Work Futures Update | Fulfill Your Drives
| Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even | Pods To The Rescue | Workism, Overwork, and Total Work |
2020–10–03 Beacon NY | I find it heartening that readers find their way to older writings of mine, like What Drives Us?, some that aren’t that easy to find. (In that specific case, I moved it to the Work Futures publication on Medium.)
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The Quote of the Moment
Every business needs to take on, first — as elements of the company’s operating credo — the goal of working to help its people fulfill their drives for mastery, autonomy, and the respect and connection with those with whom they work.
Stowe Boyd, What Drives Us?
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I enjoyed this excerpt of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen:
From the outside, freelancing seems like a dream: You work when you want to work; you’re ostensibly in control of your own destiny. But if you’re a freelancer, you’re familiar with the dark side of these “benefits.” The “freedom to set your own hours” also means the “freedom to pay for your own healthcare.” The passage of the Affordable Care Act has made it easier to purchase an individual plan off the marketplace. But before that — and given the concerted attempt to undercut the ACA — obtaining affordable healthcare as a freelancer has become increasingly untenable.
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Freelancing also means no employer-facilitated 401k, no employee match, and no subsidized or concerted means, other than the portion of your freelance checks that go to Social Security every month, to save for retirement. It often means hiring an accountant to deal with labyrinthian tax structures, and getting paid a flat fee for the end product or service, regardless of how many hours you put into it. It means complete independence, which in the current capitalist marketplace is another way of saying it means complete insecurity.
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I was prepared to be very cynical about the concept of ‘meeting pods’ and ‘phone booths’ as a retrofit for open plan offices, like those offered by Room.
But on reflection, this may be a low-cost way to de-open office plans. As Brian Chen, the founder of Room writes:
… We ignored the needs of people in favor of the demands imposed by real estate. As cities swelled, we found novel ways to fit more and more people into less and less square footage. The open floor plan. The modern workbench. Coworking. The innovations of the last several decades have left gaping holes in our available toolkit to support a great workplace environment.
Remember that open offices do not engender the wonderful serendipity from face-to-face interactions so often used as a smokescreen for transitioning to minimal square footage plans. Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber debunked that in The Truth About Open Offices:
Collaboration’s architecture and anatomy are not lining up. Using advanced wearables and capturing data on all electronic interactions, we — along with Stephen Turban, one of Ethan’s former students, who is currently at Fulbright University Vietnam — tracked face-to-face and digital interactions at the headquarters of two Fortune 500 firms before and after the companies transitioned from cubicles to open offices. We chose the most representative workplaces we could find; we waited until people had settled in to their new spaces to track their postmove interactions; and, for accuracy, we varied the length of time over which we tracked them. With the first company, we collected data for three weeks before the redesign, starting one month prior, and for three weeks roughly two months after it. With the second, we collected data for eight weeks before the redesign, starting three months prior, and for eight weeks roughly two months after it. We aligned our data-collection periods with seasonal business cycles for apples-to-apples comparisons — for example, we collected data during the same weeks of the quarter. We found that face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly 70% after the firms transitioned to open offices, while electronic interactions increased to compensate.
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Many common assumptions about office architecture and collaboration are outdated or wrong. Although the open-office design is intended to encourage us to interact face-to-face, it gives us permission not to. The “accidental collisions” facilitated by open offices and free spaces can be counterproductive. In many instances, “copresence” via an open office or a digital channel does not result in productive collaboration.
And for those with an open office they would like to de-open reworking the entire office may be prohibitively expensive, even if we could somehow know what we want in an office, say, six or 18 months from now? Buying a bunch of these pods and running them along the walls of the office can diminish the negatives of open plan, like giving people a door to close for a call or some heads-down work.
We don’t know exactly how the people in any company will respond to the so-called hybrid work model (what I call minimum office) — based on management dictates, personal preferences, and the nature of the work they are engaged in — but we shouldn’t expect a necessary loss of collaboration and innovation because people aren’t in the office 40 hours a week. For most people working in an open office plan, the negatives outweigh the benefits. Minor innovations like pods with doors are likely to help and buy companies time to figure out what the minimum office experience of 2022 might be. It won’t look like 2019.
