What Do We Want?

Why is it so difficult to get employees and employers on the same page?

The purpose of an organization is the 'work' it does. That is what it is organized for, and what separates it from a community. Communities can, but don't have to, do 'work' to be a community. Organizations have to do work to be an organization. Organizations are purposeful; communities don't have to be.

Work is what people do with their bodies and their hearts and their minds. We do this alone, and we do this together. It is in doing work - well or badly - that the culture of an organization is formed; not through theories, talk, or foosball tables.

We work.

There is so much noise (and sometimes some remarkable, moving music to be sure) around the world of work in organizations right now. A lot of that noise exists to answer a question.

What do we want?

What are the individuals who are working - or could work - for an organization, looking for?

It isn't complicated.

A couple of centuries of writing and talking by economists, consultants, academics, and technocrats of all kinds have made it complicated (see: noise), but it doesn't have to be. It is complex (see: humans, working together), but it doesn't have to be complicated.

It boils down to three things.

Three simple things:

1. An income. If the organization is where we work to earn a living, we are looking for an income that provides for food, shelter, the care of our families if we have them, medical care, and security in old age.
2. Meaning. We require that the work we do has meaning. There has to be a point to it. That sense of purpose may or may not be captured in the organization's 'purpose'. We do need to know our work contributes to the other humans we work with and contributes to the ultimate value of the 'work' of the organization for its stakeholders and customers, etc.
3. Security and safety. We want to be confident that the place we work in and the people we work with are safe; that we will not be lied to, betrayed or threatened, feel unsafe (psychologically or physically), or lose our employment arbitrarily.

Not complicated right?

Why then, is there SO MUCH hand-wringing about turn-over, engagement, quiet-quitting, productivity, etc. etc.

We know that simple is not the same as easy. But why isn't it? How can simple be this hard?

I'm going to stay with the idea of simplicity by restricting my response to the same three simple foundational requirements already described.

What's in the way?

An income

Simply put: most human beings do not receive enough of the financial benefits they have worked to create. And the compensation they do receive is not sufficient to meet the conditions I set out above.

We have built a capitalist ecosystem (and I'm a capitalist, so it's complicated for me) that distributes wealth to parasites (to be found in the publicly traded, secondary markets) before it distributes it to the people who created the value. The technocratic elite (CEOs appointed by boards, and the rest of the C-suite) and the public shareholders drain the pool for themselves first. Also, through collective ethical failures, a broken structure of accountability that is purely parasitic, the technocratic elite extract value through leveraged acquisitions, stock manipulation, and flat-out fraud, instead of creating value. We have created a landscape where real capitalists: business-owning, local-people-employing, real-value-creating (not extracting) are disappearing from a tilted playing field. And employees wait at the end of the line behind everyone else.

Meaning

Most employees have no idea how their work creates value. We don't know 'where we fit' in the value stream. We have no line-of-sight on the 'bigger picture'; the value we are creating for our customers. Most of our work feels meaningless because it is disconnected. Done in the dark. It feels like - at best - it is feeding the purpose of people we don't care about: Technocratic elites and shareholders. And even that sense of connection is highly tenuous. We feel increasingly cynical as one grand corporate 'purpose' after another crumbles; the banks we work for collapse, and the CEOs we work for find themselves in front of a jury, or at best, on the front page of the local paper and not in a good way. There's no real meaning here.

Security and safety

How we get hired is a mystery to us. How we get advanced is a mystery to us. How we get raises is a mystery to us. How we contribute to our own and to our collective security and sustainability in the market, is a mystery to us. Our impact on our communities and our planet is a mystery to us (unless the negative impact is so in our faces, we can't miss it). We are kept in the dark about all of that, and the political, social, and fiscal frameworks we operate in. What our employers' intentions are, is a mystery to us. We can't talk to HR. We can't talk to Legal. We can't talk to power. They make massive mistakes and fail like imploding stars, and the establishment lines up to give them more money for their next venture. We say the wrong thing, or piss off a customer, or scrap a part, and our jobs are done. After decades of bureaucratic, technocratic, academic talk and theories, the environment for racialized minorities - especially black employees in the U.S., and indigenous employees here in Canada - women, and pretty much every front-line employee generally, is deteriorating, not improving.

Its not complicated

If you are a leader, the next time you wonder why 'minorities these days' 'young people these days' 'employees these days' are causing you such grief, how are you doing on these three simple things?

Align the work, the return (profits), and the compensation in a way that reflects how value is really created and who really creates it.

Remove the mystery, end the secrecy. Stop treating communication, consultation, training and feedback as annoying distractions and mere cost centers. Embrace transparency - especially in hiring, compensation and advancement. Open the doors and windows.

Fire the bullies, racists, and misogynists in your organization, regardless of their technical competence or years with the firm. Make it safe for people to fail, to make mistakes as they learn and as they deal with imperfect systems and tools. Make it safe for people to tell those in charge that they might be wrong about something.

It's not complicated.

Thank you for reading.

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Clemens Rettich