Why We Need to Redesign the Way We Work

The following is an excerpt from my FREE Workplace Intelligence Insider Newsletter. You can?access the full article in the?Newsletter Archives . And don't forget to?subscribe ?so you receive the new edition every Monday morning.?

For this week’s Workplace Intelligence Newsletter, I interviewed New York Times?bestselling author and renowned workplace expert?Marcus Buckingham. For the past twenty-five years,?Buckingham has been the world's leading researcher into strengths, human performance, and the future of how people work. He is the author of two of the best-selling business books of all time, and has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, The Today Show, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

After spending two decades studying excellence at the Gallup Organization and co-creating the StrengthsFinder tool, he built his own Coaching + Education firm, The Marcus Buckingham Company. As CEO, he quickly turned it into a Human Capital Management company working with some of the world’s largest organizations. He is known as the world’s most prominent researcher on strengths and leadership at work, and today leads research at the ADP Research Institute.

In our conversation, we discussed Buckingham’s new book, LOVE + WORK . In the book, Buckingham makes the compelling case that the struggle we are collectively experiencing stems in large part from a lack of love in our work lives. Timely,?instructive, and hopeful,?LOVE + WORK?reframes how we think about work and the role that love plays in our efforts to create fulfilling careers and lives.?

Below is a sneak peek of Buckingham’s Q&A — subscribe now and you’ll immediately receive the full article.

And be sure to join us during our live audio event TODAY (May 16) at 11am EST, where we’ll continue our discussion on this important topic.

Why do we need to completely redesign the way we do work in 2022?

Work (and school, for that matter) isn’t working. It wasn’t working before the pandemic, and it certainly isn’t working now. We need only look at the falling rates of Employee Engagement and Workplace Resilience to see that organizations have designed completely loveless workplaces.?All sectors of the economy are struggling to fill vacancies, and attempting to lure workers with signing bonuses and office perks clearly isn’t enough.

The real problem is that jobs are often stressful, meaningless, and unlovable — again, by their very design. If you design a job thinking that no one could possibly love it, you’ll be correct. But if you acknowledge that every individual has unique and beautiful strengths, and if your organization spends time and energy cultivating those strengths and leaning into each person’s loves, you’ll start seeing improvements in retention, engagement, and performance. ?

You talk about finding our “red threads” throughout the book — what are these and how can we discover and utilize them to explore the best path for us in work and in life?

Red threads are the moments, the activities, and the situations that light up your day — whether at your job or at home. We don’t necessarily need complex positive psychology theories to identify these specific activities we love. But when you find yourself disappearing into an activity — looking forward to it all day, time rushes by while you’re doing it, and you wish it would never end — use your emotional reaction to the raw material of your life to pinpoint these activities. And start to weave more and more of them into your day, because that’s the key to finding love in your work.

Want to read the full article? You can access it in the?Workplace Intelligence Insider Archives . To receive the new edition every Monday morning,?subscribe ?for free.