Lenin & Goethe on...future work-life
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!
Thanks for all the positive feedback from the first Future Work-Life newsletter last week.
I’ll be testing out a few different formats over the next couple of months so feel free to let me know which you prefer.
I mentioned some practical guides to remote work in the last newsletter, and a few of you asked which I would recommend. Here are a couple of links that you might find useful.
Wordpress is an example of an incredibly successful company that just happens to have a distributed workforce. Their CEO, Matt Mullenweg, has a great podcast series that discuss remote work best practices, and he captures some of the benefits of this approach in this neat infographic.
Toptal is a ‘global remote work company’. They’ve created a detailed ‘playbook’ on how to gear up your team for a period away from the office.
"There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s rarely my first port of call when I’m looking for some insight into the future of work, but I’m going to give it to him this time. He nailed it with that quote.
As Andrew Hill put it in the FT this week, "some companies will survive this crisis and others will die". Quoting veteran management thinker Peter Senge, he writes that “those who were on a path toward deep change will find ways to use the forces now at play to carry on and even expand. Those who weren’t won’t.”
There are some work-life lessons to be learnt from the varied response of companies to this crisis. In particular, how organisational culture and the mindset of leaders have prepared them for this situation and what impact this will have on their ability to emerge positively on the other side.
"Leaders benefit from loosening control during crises, enabling staff to creatively and intuitively respond to an uncertain and unknown situation” (McKenzie Lloyd-Smith), all characteristics of an organisation that empowers their workforce to operate flexibly.
The good news is that even many organisations that have previously been slow to evolve their culture to the overwhelmingly positive evidence for flexible working, (particularly when it’s structured) are now rapidly attempting to adapt.
Given that the starting point for many businesses is so low – Gallup's most recent research shows that up to 85% of workers worldwide aren’t engaged with their jobs – I hope that this pragmatic response proves the beginning of an experiment to test the effectiveness of more flexible work arrangements.
What can business leaders and managers do right now to motivate their team and take advantage of this opportunity?
In Drive, Daniel Pink's identifies three intrinsic motivations that determine our relationship with work.
Autonomy (our need to be in control of what we do and when we do it)
Mastery (a sense of improvement and progress)
Purpose (a desire to do something that has meaning).
You can watch his TED Talk on the subject, here.
Although it may be tempting for companies to resort to a paternalistic approach during times of uncertainty - as evidenced by the baffling use of surveillance technology as described in this Reset podcast – this is the time to show you trust your team and engender a ‘growth mindset’.
Typically, companies have invested in the mastery part, without necessarily understanding the importance of autonomy and purpose. Unfortunately for them, this isn't a recipe for success now or in the future.
Adam Grant said it best...
"In remote work, we don't need micromanagers. We need macromanagers to highlight our contribution to the team and reinforce the broader purpose of our work. One of the most meaningful parts of a manager's job is making other people's jobs more meaningful."
Creating a culture of communication and openness is as vital now as it always has been, and it will remain so. If you want to listen to a superb articulation of how this can instil purpose, I’d recommend you check out this interview with Angela Ahrendts on Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast. She’s the former SVP Retail at Apple and CEO of Burberry and advocates imbuing meaning in the company’s mission by creating down-to-earth, meaningful connections with people within the organisation.
Interestingly, she also discusses how the influence of her family relationships has translated into an approach to work which emphasises human connection. It strikes me that a movement towards home-working is reducing the traditional barriers between home and office life.
Indeed, one benefit of this crisis is that it’s created a sense of understanding of people’s individual circumstances. In this Harvard Business Review article, Joan Williams considers the benefits of the current situation in helping expose the fallacy of the ‘ideal worker’.
She discusses, for example, the struggles of many parents to perform three jobs at the moment – worker, parent and teacher; something to which I can relate!
The uniqueness of each individual's circumstances is a fascinating aspect of this situation. It's illustrated well by the divergent perspectives given by Jenny Odell and Hugo Rifkind this week. which speak both to the respective challenges they face while simultaneously recognising the experience of others.
On Ezra Klein’s podcast, Odell discusses themes of isolation and burnout, while in The Times, Rifkind nicely summarises how a disparity between people's perception of time is the defining feature of life in lockdown.
"I have friends and family now plunged into enforced idleness, watching box sets, playing epic computer games, or in one case doggedly reading all six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Whereas I, with full-time co-parenting now ladled on top of my normal full-time job, have never had less “me time” in my life. Often, I’m nodding off on the sofa by half-past nine. Take up painting? Learn Mandarin? Are you mad?"
One last lasting impact of Covid-19 will be our reassessment of what's important in our lives and a better appreciation of others.
I hope that another will be recognition of the benefits of flexible work-life design and an appreciation of the positive effects of a 'growth mindset'.
After all, to paraphrase [cue German cultural reference] the great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
"If you treat an individual as they are, they will remain how they are. But if you treat them as if they were what they ought to be and could be, they will become what they ought to be and could be."
Thanks and have a good weekend,
Ollie