What it takes for workers to flourish
Perhaps the most common theme among happy workers is agency. Workers who feel empowered to make changes, to choose a unique working style, tend to navigate tensions successfully. Rather than feeling boxed in, they can recalibrate and adapt as their life or circumstances change. This agency can manifest itself in three different areas.
Policies
Policies are a necessary evil of the workplace—rules that sometimes get in the way, but nonetheless, attempt to keep things organized. Still, workers can grow frustrated when company policy becomes too blunt, too one-size-fits-all.
Several workers in our interviews, for instance, described policies that required them to be at their desks for hours at a time, even when it wasn’t critical to their work. Others mentioned bloated hierarchies, where even small decisions required several layers of approval.
A few questions can help clarify whether a policy might prevent people from successfully navigating tensions. Are the policies reactionary, put in place as a response to a handful of edge cases? Did the organization create the policies years ago, when the company was smaller or differently organized? In either case, it’s possible the policies are discouraging some workers from making important changes to their schedule, style, or daily flow.
Next, it’s worth considering whether company policies empower employees, versus simply giving the organization power over them. A good policy helps an employee in a sticky situation (i.e. how to privately report harassment), or provides clarity in the midst of confusion (i.e. what to do during a crisis). Meanwhile, some policies simply limit employees in order to keep everyone in line (i.e. “butts in seats”). When policies can focus on “power with” rather than “power over,” workers feel protected without being limited.
Tools
Knowledge workers use a vast array of tools at work, from mobile phones to monitors, task managers to sales trackers, water coolers to desk chairs. Sometimes, employees get to pick what they use (i.e. a note-taking app). Other times, the company must keep it standardized (i.e. the HR portal for billing and benefits).
Still, workplace tools provide dozens of opportunities for giving employees agency, and those choices can range from simple to multi-faceted. Can workers choose a preferred brand of laptop? Can they arrange for an upgrade if it might help their particular job? What about the chair a worker sits in, and for how long (or for how many days per week)? When it comes to software, can workers sub in certain tools they prefer, so long as they work with the company’s broader suite of applications? To what extent?
Even then, deeper questions can arise. When the company wants to make a big change, how much say do employees get on that transition? And which features seem to get the highest priority? Are the tools easy to scale across the organization? Inexpensive as possible? Do they provide accessibility for different types of workers or working styles? Do they tend to help workers focus above all else? To be efficient? To collaborate?
Workers likely don’t want to answer all these questions themselves—and probably shouldn’t—but our research suggests most want to at least get involved from time to time. They want the option, periodically, to change course or try something different.
Here’s how our lead researcher, Jennifer Brook, describes the tensions around workplace tools:
“When work and people are seen as machines, they can be optimized, tooled, and oiled. Well-oiled machines can also break. They can dehumanize and break people by putting expansion, profit, and revenue above all else. When something is broken, our relationship to that thing is inherently limited — we can diagnose, we can fix, or we can throw away. It’s rare that we’re invited to participate with the making and shaping of that machine. It’s more likely that the machine is built to work on us.”
With the number of workplace tools growing everyday, it becomes all the more important to keep the human in mind. Machines have, and will continue to, make work better. But when humans feel cut out entirely, when the processes start to resemble a sterile lab or assembly line, employees begin to feel anxious and resentful. When implementing new technology, it pays to consider how people will feel and respond, as humans, then adjust accordingly.
Culture
Company culture is both powerful and difficult to change. It tends to crystallize over years—influenced by everything from a company’s founders to its history to its hiring tendencies. Where a policy can be reexamined, or a tool can be replaced, culture must evolve gradually, and only with buy-in from the majority of the organization.
A few themes came up when we spoke to workers about culture. Some said their companies had developed an expectation of 24/7 availability, where projects lived and died based on a Sunday morning email or late evening correspondence. Other workers said their organizations instinctually operated on precedent, or “the way things have always been done.” When workers clash with their company’s culture at a fundamental level, they tend to feel ineffective or ignored.
Given how difficult it is to change culture, the best first step might simply be acknowledging what that culture is. When employees are aware of their company’s cultural tendencies, they’re more likely to tolerate—or even celebrate—the occasional teammate who works in a much different way. This awareness can also help organizations gradually make changes, even if it takes many new hires and frank conversations to get there.
Here’s Brook on what it takes to have a healthy and fulfilling culture in the workplace:
“When work feels like it’s working well it’s because people feel a sense of belonging, they feel respected, and they feel seen. It’s working because of the connection they have to their teams, their purpose or mission, and their leaders. It’s these relationships that enable them to work with autonomy, help them develop clarity and feel a sense of ownership over their work, and have have a kind of flexibility at work that enables them to better navigate the numerous tensions in their life and work.”
A note on purposefulness
That said, what happens when workers still can’t quite find equilibrium, despite their best efforts to navigate tensions across policies, tools, and culture? We found that workers are more likely to accept slight imbalances when they find purpose in their work, like helping others or contributing to society. But even when a company’s contribution to the greater good is more opaque, employees are similarly motivated by a sense of purposefulness—that is, a feeling that everything they do plays an important part in the organization at large.
Going forward
The way we work is going through a huge transition. In a 2017 study, researchers found early evidence that smartphones were decreasing both our attention span and ability to remember information. But perhaps more importantly, the study stressed that it’s still too early to predict exactly how bad this is, or what the longterm effects might be. We’ve had an explosion of new apps, new tools, and new technology over the last two decades, and we’re still figuring out how it should all come together.
On the one hand, all these new tools give us a lot of power, the ability to stay connected and to collaborate from anywhere, at any time. But increasingly, modern technology makes it almost impossible to disconnect, to give ourselves space from our work. Navigating the tensions and tradeoffs of all this new complexity is the key challenge of the modern workplace. How do we focus on meaningful work that actually makes an impact?
It starts with being more thoughtful about the workplace. As we observed in part one, constantly pushing to go faster and do more isn’t actually helping, with true productivity growing at its slowest rate in 30 years. It’s time for a new paradigm.
If workers can find agency when it comes to policies, tools, and culture, and to feel a sense of purposefulness, we stand a much better chance of winding up somewhere better than where we started. In the end, the problem isn’t necessarily with productivity itself, but the way we’ve tricked ourselves into a “more work, faster,” mindset. Perhaps we should focus less on volume and speed and more on successfully navigating workplace tensions. If workers can be find equilibrium in their work, maybe we can actually get to the outcomes and impact we’ve been looking for—both for workers and companies alike.