Future of Work: What is the Nature of Work? (part 2)
We are all in a crisis right now. COVID has kicked us all a few steps down Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs. We are in a crisis and struggling with basic needs and psychological needs. We are not the best versions of ourselves.
Yet life continues.
In between fending for the needs of our families and ourselves, many are still working on the front lines, trying to hold it together and still do their jobs. Many are at home, trying to bring some sense of normalcy to their own lives, and their families. Some have the privilege of working from home, although it may seem like an obligation. Corporate leaders are responding to our current constraints with various levels of fear and empathy. The fears around loss of productivity or a bankrupt business model are making some leaders impose top-down restrictions. Top-down restrictions in a bottoms-up world will not save you.
In a crisis, real leadership is empathy, and a willingness to revisit our assumptions around the nature of work in light of our current constraints, with a fresh set of eyes and a desire to find a better way that creates value given our constraints. I do not know if we are ever going back to the world we used to inhabit, but to survive, we need to take stock, confront our assumptions, and make some decisions.
What is the nature of work?
In small and large organizations you can group what you do into four distinct activities:
Learning: In every organization, there is a flow of information. No matter your role, you consume information. Part of your job is learning. In some cases, you may be learning new skills in your organization as well as learning about new information relevant to your job. Your learning is driven by the information you are consuming, whether it be written word in print or on-screen, audio via podcasts, or the radio, video snippets online or over the air, or in-person with another person. You also may learn with other people, through workshops, conferences, or classes that help you continue your education
Doing / Making: These are the core activities of your job or the jobs you need to get done weekly to be compensated. This is the core activity and demonstration of your value proposition. Sometimes the work you do takes a little bit of focus over a short period. Sometimes it takes a lot of focus to maintain accuracy in the face of monotonous tasks. Sometimes the work is deep work, which requires longer continuous uninterrupted time cycles.
When you make or do with others, you can collaborate at the same time (synchronous) or at different times (asynchronous). Synchronous making is collaboration at the same time — think — rowing a boat together or playing a tennis game. Some work tasks do require a tandem of bodies in coordinated motion at the same time. The best version of synchronous making is like a murmuration of starlings.
Asynchronous making that doesn’t take place at the same time is more along the lines of building a wall, brick by brick. Or the creation of a Wikipedia article, for example, edit by edit. In doing or making, it is important to consider our jobs to be done — both individually and collectively, and determine how to optimize our synchronous making and be clear on where we make asynchronously. These are new behaviors that need to be communicated out loud.
Managing: Individuals and organizations all require management of time, resources, attention, and expectations. The act of managing is needed for grooming and hygiene. You need to manage your time, your resources, and your goals. You also need to manage others inside your organization such as your boss or your team, as well as third-party partners who are external to your organization. Management is necessary for any multicellular organism to function. Paul Graham has an interesting essay about the make schedules vs manage schedules. I try to stick to 4 hr cycles for when I’m focused on making and 30min cycles for when I’m managing.
Communicating: Multi-person organizations need to transmit information between themselves regularly to coordinate activities and work. Sometimes this information is to make you aware of something you should know. Sometimes this information helps get your job done. Communication goes hand in hand with management. High-quality communication helps individuals and organizations self-manage, learn, and do most effectively. Communication takes the form of many mediums across an organization, with email historically being the most-used channel. We struggle with email overload, and my point-of-view is that email is for people outside of your organization. Internal communications should take place across a communications channel that defaults to being open and public to that community of collaborators. Anything else puts the onus on the individuals in the organization to surface the right information to their teammates at the right time. That doesn’t work. Instead, information becomes weaponized and held closely to be useful to the individual, instead of the organization. In a partially-to-fully-remote world, this is a losing strategy.
All of these activities that comprise the nature of work require your attention every week, with varying demands of time split across activities. There is a direct and indirect value that each of these activities brings to your life and organization. If you had a choice in which to allocate your time independent of need, I would recommend focusing on growth activities on the left side — the learning and doing/making drive growth and are the best expenditure of energy.
In this new experiment at the scale of working from home, we are seeing a lot of organizations address the gaps in their technology to meet our current constraints, however, new tools bring into focus existing cultural issues, which ultimately need to be addressed. Current technology platforms adopted by organizations such as Slack, Office 365, or the Google Docs stack, remove friction from managing and communicating while increasing the individual and group’s ability to make/do and learn.
