Now is the Time To Reimagine Labor

As we head into Labor Day weekend at a time of great stress and struggle for American workers, the time is right to think again about what labor is in the modern world.??

Labor Day is an annual celebration of workers and their achievements. The height of the Industrial Era was a dismal time for workers putting in twelve hour days, seven days a?week just to meet basic needs. Already vulnerable people, including immigrants and small children, faced dangerous conditions. Children worked in mills for a fraction of adult pay.?

Labor Day was born from the ashes of these human rights abuses that fueled the Industrial Era that still dominates our lives and work today. Many workers around the world still toil in these terrible conditions, and the fight to change this is still ongoing. By contrast, knowledge workers, despite being physically protected at work, are still subjected to industrial ideas about time. Employers, at the peril of a company’s ability to learn and innovate and the wellbeing of the workforce, continue to pay for time instead of performance.?

Knowledge workers do not work in mills or factories. But where do they work? Should they come back to the office or continue working flexibly? Either way, the fact remains: knowledge workers often meet all day and work at night and weekends at home, which erodes the line between work and life.

I recently posted a poll to ask whose job it is to fix meetings. As responses came in, one frontrunner stayed as consistent after eight votes as after 800. If culture starts at the top, it’s the CEO. The “other” category in my poll included COO, and the comments reveal strong feelings for this role being a close second.?

Productivity is an Industrial Era Concept

Productivity is an Industrial Era concept, a measure of physical output such as bushels of wheat or cars produced on an assembly line. To demonstrate productivity in offices, knowledge workers meet. But knowledge workers are not factory workers. When factories emerged, the work style was different from agricultural work. Yet we have not made the same advances for how knowledge work is structured. The physical nature of industrial output makes productivity easy to track. Knowledge workers, by contrast, use their minds, with intangible results. Code, algorithms and data analytics are all Intelligence Era products.?

Many companies attempt to achieve Intelligence Era results with an Industrial Era work model. They say the word innovation more than they innovate. In the absence of a catalyzing event, few changed. For fifteen years I have been calling this transitional time between these overlapping eras the Imagination Age. It is a way to think about this critical crossroads in the history of humanity. The challenges we face are systemic, and can no longer be neatly contained or controlled. Imagination is how we learn to solve problems in a chaotic world by seeing a better path forward and conjuring a vivid vision of how it could be. It is not something children do for fun. It is something they do on the road to understanding they will be participants in this world, and play a role in shaping the future. Why, then, do we abandon this skill as we mature??

Think Differently About Time

Now that the pandemic forced most office workers home, the catalyst is upon us. Why are companies so eager to return to the status quo? We have a chance now to reimagine work, regardless of where workers are located. Factory workers need to be physically present to do their jobs. Some jobs can only be done in person. A mechanic has to be there to fix the plane. Software development, however, can be accomplished from anywhere. Too many unnecessary meetings distract from knowledge work as thoroughly as a fire in a factory prevents manual labor from taking place or a drought destroys agricultural output.?

I am the EVP for Business Development at Science House, a strategic consultancy in Manhattan. Our mission is to apply the scientific method to business. For ten years, our clients have engaged us to help strategically shape and execute on the kinds of initiatives a CEO might mention on an earnings call as critical to the company’s future. In order to accomplish our work, we ended up in countless meetings that followed the same patterns, often leading to wasted time and energy. Lack of purpose and focus is common. Poor communication and hazy focus on outcomes. Leaders often say the world is too ambiguous to navigate, but this is often because people are too busy in meetings to learn enough before aligning around work. This is what led us to focus on solving the problem of meetings by creating Model Meetings. We need to learn, innovate and make better decisions before aligning to work.

Despite all the meetings, initiatives often fail despite people working to the point of burnout. Too many meetings force “real” work to happen at night and on weekends. This entrenched habit of including too many people in too many meetings doesn’t get companies any closer to their goals or give workers the satisfaction of a job well done.?

The Great Reshuffle is an Opportunity

?More than half of the knowledge workers in the United States currently report wanting to change jobs. There are many reasons for burnout. Not all of them are related to work. We face endless systemic and personal challenges. But all of the reasons for burnout that are related to work can be improved with a new approach to meetings. Companies hoping to reinforce the status quo are going to lose valuable employees and face the expensive challenge of onboarding new hires who will quickly realize they now face, again, the same problems they thought they left behind.?

All conclusions about the future of work being drawn during this time of stress are reactionary. Multiple crises are unfolding at the same time. We have a window, now, to imagine and implement changes. Imagination is required not just to create more humane and efficient work models, but to think more clearly about the work itself and the impact it will have on people. Imagination makes invisible dynamics visible.?

Companies can attract, retain and care for people in a flexible, iterative way, or watch them leave. A flexible environment guided by clear priorities and communication protects people’s time and energy and enables the creation of better, more sustainable products and services. It is possible, and necessary, to get better results for companies with less stress for the workforce. This is a powerful perk, and a necessity, in an increasingly chaotic world. Meetings should be aligned with a company’s goals and fulfilling for the people who attend them to make those visions real. Time is the one thing none of us can ever recover.