Unf*cking work with Neil Usher
“Everyone deserves a world of work that’s fair, supportive, developmental, caring, honest and rich in opportunity.” This applies to us, to those around us who don’t have the luxury of our choices, and to those who will join the world of work after us. We should strive to create “legacies of virtue for those who follow, freeing them and ourselves from mere financial viability”.
In Unf*cking Work, Neil Usher shreds twelve statements frequently heard in the world of work, proposes a revised version for each one and offers practical steps towards the vision above.
The 12 statements:
Each of the twelve statements is explored in its own chapter.
Our relationship with work is often emotionally and psychologically abusive. We don’t like it – sometimes we hate it – but for many different reasons we stay put and endure that abuse which many even consider to be an integral part of work.
Work is f*cked and will continue being so for as long as we choose to remain complicit.?“We’re not stuck in a traffic jam, we are traffic.”
“We shouldn’t design better systems to try and force us to be better humans (...) we should become better humans such that we can design and develop better systems.”
Chapter 3 looks at the constantly high volume of workload, the stress and exhaustion it causes and the damages it makes: eroding personal relationships, dismantling our sense of self-worth, crushing the chances of career advancement, and even damaging the organisation. It is key that we look out for ourselves and for others.
“All too often the solution to perceived deficits in ability, flagging energy, distracted morale, even changing social norms, is training. We train for obedience, method, rules, protocols and we call the acquired acquiescence and techniques ‘skills’.”
Chapter 4 is about how hierarchical structures enable the blame culture.
Blame seems to be all around us in the workplace, serving “two intrinsically related purposes: denigration and liberation”. It can be a political weapon, it kills innovation, it is often disproportionate in its reach and impact, and it is closely linked with bullying.
In this chapter, the author explores a few alternative structures which, at least in theory, are less prone to a blame culture.
“Responsibility isn’t blame in softer shoes. It’s an active, organic creator of relationships.”
Chapter 5 is magic. It should be mandatory reading for every manager and HR professional out there; recommended reading for everyone who works.
The chapter focuses on trust, “possibly the most over-promised, over-promoted, under-delivered and evident workplace idea – as something we can identify and seek – of them all”.
When it comes to trust, we can use it (trusting someone), gift it (showing we trust someone) and take it (accepting someone’s trust).
“[T]rust underpins every aspect of human existence. Society is trust.” Unfortunately, “trust is difficult to build and easy to destroy, while mistrust is easy to build and monstrous to repair.” And when trust isn’t present, the workplace pesters with doubt, the “relationship purgatory” between trust and no trust.
Chapter 6 feels the less humorous and sarcastic chapter in the book. Probably because of the topic: equality and opportunity in the workplace.
Although discrimination may be anchored on several different characteristics, Neil Usher chose to focus the conversation on male and female (un)equality. To do so, he invites us to consider the societal pressures, the biological conditions and the contextual discrimination, that women are subjected to throughout their lives, and how it all impacts them at work.
“Very often people are hired for their difference and there remain because of their difference. An honest advertisement for such roles would shamefully say: 'We need you for our stats but don’t expect to get anywhere.'”
Chapter 9 is one of my favourites. It is about teamwork.
Collaboration, coordination and cooperation can be found in teams. However, collaboration only happens when it is not mandated and people willingly opt to work together to create something.
Weekly team meetings, “[t]he ultimate exercise in just-in-case futility”.
In chapter 10, Neil Usher discusses the link between management and measurement. For the latter, the author identifies 10 problems: not easy, often for nothing, self-fulfilling, never shows the whole story, used as a weapon, legitimises fear as a management tool, magnifies disinterest, stifles creativity, culturally flawed, and cannot overcome bad managers.
“The un-measurable stuff still needs management. But a management that sets it free rather than constrains it. That allows it to flourish.”
Chapter 11 is about people management and people development and is, perhaps, one of the most cynical chapter in the book.
Many organisations will say their people are at the core. “While entirely noble it’s constantly at odds with the perpetuating need for members of the organization to ensure it survives its people.”
Neil Usher mentions that people can be both assets and liabilities, that for some industries there are more valuable assets than people, and that organisations work hard to retain their greatest assets: their people’s creations.
When it comes to appraisals, the author gives voice to many: “Our entire year’s effort is reduced to an evidence-scant subjective assessment, sometimes aggregated into a score – alpha or numeric – that affects progress, bonus, remuneration, opportunity and our sense of justice and self-worth.”
Focusing on great places to work, chapter 13 acts as a really good checklist of what to do to improve each stage of the employee experience. At the core of the employee experience, though, is each one of us: “We all make it better for everyone else. The driver is the belonging. If we want to belong, we’ll make sure everyone does.”
The book is peppered with references to stories and storytelling: stories as carriers of culture and as instruments to inspire different behaviours.
I also enjoyed and valued the author’s musings on concepts such as meaning and purpose, unexpectedness, motivation, diversity, fun at work, continuous improvement, activism and recognition.
Work and the covid-19 pandemic
The book was written during the first year of the pandemic. As a result, it touches on aspects that result from the different context of work, namely on how it has simultaneously contributed to challenge some practices and exacerbate erroneous ones.
One of the first considerations is that, actually, many workers were hardly impacted by the pandemic: for them, work, as a place, did not change.
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When “knowledge work” started, the output was trickier to measure. So organisations started to measure the input: “the extent to which we were present, seen and heard”. This has been particularly tricky to extend to remote working arrangements and that is why we initially saw a “knee-jerk and entirely misplaced celebration of the return of management by output”.
