The Work Revolution

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

This quote from Leo Tolstoy and referenced in a fantastic article by McKinsey Quarterly on organizational change, resonates most loudly in the land of startups and technology. More often than not, startup companies with industry-changing business models get splashed across the headlines for their dysfunctional internal management and leaders — see Uber, Tinder, Dropbox. While some companies can continue to attract employees because of their promise of success, the majority of companies that must scale their workforce quickly, as Google and Salesforce did, have placed a lot of focus on employee development initiatives. In order to execute their disruptive, world-changing visions, these companies have needed to stay focused on how to retain (and attract) the people who will be executing their visions. Consequently, employee engagement is being brought to the forefront of more and more company initiatives. Successful companies have accomplished an engaged workforce through progressively more purpose-focused organizational cultures. This doesn’t mean putting a nice coat of paint on the company with perks and purpose statements, it means a much more integral change within the actual values of the company, its management structure, and its people. This monumental shift from industrial efficiencies to human efficiencies, and further, employee engagement to employee empowerment, is what some people in the organizational and cultural development space are terming the “work revolution”.

What’s catalyzing this Work Revolution?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2020, one million programming jobs in the U.S. will go unfilled. Since good talent, primarily within software engineering, is in short supply, it’s forced companies to begin to evolve beyond just company benefits and perks, and to focus on the personal development of their employees, which is having a broad-reaching ripple effect across Silicon Valley companies. Delivering Happiness, the consulting firm co-founded by Tony Hsieh, author of the eponymous book and CEO of Zappos, calls this concept, “the Ripple of Impact”, and believes that “by focusing on people first, we are able to also impact companies and communities…creating more ‘ROI’”.

Organizational culture has been moved to the forefront of the software development recruiting tug-of-war, as it’s one of the distinguishing factors for a company to attract and retain their employees. Engineer-founded public companies, like Google, had a meaningful impact on what top employees expect of the companies they work for by attributing their success to a highly intelligent, innovative, and relatively autonomous workforce. As noted by the 2015 Global Human Capital Trends survey from Deloitte, a leading management consulting firm in Human Capital research, “In an era of heightened corporate transparency, greater workforce mobility, and severe skills shortages, culture, engagement, and retention have emerged as top issues for business leaders. These issues are not simply an HR problem.”

Companies like Airbnb are frequently lauded for an organizational culture that acknowledges the high value of the human aspects of their company. John Bersin, Principal and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte, an enterprise learning and talent management research and advisory firm acquired by Deloitte, points out “…the issue of ‘engaging people well’ is becoming one of the biggest competitive differentiators in business.”

Josh Allan Dykstra, co-founder of WorkRevolution.org describes the movement from his Gallup research perspective “The work revolution is nothing less than a complete reinvention of our relationship with work. The latest research indicates that, more than anything else, the whole world wants a good job, and on the whole we are failing miserably at delivering this. The word “revolution” comes from the Latin word revolutio, which means “a complete turn around.” Instead of the vast majority of us being disengaged and tuned out at work, we want to turn that number around — we want everyone to have meaningful and life-giving work.”

Why companies can’t ignore the importance of culture?

A Gallup report on employee engagement in the workplace reasserts that employee engagement contributes to a company’s bottom line and notes that “Engaged workers are the lifeblood of their organizations. Work units in the top 25% of Gallup’s Q12 Client Database have significantly higher productivity, profitability, and customer ratings, less turnover and absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents than those in the bottom 25%.”

John Bersin, echoes this with, “The change we need to make is to redefine engagement beyond an “annual HR measure” to a continuous, holistic part of an entire business strategy. If your people love their work and the environment you have created, they will treat customers better, innovate, and continuously improve your business. And today, with the increased transparency at work and the Affordable Health Care Act available, high performers can change jobs easier than ever.”

Additional value of culture in employee retention is represented in USA Today’s article “Do happy workers mean higher company profits?”, which highlights “In information technology, an industry notorious for job-hopping, voluntary turnover is 5.9% at the companies on the (Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For) list, vs. 14.4%”. Delivering Happiness, even has a calculator to roughly quantify the cost savings of a happy company culture, asserting that “Companies with a higher sense of purpose outperform others by 400%”.

