Oof, It's Friday

Do you work at one of those places where every Friday you regularly hear your coworkers or direct reports saying stuff like... "Oof, it's Friday" or "Wooh, it's Friday, we made it through another week"??? Well, here is what's hopefully not a newsflash - that's not really a good thing. It's a very good sign of burn out, or an organization being worked beyond capacity, or of listless, directionless strategy and a lack of focus and meaning. If you're in a leadership position and this is something you observe as a regular theme in your unit or across your organization, it's time to drill into your culture.

I actually consider this one sound bite (or hopefully its absence) to be an effective hack for gauging meaningfulness in an org. Over the past 5 years, I've observed this in a couple places I've worked, or when interfacing with partner companies in B2B spaces, and also when doing independent consulting with clients.

You know the setting. It's Friday morning, 9am. You get on your 25th video call of the week. Maybe it's a fun Friday morning pitch call to a prospective partner business. Your team and colleagues have scrambled the past 3 days to put together a pitch deck for this possible client, while you also had a couple other pitches you were working on, leadership training calls, recurring departmental sync meetings, and important time spent mentoring your team, direct reports, and reviewing work. Oh wait, let's not leave out, dropping your kids off at school, picking them up, taking them to dance and softball after school, cooking or picking up dinner, visiting your elderly parent, dropping your car off for service, and attending a community event that you helped organize.

So yeah, it's Friday morning, you get on this call, and the lead from the other company remarks, "Well, it's Friday, we made it through another week." Their colleagues all nod and chime in, "Yeah, another doozy." Your colleagues chime in, "Oof, we feel ya. It's been busy over here too."

Ok, this happens on occasion, no big deal. It happens after a week where everyone's been working on a big, important project, shipping a new product - understandable. That's actually probably something you should be celebrating. But if this is your reality 50% of your Fridays, it's very much time to look into stuff and make changes.

In leading design teams through COVID and the post-COVID always-on world, this sound bite has been something I've watched for in teams I've led. When I've heard it from someone I lead I've taken the time to figure out what they're working on. What all do they have on their plate (I look for and aim for no more than 2-3 projects or focuses)? Who are they collaborating with? Are problems identified and defined? Are they armed with user research or have they carried it out and connected the work they do back to the words and needs of customers? Are they using effective tools and technology to organize their workflow and thoughts? Are they checking the efficacy of their ideas, theories, and designs with other designers and colleagues across disciplines?

I've also regularly measured "meaningfulness" by using surveys to literally ask designers - how meaningful is the work you're doing right now? Of course, giving the option to provide commentary too. This one question across 10 or 15 or 25 designers/employees can say so much about your organization and who is providing clarity of leadership, solving the valuable problems, driving, efficient, lean strategy, and who's creating a safe, fulfilling work environment... and who is not. For me, I don't want to be leading designers and teams to just "get results". I want to lead folks to design and build features they understand -- understand why we've built them, understand the value they've created and the market impact they'll make, understand whose life they'll be making easier with the design of this product. Tracking meaningfulness is the concrete for holding all this together... and helping make sure just getting to Friday and the next Friday is not the end game.

So when it's Friday and your people are exasperated and you've observed this is consistently the case... it's time for you to do something. Exasperating employees is not what work is for. And it's time we all radically take stands to change a trend that is becoming more and more common across companies. Companies do not own their people. Companies should be grateful their employees have chosen them to donate their time and talent to. Because if you don't get this as the leader of a company, guess what; your best people will leave. And as a leader of a company, one of your chief duties is as a curator of talent, a master maximizer of people's brilliance and their potential. Oof, it's Friday does not cut it.

Ask yourself as a leader:

• How many marriages or families has your company's culture hurt or improved? How many of your employees proudly talk about their work to their spouse, partner, or child? How many of them rag about their work in misery?
• How many of your employees show off the work they've done for you, or in future years will continue to refer back to that one inspirational project? I still refer to a "client orders" project that I had the honor of leading and developing as an early career UX designer - guided and gently challenged by one of the best product VPs I ever worked with. Do you lead people to do work they're proud of?
• How many of your employees health has been impacted by working for your company?
• How many employees has your company taken in that helped end generational poverty, and alter the course of a family and their next generations in a positive light?

For 21st Century companies and emotionally impactful leaders, these are the kind of questions that should matter. Not just getting folks to the next Friday.