursue those opportunities they most value. Vibrant, robust, and inclusive opportunity marketplaces strategically align both individual and enterprise aspirations."
Something that jumped out at me in the research is the importance of flipping traditional management theory on its head. Instead of asking, "how can we make better and smarter investments in people?”, companies need to consider “how can we support people in making better, smarter investments in themselves?”.
Opportunity marketplaces 'both demand and elicit agency — the perceived ability to influence one’s future.'
This 2x2 matrix shows how organisations and their leaders might describe their opportunity marketplaces.
Given so many workers are disengaged with their work, combining job crafting with opportunity marketplaces seems an innovative and forward-looking approach. It addresses the demands of businesses to retain their top talent and optimise the performance of their people, while simultaneously increasing fulfilment among the workforce - which we know improves productivity, job satisfaction and performance.
The future of work-life design will involve greater personalisation so I'd love to hear about any initiatives you or your business are taking to capitalise on these - I'll share them in a future newsletter.
See you all next week,
Ollie
Any Other Business:
How agile leaders have tackled the pandemic’s pressures in Wired. Some business success stories from the past couple of months.
Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making on Farnam Street. How do we decide what to do when everything is up in the air, our lives are in flux, and there don’t seem like there are enough hours in the day?
Amazon.com Is Expanding Beyond Books in the New York Times. Once upon a time, Amazon only sold books.
Solving online events by Benedict Evans.
Words of wisdom again from Adam Grant:
