7 Ways Work Is F*ed Up

Work and love are the two core human drivers. We work not just to earn our keep or provide for ourselves and our families. For many of us, work is critical to our identity, a way to create meaning and impact. Work is where our most willful, creative, and productive actions happen. In the best case scenario, our jobs are a form of self-expression, and can fill our day with something of worth and purpose. Work is also a place where we can be part of something: a team, an organization, a body (yes, the corporeal corporation).

But that’s not the way work is being experienced for most people. Some 7 out of 10 people are just not engaged in their work, and God knows the economics aren’t working very well for most of us. This is a travesty, because working isn’t just exchanging time for money; it’s exchanging our life for money.

So what’s wrong with it? After 25 years coming up in the system, as corporate babe and CEO, being venture backed and being boot strapped, stepping into conscious capitalism, failing and succeeding in varying degrees, here are some things I see — personal hypotheses on why it’s so fucked up - for your consideration.

1) It’s hierarchical

There’s an underlying premise in the employer-employee relationship: There is a limited pie of real wealth, one that accrues at the top, and the rest of the world should be okay with getting by — food, shelter, maybe healthcare. We are taught to “work our way up” via a long inherited history of hierarchy that stretches back in a chain of lopsided relationships. From today’s CEOs to the nineteenth century’s robber barons and all the way back to feudal lords, the Western work paradigm has been defined by who has power over whom.

2) It’s disempowering

Once we get into a system where we are dominated and directed as part of a larger structure, we inevitably lose some of our agency. Direct control over our financial state, over our daily tasks, even over whether we are permitted to continue working at an organization — much of this is out of ours hands in a typical American workplace — at will employment. We lose direct visibility over our fate in that position, and we lose control to determine our own futures. If we’re stuck in a work structure designed to restrict us, rather than liberate and motivate us, our freedom to create impact and value may also be diminished.

3) It’s dehumanizing

Surely we don’t intentionally raise our children to be widgets. We don’t hope they grow up to work as mid-level managers in a cubical with a boss who keeps them on edge and under constant threat of firing, while they develop office-workers’ posture and a lifetime addiction to Xanax. We want them to have long lives of personal strength, happiness, self-actualization and meaning. But these goals are increasingly difficult to attain. A good portion of people are going to an assembly line, coding monitor or fast food position. And our work system tells these people they should they be grateful that they even have a job, that “jobs have been generated” for them. Are these adequate options, for ourselves or our children?

4) It’s digital, while we’re analog!

Work in the information age is challengingly abstract — it’s often not connected to our biology or any tangible need. We do things that are not directly relevant to day-to-day life. Most people are not growing food or building houses; we are not as actively taking care of our children, or going about our day healing others or creating beauty- the things we are biologically crafted for. This isn’t to dismiss IT specialists or financial work, just to point out that many of us are working at a level once-removed from the physical world, which begs some reintroduction to forms of work in alignment with our bodies.

5) There’s a lot of fear

Fear and its companion, anxiety, pervade the current work culture. They are present among employees, in employee-employer relationships, and even in company-customer relationships. Fear is the number one trigger for disconnection in the workplace, and it is toxic. In some company cultures, fear is even cultivated as a way to keep everyone on their toes. Not only doesn’t it work; it’s a form of bullying. At the employee level, fear stops people from doing what they are there to do. People are afraid of losing their jobs, and suffer anxiety and stress. All of this takes away from their ability to work smart, produce results, and enjoy what they do. On the flipside, many a boss’s greatest fear is the 360-degree performance review, where he or she gets real feedback. Some companies even fear their customers, worried about how they will fire back at them through social media and word of mouth. Fear dynamics create a work environment that’s on edge, as opposed to joy dynamics, which help create an environment in flow.

6) It rewards inauthenticity

A hesitancy to be vulnerable disconnects us. Employers and boards of directors are hesitant to enter a transparent relationship with their employees; they are scared of becoming vulnerable in disclosing the company’s financials or strategy. People don’t show their true selves, but mask to perpetuate myths and personas. Inauthenticity in turn diminishes trust.

7) It’s devolves us to consumers

The ingrained denial of creativity in much of our work world has framed us mostly as consumers instead of creators, and seems to be at the root of a lot of contemporary malaise. To be a consumer is a minimization of who we are. To consider ourselves consumers is to believe that our only job is to go out and purchase. But we aren’t just part of a mechanism designed simply to make money to buy things to serve the machine in some unending cycle.

This institutional design of work that most of civilization has inherited is based on outdated thinking and old models of class structure. For those in the freelance economy, designing their lives, many of these things go away, but new problems arise.

But we’re the ones allowing it.

How can we actively redesign systems of work to solve these problems?

That’s the subject of this series, redesigning work for greater connections. More to come.

*Design Anything. Including Your Life.*