Companies need a better approach for measuring their culture

The concept of “employee engagement”, which is the current metric for measuring company cultures, doesn’t incorporate the holistic needs of employees within progressive organizations. A recent concept of the “Irresistible Organization” has emerged. Bersin by Deloitte’s company research has determined that, “The concepts of “employee engagement” have been with us for many years. More than 30 years ago Gallup and other companies pioneered the concept of the “engagement survey”…While this is a good thing to do, most companies now tell us that this process is not keeping up. It’s not detailed enough, it isn’t real-time, and it doesn’t consider all the work related issues which drive employee commitment. A new breed of engagement tools vendors, models, books, and workshops has emerged — all focused on building what we call today’s ‘Irresistible Organization.’”

The keystones to these Irresistible Organizations are “meaningful work”, “hands-on management”, “positive work environment”, “growth opportunity”, and “trust in leadership” — all building blocks for more purpose-driven employees. As you can see, these are all integral company changes, not perks and ping pong tables.

Key influencers in the Work Revolution

While many of the companies on Fortune’s List of the Best 100 Companies to Work For are tech companies, Google has been the longstanding frontrunner in the movement of optimizing employee engagement. Google has developed extensive programs, including building out a People Operations department that focuses on data-driven methods for this. They’ve also implemented and maintain an industry-leading organizational management structure that is much flatter and more transparent than traditional companies (i.e. employees usually know the upcoming products they can expect to be released to the mainstream and teams are generally self-managed).

Google is notorious for its impressive employee perks and benefits, and many companies shirk the responsibility to aspire to Google’s level by claiming that Google is only able to create a great culture because they’re flush with cash. But, in an article discussing the key to Google’s employee engagement, their Head of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, emphasizes that Google’s success is mostly based on its culture — “I was at a dinner of Chief HR Officers once and one told me, “Well of course Google can do this. You guys have great margins. I’m in a business with low single-digit margins. I can’t afford cafes or TGIFs or any of the things you do.” He was right that he couldn’t afford the cafes, but the cafes don’t actually have anything to do with it. Before I could reply, another person jumped in and said, “What are you talking about? Most of what makes Google’s culture work is free.” She was right. The bulk of what we do to cultivate this creative, passionate workforce costs nothing.”

Leading startup companies, like Square, Pinterest, and Uber, have all recognized the importance of employee-centricity as witnessed in their recent job listings for “Head of People Development” positions. Airbnb recently changed the title of their Chief HR Officer to Chief Employee Experience Officer. Some of the most progressive companies in this movement are Zappos (very prominent in the news lately) and Medium. They’re experimenting with a new, ideally transparent, “self-organizing” management structure, called Holacracy, in order to increase employee innovation and engagement beyond HR/People Operations measures. Responsive.org, started by the co-founder and former CTO of Yammer, is a growing movement around this idea of self-managing, flexible organizations.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are also meant for more integral change within company structures. They’re a management methodology, used by most top tech companies, that aims to increase transparency, communication, and ideally purpose, within an organization. Betterworks is a notable startup that provides an enterprise goals platform built around OKRs, with John Doerr (who introduced OKRs to Google) on their Board of Directors and Laszlo Bock on their Board of Advisors.

Supported by the reports from Gallup and Deloitte, there’s a trend toward larger corporations attempting to follow suit to stay competitive with the newer structures of companies like Google, Salesforce, and Twitter. This has led to an emergence of boutique culture change management consulting firms, for instance, SY Partners, which is responsible for helping with the reinvention of Starbucks after Howard Shultz’s return to the company as CEO. Recently-emerged consulting firms attempting to help improve the culture of larger companies are Delivering Happiness (mentioned previously), Forte, Hospitality Quotient, Great Place to Work (they’ve been around for 25 years), and Undercurrent. Even more, the management consulting firm, Bain & Company, the creators of the progressively adopted Net Promoter Score for measuring customer satisfaction, recently developed an eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) rating program.

