Research notes and bookmarks II
Petar Vujosevic
Examining how wider culture impacts work culture. Practical note: internal & external employer brand strategy research & consulting.
Editor's note: this newsletter contains footnotes that belong to a longer essay exploring practical ways of thinking about DEI 2.0. The essay is in between "the best thing ever" & "worst thing ever" phases of writing and editing. So in the meantime please explore some interesting rabbit holes that are part of the essay.
The Unaccountability Machine explores how organisations get into the bizarre but common situation of acting in line with “process” but against all logic.
At the extreme end of the spectrum, Davies cites the Dutch airline KLM, which in 1999 discovered that 440 pet squirrels had been shipped on a flight without appropriate paperwork. Airport staff threw the squirrels into an industrial shredder.
After the inevitably outraged public response, KLM issued a statement expressing “sincere regret” about this “unethical” outcome – while still protecting its position by saying that the employees had acted “formally correctly” in following government instructions.
While reading Dan Davies’ bleak analysis, sometimes you’ll nod, sometimes smile, sometimes grimace. What’s clear – whether you want to call them “accountability sinks” or “responsibility voids” – is that we need nothing less than a full-blown renaissance to get us out of the state we’re in.
The gender pay gap has primarily declined because younger men and women are paid more similarly
The entire reduction in the gender pay gap stems from differences between worker cohorts, not changes within cohorts over their careers. Newer cohorts enter the labor market with smaller gender pay gaps, while older cohorts with larger gaps exit. This pattern holds across all four countries studied.
So it’s not that older male and female workers were increasingly paid more similar wages. They were paid differently, then left. Their departure meant that the overall gender gap then fell.
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They would find that factors leading to satisfaction were very different than those leading to dissatisfaction. The satisfiers were work-related, such as feelings of achievement, being recognized, or gaining in prestige and responsibility. Those factors that led to dissatisfaction were more likely related to the environment around the work such as relationships with colleagues or supervisors, company policies, work conditions, or in some cases wages and salary.
But eliminating these dissatisfiers did not mean workers were happy – satisfaction was not assured. So employers and managers had to address two different sets of factors – one that truly motivates workers and those that prevented problems from arising.
The result became known as Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory of Job Satisfaction, also known as the motivator-hygiene theory. Hygiene factors were so-named because they served a similar purpose as one’s preventative health measures – to keep the workplace environment free of problems and thus reduce the propensity for worker complaints.
There is such a thing as culture, but any approach that aims to change it is too indirect. The indirectness of cultural strategies is apparent in their account of how they affect material outcomes in the world: you do a bunch of work to build up a cultural movement, the movement manages to change “the culture,” and then that finally inspires someone else to actually do something real. Or at least that’s the hope. More likely, it just inspires them to do something “in culture” like you did.