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I created a curated list of great writing on workism/overwork/total work for Refind. Here’s the list:
5-Hour Workdays? 4-Day Workweeks? Yes, Please | Cal Newport distills the overwork culture into two sentences:
In our current age of email and smartphones, work has pervaded more and more of our waking hours — evenings, mornings, weekends, vacations — rendering the idea of a fixed workday as quaint. We’re driven to these extremes by some vague sense that all of this frantic communicating will make us more productive.
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How to Defeat Busy Culture | The aptly named Serenity Gibbons makes a gentle case for debusifying business culture. One takeaway:
In his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, the leadership strategist Greg McKeown argues that to combat busy culture and create a healthier and more productive work environment, leaders should say “yes” to only the top 10% of the tasks presented to them. Show through your actions that your core duties are your priority, and make saying “no” to other work the norm.
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The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable | Derek Thompson writes:
The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.
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In Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs, published on The Guardian in January 2018, Andy Beckett attributes the word workism to one or several of a group of thinkers:
Since the early 2010s, as the crisis of work has become increasingly unavoidable in the US and the UK, these heretical ideas have been rediscovered and developed further. Brief polemics such as [David] Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” have been followed by more nuanced books, creating a rapidly growing literature that critiques work as an ideology — sometimes labelling it “workism” — and explores what could take its place. A new anti-work movement has taken shape.
[David] Graeber, [Helen] Hester, [Nick] Srnicek, [Benjamin Kline] Hunnicutt, [Peter] Fleming and others are members of a loose, transatlantic network of thinkers who advocate a profoundly different future for western economies and societies, and also for poorer countries, where the crises of work and the threat to it from robots and climate change are, they argue, even greater. They call this future “post-work”.
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The Richest Man in China Is Wrong. 12-Hour Days Are No ‘Blessing.’ | Bryce Covert comes out in opposition to Jack Ma’s promotion of the 996 work culture in China: 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
There’s a ceiling on how much more someone can get done by simply spending more time at work. After about 48 hours a week, a worker’s output drops sharply, according to a Stanford economist. Other research has appeared to support this finding. While there may be an initial burst of activity from overworking, people who work more than 55 hours a week perform worse than those who go home at a normal hour and get some rest.
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If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living? | Andrew Taggart looks into the concept of total work, an alias for workism:
‘Total work’, a term coined by the German philosopher Josef Pieper just after the Second World War in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), is the process by which human beings are transformed into workers and nothing else. By this means, work will ultimately become total, I argue, when it is the centre around which all of human life turns; when everything else is put in its service; when leisure, festivity and play come to resemble and then become work; when there remains no further dimension to life beyond work; when humans fully believe that we were born only to work; and when other ways of life, existing before total work won out, disappear completely from cultural memory.
We are on the verge of total work’s realisation.
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The Cult of Overwork | James Surowiecki approaches workism via an alternative alias: overwork.
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Is Overwork Killing You? | Gianpiero Petriglieiri summarizes a great deal of the discussion about overwork in this analysis.
Commitment to work is no longer the consequence of organizational loyalty. It is an expression of talent. This shift still allows organizations to exact commitment by offering that precious appellation, “top talent,” in return.
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Why Women Still Can’t Have It All | Anne-Marie Slaughter, in a piece that doesn’t directly address workism, makes the intersectional argument that women are doomed unless massive societal change happens:
Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
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When Efficiency Goes Too Far | Curt Nickisch interviews Roger Martin, professor emeritus of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto., and author of When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsessions with Economic Efficiency.
For almost everything in life, more is better up to a point when it ceases to be better. Love is a good thing. Right? But obsessive love is a bad thing, and it causes people to hurt one another, if not kill one another.
And so, this is a case of, we have ridden, if you will, the horse of efficiency, to having a more productive economy. But past a certain point, chasing after more efficiency without regard to anything else is having some consequences that are unexpected entirely. That includes having an economy where the median family in America, is stagnating and has been stagnating for many years, while the top 1% are having a better economic time than ever. That’s an inadvertent consequence of the obsessive push for efficiency.
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Elsewhere
First Look: The New Gmail | Google has made Gmail the hub of a business operating system
Work Week | Technological Intransigence | Land of the Fax | Asana Cashes In | Intranets: Workvivo and Happeo Fundings | Outlook Issues |
Work Week | Interstitial Tools | Shift Scheduling | Todoist Boards | Google Tables | Air Raises $12M |
Ism’s | I want to explore a few of the Ism’s I think are holding us back from a deep and serious transformation of work.