While it’s questionable how integrally a culture can be meaningfully changed from within a large, established corporation, it’s promising that a soul-less culture is becoming less and less widely accepted.

People want purpose, not just employee perks

The phase beyond employee engagement lies in employees finding purpose within their careers, which is something that Google has been progressing towards. Their primary hiring aim is to create a culture of passionate, innovative employees, which comes with helping employees to realize purpose within the role of their job within their life. In the same article previously referenced, Lazlo Bock adds, “We spend more time working than we do on almost any other activity in our lives. People want all that time to mean something…People look for meaning in their work. People want to know what’s happening in their environment. People want to have some ability to shape that environment. Mission. Transparency. Voice. These three components of our culture create a virtuous cycle of attraction, community, engagement, and innovation…”

Some of Google’s initiatives to help their employees find more purpose within their lives are their personal development programs, including Search Inside Yourself, developed within Google, and Designing Your Life, developed within the Stanford Design School. Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a company born out of Google’s program, references a 2013 Gallup poll on their website, saying “Leaders are missing what matters most — 70% of employees are disengaged, leading to lower productivity, innovation, and wellbeing. Only 8% of people strongly agree that they experience overall wellbeing because of their work.” The goal of the institute is to re-engage employees through meditation and mindfulness training.

Other thought leaders, including Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO is well-known for emphasizing leadership development through mindfulness and meditation. LinkedIn even has a Philosopher of Leadership and Organizational Development, a post held by Fred Kofman whose background includes a PhD in Economics.

While mindfulness and mediation aren’t the immediate paths people think of for finding purpose within a career, they’ve been found to effectively derive more engagement and awareness within one, and training programs for them are gradually being more widely adopted within companies (even Aetna, the health insurance company).

One of my favorite thought leaders in this area of purpose-driven employment is Chip Conley, Founder of Joie de Vivre Hotels and Head of Hospitality at Airbnb. He authored a book called Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, which discusses a vision for employees to become self-actualized through what they do for employment. One excerpt highlights, “There are three kinds of relationships one can have with work: you either have a job, a career, or a calling…Someone who sees his or her work as just a job tends to be stuck at the “money” or survival level of the pyramid. Those who are on a career path (there’s no such thing as a “job path”) find great motivation on the success level in the way they are “recognized” at work. Yet, outside rewards and recognition can wear out as motivators over the course of a long career because there’s a certain level of compliance required. More and more people are finding that they need something that feels more internally generated as their infuser of energy. For those of us lucky souls who experience our work as a calling, there is a natural transformative effect when we find great “meaning” in what we do, what our company does, or both.”

Josh Bersin supports this idea with the statement “Many industries are trying to re-engage their people. Financial institutions are redefining their mission and values. Pharmaceutical companies are shifting from “drug companies” to “health and wellness companies.” As Joey Reiman discusses in “The Story of Purpose,” people are not motivated by the bottom line — they want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves.”

The ultimate accomplishment of a company within the work revolution is to help employees find purpose and contribute to some level of self-actualization through their employment and association with the company.

What does this mean for the average employee?

Now, if you’re not someone working at one of the companies that’s adopting meaningful culture changes yet, it’s even more important for you to be looking out for your own career and purpose-focused development.

The upside to being an entrepreneur is that one can likely reach fulfillment from their career more quickly, working for a company and within a position that they really love. The downside is that their exposure to many fewer co-workers and development programs, will make it more difficult to know the full scope of options outside of their immediate knowledge base.

In light of the minimal opportunities to do this in a broad way within smaller startups, I want to share some recommendations on the more effective trends I’ve seen people using to manage their professional development.

I’ve been organizing the San Francisco Women 2.0 City meetups for the past 3.5 years, which gathers 100+ females in tech each month to network around their entrepreneurial careers. After speaking with numerous attendees, I’ve found it very interesting that the majority of them are not familiar with the concept of a career coach.