However, this approach requires different managers who did not suddenly appear. As such, many organisations have gradually fallen back to control-focused management practices, going to extremes to monitor people’s presence (or presenteeism) when working remotely.
The pandemic made very clear the trust, or lack of thereof. “[A] beneficial grounding in trust can prepare managers for any challenges, including distributed working and variable workplace attendance. Trust is, after all, location-agnostic.”
In a distributed or hybrid environment, with many conversations happening online, “[t]he imperative for transparency has been magnified“.
I would have liked to find, in each chapter, some additional thoughts about how those ideas translated into a more digital workplace. However, here and there once can find such considerations. Like this one about hybrid work in the chapter on trust:
“The relative success of the year of remote working has proven that digital tools are adequate for many tasks. Yet this presents a further visibility challenge associated with “mixed mode” patterns of attendance – a formally dressed version of “fear of missing out” (FoMo), the sense that those present are far more likely to be in leaders’ eyelines and hence thoughts when it comes to involvement, rewards and promotion. This form of proximity bias has yet, at the time of writing, to be proven at scale, but it’s lurking.”
My highlights
On culture
Strategy is “what we’re going to do, why we’re going to do it, how we’re going to do it, when we’re going to do it and what we need to be able to do it.” When it comes to culture, the definition is harder. The common “the way we do things around here” implies something static. It is perhaps an intentional, comfortable statement, Neil suggests, as “[c]hange is risk, and culture cannot be put at risk.”
Culture can be seen as an enabler or as a constraint. “An organizational culture isn’t a closed loop, it’s integrated with its environment, feeding it and fed by it. It’s emergent rather than designed and organized; cajoled, prompted and challenged rather than maintained and upgraded; unpredictable and surprising, not expected and dry. Not an operating system then. At all.”
“Where the solution to anything at all is change management, it’s inherently flawed.”
On leaders and managers
“For many, fear is power and it’s directly proportional to their lack of ability.”
Management, should be “the enabler of the development, learning and growth of everyone within the organization”.
But words are not enough: “the acts and omissions of leaders define the boundaries of what is acceptable within the organization”.
“[W]hen our idea gets biffed for a pile of emails and a monthly report and a compliance training session, it’s the ultimate proof of our irrelevance.”
Community
The idea of community comes out very strongly throughout the book: be it as the nature of work, as the mindset required for self-organising structures to flourish, or as “place”.
“Work is by its very nature a community” where mutual dependencies are the bonds that prevent individuals from roaming free.
“[W]e must value ‘place’ in its broadest sense as both a physical and collective experience, the energy of community”.
About watercoolers
Neil Usher also lends his critical eye to this staple item in every knowledge management toolkit.
“The importance of these 'watercooler moments' – forgetting the fact that the device is usually stationed somewhere no-one wants to loiter for any longer than it takes to hydrate – has been massively overplayed. There is precious little evidence that they yield what the myth portrays, because unless trust already exists between the participants, conversations of the type imagined, with their open sharing of insights and ideas, don’t happen. That’s not to say that such an interaction may not prove to be the first tentative step toward a relationship that later proves fruitful.”
“In reality, the team is often a construct adept at enabling co-operation and co-ordination but an impediment to collaboration, which is more likely to occur between individuals from different teams or structures, or those floating between them. For the avoidance of any doubt, this doesn’t happen at the mythical 'watercooler,' it’s a much longer process principally comprising the progressive establishment of trust. It arises in opposition to its environment where it’s perceived to be acting as a constraint. It contains a healthy germ of rebellion which in turn is often the quality it needs to come to life. Somewhere in collaboration is a desire for freedom, a clawing from the cloying corporate cobweb, a sense that the product of the time and thought invested will be the opportunity to leave the tedium and oppression of the present behind.”
Xeno
I loved finding out about "xeno", a term made up by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
Like Neil Usher’s previous books - The Elemental Workplace and Elemental Change – this is packed with references from different fields used to contextualise, explain and illustrate his views.
Unlike the others, Unf*cking Work was an uncomfortable read at times. It makes us question ourselves. It makes us ask why: why we work and why we fail to act in order to fix what is broken.
Although it benefitted from the inputs and challenges of Kirsten Buck and Perry Timms, Neil Usher says he wrote this book for himself. That probably explains the joyful rawness of the language, the sarcasm and sharpness of the metaphors, and the odd paragraphs which non-proficient English readers might find a tad difficult to understand.
His sense of humor, his laser-sharp remarks, his unadorned and focused perspective on the workplace are a much required kick in the butt to call out the BS and get us doing something to unf*ck work. Even if, as the author suggests, we start with just a “minimum viable workplace”.
Another must read by Neil Usher.
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Capability creates opportunities - always trying, sometimes succeeding, often not.
2 年What a stunning review, Ana. Thank you. Reading Neil's book and now your review makes me want to get people together online for conversations around the themes that he raises. So, so many. So much food for thought. How can we stop being complicit? What can we do? I used to do this. in-person, with a co-conspirator many years ago. It takes a lot of organising and I do not currently have the headroom (like all of us, I have a lot going on) but heck on a lazy Sunday morning as I write, I think this is a damn fine idea. Watch this space!
Partner of Knowman; Author and host of KMOL; Organiser of Social Now
2 年Esta review está também disponível em português em: https://kmol.pt/livros/2022/06/22/unfcking-work/
Chief Energy Officer and Founder: People & Transformational HR Ltd - a self-managed Certified B Corporation
2 年A joy to see Neil's work come together. Honestly, Kirsten and I did so little of the work but Neil being Neil, he insisted we were credited. Which shows you the worth of the man. He's a poet, a thinker and a darned good person.