Work isn’t working

Does work make you feel good?

Do you come home from work feeling better than when you left in the morning? I’m guessing more often than not… that’s not the case.

And yet, why can’t work be the place that makes us feel good?

Why can’t it be the thing that fuels our best ideas, makes us feel fulfilled, and connected to our colleagues and our customers?

Ultimately, why can’t work help us become our best self, inspire us and motivate us in some positive way?

Light us up even.

I wish for work to be like that.

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The word “work” has a negative connotation, making out that it’s something difficult and an unpleasant experience. And as we know, because of all the studies, surveys and headlines, for an increasingly high number of people… it appears to be doing us more harm than good.

Work is depleting rather than enhancing our lives.

A recent report from Deloitte, in association with the mental health charity, Mind, determined that stress, anxiety and depression are responsible for half of all the work days lost in Britain.

Burnout and mental health issues are costing UK companies around £43 billion a year. And that’s 16% up on two years previous.

It’s getting worse.

And it’s really quite astounding.

Yes, we’re all trying to address mental health issues. And companies are trying to work out the best way of doing that. But we have to remember that it’s within the context of a society that is moving through an extreme period of change. The pace of that change is unprecedented really. And it’s the pace, the speed, the acceleration of that change, which is at the root of it all.

We’re so connected with technology.
And everything seems to be moving faster and faster because of that.

And sadly, when it comes to work, this often means that we’re expected to work out of designated hours as well.

All these factors are adding to this potential epidemic crisis we might be facing. Add to that the ageing population and you’ve got a much broader range of generations in the workplace as well. Not everybody wants the same things in the same way, so you can’t run companies exactly the same as we’ve done previously.

The younger generation specifically, who are the leaders and managers of the future, really want meaning out of their jobs.

A recent survey by Gallup reaffirmed that the younger generation wants to understand the values and the purpose of an organisation. And they want their employers to facilitate their personal growth and development.

So there’s a mixture of themes and topics here. We’re clearly struggling with the way things are changing, the pace of change accelerating and people not being as engaged at work as they used to be.

But it isn’t just detrimental to individuals.

It’s not good for businesses either.

And I hear stories all the time about what certain employers are doing to people. Maybe not even consciously.

I had a friend the other day tell me that she was so negative about going into work that she threw up in the shower as she was getting ready.

And with my 25+ year background in the creative industries, the marketing agency sector specifically, I’ve seen anxiety about work raise its head many times. Because in that sector, you need to come up with new ideas and new thinking — solving problems all the time, every day.

That’s what’s expected of you.

That’s what clients pay for.

And I’ve seen first hand the damage that level of expectation can do to people.

A real seminal moment for me on this issue was when a creative director pretty much had a breakdown in my arms in the car park outside the office. We were preparing for a very important pitch. He had just worked two weeks solid, including weekends, without a break and was still struggling to get things right.

At that moment I was in despair.
What are we doing to people?
I don’t want to do this to people.
I don’t want to put this amount of pressure on somebody.

But often, certainly in this industry, it’s the nature of the work.

Turns out this was a serious bout of performance anxiety, which is probably rife in a lot of businesses.

We are expected to bring our A game every single day.

And we just can’t.
We’re not made that way.

You can work intensively for a period of time, but you can’t do it every single day to the same level.

And this is the kind of thing that generates burnout.

I once saw Dr Pippa Grange speak. She worked for the English Football Association as a psychologist. The discussion focused on how the world of work and the world of sport are often compared. And it’s common for high achieving sports people to deliver key notes about performance at business events.

But she made a really, really good point.

As an athlete you prepare intensely for a match, or a tournament, or an event. But once it’s done, you then recover.

You don’t do that in business.

It’s relentless!!!

That event — that performance — is often happening every single day.

And that can quickly lead to burnout, when we just can’t keep that up.

In the book “Thrive” by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, she proposes a new approach for business. This came after an incident where she collapsed in her office and hit her head on the way down because she was so exhausted from working too many hours. At one point she was even sleeping in her office!

That really made her think and reflect on how she was working and the culture of her company. She reflected that, certainly in the corporate world, it’s like a badge of honour…

How many hours you work.
How many outputs you deliver.
How much you’re in touch outside of office hours.