Career coaches with an emphasis on counseling will help people navigate both the horizontal and upward trajectory of their career, and how it fits with their life purpose (or they’ll even help you identify your life purpose). As employees are remaining within their company, industry, and profession for much shorter amounts of time through each progressing generation, it’s increasingly more important to develop the management and maneuvering skills to pursue their most satisfying and/or purpose-filled careers.

I spent a couple years looking for a career coach, through recommendations from a select group of friends who were familiar with the space, and finally came across Melissa Lau, a Mindful Leadership coach who fits like a glove with my values, goals, and who also had direct experience within the industry I work. I’m a huge advocate of mindfulness and establishing exceptional emotional intelligence in the workplace, and she specializes in this particularly progressive approach to coaching.

Getting a career coach is a very personal decision, and investing the time and money into a good one deserves a good deal of research. While there are firms that place you with career coaches, I’ve found that individuals who’ve managed to build their own practices, are generally the most accomplished and multi-faceted ones. The Wallstreet Journal has some good tips for selecting a career coach: here. And you can find some more tips and a list of Stanford Alumni coaches: here. There’s also The Coaching Fellowship for career coaching of women between 25–35. There were a very large number of career coaches in attendance at the Wisdom 2.0 conference.

Additionally, at Women 2.0's last conference Kathy Savitt, CMO of Yahoo, did a talk on How to THRIVE in Entrepreneurship, Business and Life and recommended that all professionals create their own personal Board of Directors, which includes sponsors, mentors, and advisors from various parts of your life who can guide you to achieve your optimal career passions. While some connections are made within working at companies, many of your Directors can come from external networking encounters. A recent company I discovered that can help with this is called Glassbreakers. It’s a peer-to-peer mentoring network for women which was recently featured in Newsweek’s What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women cover story. With all of the fluctuation in companies and career paths these days, it’s important to have all of the external guidance you can get, especially if your trajectory isn’t being overseen from the macro-perspective of a larger, employee-focused company.

Joining the Revolution

The momentum behind all of this has brought about more widely accepted movements toward ways to marry professional and personal actualization, seen in events like Wisdom 2.0, a conference that has grown to 2,500 in attendance (with a waitlist of 500) this last year. The uniting goal of participants of the conference is “to live with greater wisdom, purpose, and meaning, while using technology in ways that create a more open and healthy culture.” Note: I attended the one in March and it was the most transformative conference I’ve ever been to, populated by people with a combination of high IQ and high EQ (completely different from SXSW, TechcrunchDisrupt, CES, MWC).

Emerging organizations like workrevolution.org and greatworkcultures.org are creating communities that showcase thought-leadership within purpose-driven employment cultures.

If you’re at a smaller company, keep in mind the Rework point that “You don’t create a culture. It happens. This is why new companies don’t have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in….You can’t install a culture. Like a fine scotch, you’ve got to give it time to develop.” Your goal as an employee in a small startup (especially, a startup without an HR/People Operations department) is to do everything you can to create an environment that empowers purpose-driven employment.

I’m certainly optimistic about how the Silicon Valley-approach to progressively more purpose-driven cultures and organizational development processes will influence employee engagement within the organizational structure and culture of this next generation of corporations.

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THANK YOUS:
Josh Allan Dykstra — WorkRevolution.org, Forte
Julie Clow — SVP People Development, Chanel, WorkRevolution.org
Christine Lai — Delivering Happiness
Brad Wolfe — Delivering Happiness
Prof. Hugh O’Doherty — Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy (Adaptive Leadership), Harvard Kennedy School
Alexis Gomez Garcia — Zappos
Clay Parker Jones — Undercurrent
Alix Zacharias — Undercurrent
Menaka Shroff — Betterworks
Melissa Lau — Seachange Coaching
Raabia Shafi — Hospitality Quotient
Phil Chambers — Thrive-ai/Podio
Yakov Barton — Ph.D. Clinical Psychology, Positive Psychology/Mindfulness Trainer, Columbia University
Alejandra Jusidman — SY Partners
Mary Kate Stimmler—Google, People Analytics
Matt Weisinger—Airbnb
Dan Calpin—Bain & Company
Hannah Yankelevich — McKinsey & Company
Taylor Evans—Twitter