All Jobs Should be ‘Service Jobs of Love’
A recent New York Times opinion piece foresees a future of AI-induced mass unemployment. In this scenario, the only remaining jobs will be “service jobs of love”. These jobs are things like “accompanying an older person to visit a doctor”. I find the term deeply compelling, but want to apply it much more widely. I believe we need to start approaching ordinary work, at all levels of the organization, as service jobs of love.
We've fully entered the service economy. Service value emerges from helping customers accomplish their goals, rather than from building objects we then convince people to buy. Providing service requires looking beyond ourselves. While redesigning their site a few years ago, AirBnB had the epiphany that “the product was the trip”; in other words, finding lodging was just part of a larger process that mattered to the guest. From that perspective, is helping someone find a place to stay while they’re in town for their child’s wedding inherently different from helping your elderly parent get to the doctor?
If service is about helping others, what is love? When you love your child, or your spouse, or your parent, you put their needs before your own. Wim Rampen, a leading expert in customer service and marketing, identifies the willingness to put your customer needs before your own needs as the true litmus test of customer-centricity.
This kind of love needs to go beyond customer relationships. It also needs to permeate internal relationships. The quality of the customer experience depends on the quality of the interactions between the various parts of the service organization. DevOps, for example, has discovered the importance of empathy between development and operations teams. The high-tech industry in general is recognizing the negative business impact of emotional and social problems like burnout, depression, harassment, and lack of diversity and inclusion. Traditionally hard-nosed engineering organizations are coming to understand the bottom-line value of taking care of each other.
Digital business depends on systems thinking. Systems thinking prioritizes global over local optimization. Yet executive teams often still look like Elizabethan court dramas, full of maneuvering, jealousy, and zero-sum thinking. Imagine if executives thought in terms of putting each other before themselves. That attitude would flow throughout the organization, both down and across.
When I imagine a company where everyone sees their work as a service job of love, everyone enjoys coming to work more. They are more engaged, productive, and customer-centered. Creativity flows more freely. The attitude of innovating on each others’ behalf translates into innovating on customers’ behalf. At least if contemporary service design, customer service, and organizational design experts are to believed, a love-based organization translates into better outcomes both for customers and for the business.