Every organization has an opportunity to revisit its operating model and assumptions on workload. In my opinion, the current 40 hours / 5 day a week work cycle is a legacy holdover of the industrial revolution. It has served its purpose and needs to be updated. Pre-COVID we saw forward-thinking organizations change their operating hours while seeing a better return on effort. COVID should expose the lie of the 8hr workday and have us revisit our assumptions. We should prioritize shared synchronous time. Everything else should be scheduled accordingly. We have an opportunity to define what a sustainable work-from-home model looks like for all of our organizations big and small. Some of that plan will require some technology investments and changes. But tools themselves won’t save us from ourselves. Many of our workplaces and offices will need to make hard choices to try and help our culture be more transparent and open.
We should all have a bias towards action, with a focus on making/doing when we can. If we build systems to make explicit our internal activity and processes, our organization is forced to be less siloed and instead becomes a lot more open. The consequence of such an approach is an improvement in culture, and an opportunity to increase our productivity.
For every organization trying to keep it together while working from home, a few suggestions for you to consider:
- Rethink what you’re doing and why: Your business model is likely changing, which brings new opportunities to the forefront, and changes roles and responsibilities. Every organization is well served in revisiting a Lean Canvas (link)for their Businesses to remind themselves of their value proposition and explore different solutions given the current constraints. No organization is an island unto itself — remapping the empathy map (link) of your customers is key.
- What you make or do may change — be clear on the jobs to be done, and articulate roles and responsibilities: Some of what we do requires collaboration with others. be clear on those activities that require synchronous collaboration and ensure you have the processes, tools, and time to make together effectively. Google Docs and Office 365 paired with a conference line helps our team draft and co-create content and complete tasks together. Platforms like Miro, help us run through design thinking exercises which identify problems to be solved.
- Fully-remote work requires high levels of consistent communication — make an intentional commitment to higher-level communication: This should be a welcome fact, and not viewed as an obligation, as it saves time and effort in the long run. Communications platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams can help organizations provide visibility into communications and enable the creation of a single source of truth around communications while making it streamlined and transparent between members. Tools like IFTTT and Zapier create explicit signals out of internal processes and activities and focuses your attention on information that matters. This removes friction big and small. Big friction: weekly hour+ status meetings to inform of progress against activities Small friction: where is that file/update/piece of content. Don’t feel bad about the overload of zoom content, and don’t feel pressured to join all things streaming. But do understand that if you still have a job and can earn a paycheck, the requirements of communication when fully remote place the burden on over-communicating to ensure everyone is aligned. Take your conversations out of email and consider a platform such as Slack to keep your team connected. Working on local files when you’re meant to be collaborating is anti-social behavior that is counterproductive to synchronous making. This is a learned behavior that can be hard for many of us. Active and passive information help individuals and teams manage themselves.
- Align your heads and hearts for work: Develop an inclusive schedule that works for your humans. This will be determined by which activities need synchronous collaboration and those that can happen asynchronously. In our family, we split the workday to provide each adult the opportunity for 4+hrs of uninterrupted time. Describe your service level Agreement: what behavior is acceptable, how we set, meet, and exceed expectations. Consider the input of your employees and develop a written organization facing. operating model of how your organization will work. Thinking about a meeting? “Every meeting deserves a plan. Note that a great plan can’t guarantee a great outcome, but it will help lay down the fundamentals from which you can adapt. Sketch out these fundamentals by using the 7Ps framework.” Practically speaking, have fewer meetings, and instead shorter regular stand-ups.
- Increase your learning: Pay attention to your industry and those adjacent to you. There are some new skills that we as individuals and our organization will need to learn. Consider sharing the knowledge of your organization with your respective ecosystem. Think about hosting online streaming programming — we are shifting all our programming to HopIn, and convening partners and stakeholders
The worst thing we can do is let our pre-COVID mental models constrain our belief in what is possible. It’s time to go back to first principles — wherever you exist on the organizational chart. We’ve received the exhortation to build, and with purpose. Rebuilding counts.
This is part 2 in a series on the Future of Work. Part 1 and Part 3 are here.