It really shouldn’t be that way, because in the end it harms us.
And it harms the businesses that we work within.

The world of work is really changing.

We’re coming out of what would be coined the industrial age (think the Henry Ford production line), where fear and money were used to motivate people. Human beings were treated like cogs in the machine of production, which they were.

Someone at the top would work out what needed to happen in order to deliver something, and then break that down into small, narrow tasks or processes. And they were the things that each person had to do.

People were a cog in the machine, as if a human being was part of that machine. You had to stick to the job exactly, and suppress your natural impulses to learn and explore. Because bureaucracy, coupled with command and control management practices would ensure that you just did your job. That you did it efficiently and productively, and you did not dare veer outside of that.

During the glory days of the industrial era, productivity, output, reliability, consistency and predictability ruled the day. And that’s what was needed.

But this is becoming outmoded and detrimental now.

We need to shift our thinking.

We’ve moved into “the knowledge era”, and the pace of change behind this is important. Products and services are as much based on intellect as they are on physical labour, and imagination is the primary source of value because the pace of change is so quick.

We always need to be thinking ahead. Coming up with new ideas, solving problems in different ways. You can’t manage this using traditional methods from the industrial age.

So it’s critical to create the right culture, structure and approach to managing people differently.

A lot differently to how we have before.

Then we can promote innovation, creative thinking and continual learning, because we need that now to thrive as businesses.

We have to be innovative.

We have to be more flexible and more collaborative.

And we need to provide workplace experiences and cultures that are more human, that allow people across different generations to tap into real human qualities that are more important than ever. Qualities like intuition, imagination, will, reasoning, learning and exploring.

Our ability to think and innovate are where the real value is.

I’ve read a lot about human potential. All different kinds of authors in different walks of life. I find it fascinating. And there’s one author in particular called Steven Kotler. He’s a New York Times bestselling author and a researcher, but he has become known as an expert in peak performance.

He wrote a book called The Rise of Superman, which looked to extreme athletes who do things that seem impossible. They break through barriers that are fake. They smash through the limitations that are not really there. To understand how they did this, how they performed at that level, he really explored the mindset, their approach, the belief systems. And he wrote about what he uncovered.

He discovered that these “super humans” get themselves into what you’d call an altered state of consciousness.

A flow state.

In a flow state, you’re truly absorbed in the task that you’re doing. Time and space seem to disappear. Ideas flow, and you feel amazing in the process. That’s because it releases a set of neurochemicals that make us feel good.

So if we can allow people to perform at their best, by giving them the freedom and the flexibility and the culture to get into flow states, then they’re going to benefit from it in terms of their wellbeing. And companies are certainly going to benefit from it.

He was as bold as to say that:
“The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

So how do we give people that freedom?

That flexibility to get into flow?

To allow them to experiment, not worry about failing, feel safe in their environment, and unleash their full potential?

The old practices — hangovers from the industrial age — are just not going to cut it. We have all of this ability within us, and yet we’ve just lost touch with it.

We need to explore it more.

And in my industry, in creative businesses, it’s absolutely the fuel to business growth.

It’s not a “nice-to-have”.

It’s not just about making people feel a bit better if they’re under the weather in terms of their mental health. How do we enable them to feel joy at work and be their best selves?

We actually have a seeking system, hardwired within us as human beings. And this was explored in a book by Dan Cable called Alive at Work. If you go back to our time as cavemen, hunter-gatherers, we had to explore and experiment in order to survive. So it is hardwired into us biologically to do that.

From a work perspective, this is about being able to express your unique skills as part of a team. Being able to explore new things, learn new things and find a sense of purpose in your work.

Cable says:
“activating the seeking system is actually like putting a plug in a live socket”.

We already have these amazing faculties.
We just don’t know how to help people tune into them.

And for me that’s really key. If work is going to get better, if we’re going to reduce the mental health crisis from work, if people are just going to lead better lives and make a bigger impact.

If we feel good at work, then we do good at work.

How do we get people from feeling ok to feeling absolutely amazing?

And I know that’s not necessarily sustainable every day. But more so than the feeling that I can’t cope, I’m struggling, I’m burnt out, and I’m certainly not giving my best at work.

How can work make us feel more alive, and the most creative and productive that we’ve ever been?

For me, that is true wellbeing at work.