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Albert Einstein knew a thing or two or three about work. In fact, he claimed to follow three rules of work: Out of clutter find simplicity. From discord find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Whether she realizes it or not, Melissa Swift seems to be following Einstein’s rules. With degrees from Harvard and Columbia, she clearly has the smarts. And she’s devoting her career to the issues of work. She leads workforce transformation and analytics in the U.S. and Canada for Mercer, a decades-old consulting firm with offices in 43 countries.
Her book is Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace.
Rodger Dean Duncan: For leaders, what’s a good process for reexamining work for signs of it being dangerous, dull, annoying, or frustrating and confusing?
Melissa Swift: Start with data and evidence—including your employees’ lived experience of work. We can be reticent about asking folks what’s going wrong at work because we’re afraid of what they’ll say! If we treated that conversation not as a referendum on employees’ feelings, but instead as a diagnostic of better productivity, we could achieve truly different results. And lived experience of work isn’t the only useful evidence. You can examine data sets like your employee health data to better understand, particularly, where work is dangerous.
Duncan: When it comes to assessing worker performance, how can leaders discover some of their own blind spots?
Swift: Data plays a critical role here too. It can be hard to see your blind spots because they’re your own blind spots! So have someone else examine your decisions, at a bare minimum, and have them ask you questions about how you assembled evidence on performance. Even better—do some underlying statistical analysis of how performance decisions are made under your purview. When we do this analysis for clients, all too often we find evidence of bias—on everything from a demographic basis to centering on factors like geographical location.
Duncan: How can the human resource function be reinvented or reimagined to play the most relevant role in an organization’s quest for excellence?
Melissa Swift
Swift: When I started researching the history of HR, I had a big “a-ha” moment. HR wasn’t invented to create value, promote performance excellence, or, as we’ve come to understand[LC1] , make employees happy. HR was invented, for the most part, to quell the violent clash between labor and management in the early 1900’s. So when we reinvent, let’s not think incrementally, but holistically—because things have been headed down the wrong road for more than a century[LC2] .
Different big and bold choices—fundamentally centered on delivering what the most key population segments need to be successful—lie at the heart of HR success. The starting point to these decisions is almost always a people strategy, which if done effectively, winnows down HR’s priorities dramatically. HR is quantitatively understaffed by a factor of 3 compared to IT or Finance, and it’s chronically overloaded with a wide array of both top-down and bottom-up priorities. Doing fewer things far better is a wonderful starting point for almost any HR organization.
Duncan: What seem to be the primary causes of employee anxiety and burnout?
Swift: According to Mercer’s latest employee research, burnout and anxiety due to a demanding workload is one of the top three reasons an employee would consider leaving their current employer, particularly for those under 35 and LGBTQ+ employees.
I tend to look at two dimensions of work getting worse: work intensification and Greedy Work. Both have been amply documented in the academic community, yet we don’t talk about them enough in the business community.
Work intensification is simply having to perform too many units of work per hour. Every job has a version of this, like attending too many Zoom meetings or having to pick too many strawberries. As one of my clients said to me recently: an hour isn’t an hour anymore—it’s more!
Greedy Work is the other part of the equation—work creeping out of traditional boundaries and into the beginnings and ends of the day, and even late at night, due to everything from smartphone technology keeping us accessible at all times, to global working driving meetings scheduled at “antisocial” hours. Once you’re doing too much in an hour, and there are more hours, that’s a perfect recipe for anxiety and burnout.
Duncan: What proactive measures work best in dealing with anxiety and burnout?
Swift: While organizations need to make sure they have all the right holistic support programs in place, some of the most interesting proactive measures that we’re seeing focus on two categories.
First, organizations are starting to use analytics to identify people who might be prone to burnout—for instance, using Viva insights on whose calendar is too crowded.
Second, organizations shouldn’t be afraid of setting real guardrails—everything from limiting hours to shutting down email servers on weekends. Don’t make burnout an option! Mercer’s research found that the key action employers could take to reduce anxiety or burnout was to reduce workload.
Duncan: When coaching their teams, how (and why) should leaders quiet their “suck it up” voices?
Swift: Your “suck it up” voice can feel helpful. While these comments could be disconcerting and seem unproductive, it’s important to take a step back and ask why folks are complaining so you don’t miss critical cues.
While you’re encouraging people to tough it out, they’re actually identifying broken processes, technological disconnects, and toxic cultural elements—all of which, by listening, you can actually fix, thereby improving both how your team feels and how they perform. Quieting your “suck it up” reflex doesn’t mean you have to cater to every whim that’s expressed. It just means that you’re open to taking in what can be very important information.
Duncan: You write about the organizational “Workplace Copy Machine.” What is that and what impact does it have on a workforce?
Swift: Among the main questions I’ve sought to answer are, “Why do we never get to the future of work?” and “What’s stopping us?”
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Well, the Workplace Copy Machine is a big part of the puzzle. We’re structured to repeat the past in four critical ways: 1) On a structural basis, we struggle to talk about work and jobs separate from a discussion of pay—so work itself doesn’t get fixed. 2) Often for efficiency’s sake, talent acquisition is set up to “clone” previous hires, instead of thinking about new needs. 3) Human Resources’ own structure is often dramatically simpler than the complex organizations around it—making it ill-equipped to be helpful (and serial understaffing doesn’t help!). 4) We reward leaders for consistency and sameness, not the bolder moves that might actually support the business better.
Put those four factors together and you’re set up to have the same people, doing the same jobs, led in the same way, over and over and over. We copy and paste the past of the workforce right onto the future.
Duncan: “Model humanism” is one of the strategies you recommend for making decisions at the team level. What does that mean?
Swift: Modeling humanism means acting like a human being with human needs. Modeling humanism means dropping the armor that so many of us put on in the workplace and being vulnerable. This could manifest inbeing vocal about when work needs to stop for the day and family time needs to start. Admitting to being tired, or sick. Taking visible breaks between meetings so your brain can recharge.
Why is this critical? Well, when you admit that you’re a person with human needs, you create space for others to do so too—and that’s how working culture changes for the better.
Duncan: You regard technology as “a leadership Band-Aid.” How can that perspective be useful to leaders?
Swift: Technology can be such an unbelievable tool, but we interfere with its effectiveness by over-relying on it. We use it as a Band-Aid, believing it’ll fix key problems. But tech rarely fixes the problem on its own. Leaders need to check themselves—can the tech actually do everything I’m asking of it? Or, more likely, do I need people to think differently, communicate differently, team differently? Those pesky behavioral choices seem a lot harder than just “implementing something,” but actually really make the difference (whether you put new tech in or not!)
Duncan: What’s the most important strategy you recommend to people in the workplace?
Swift: DO LESS.
I really can’t overemphasize prioritization and the power of saying no. Such a huge part of why we accomplish less at work—and drive our human workers to distraction in the process—is the constant piling on of more and more.
There’s ample research showing we’re hitting neurological and physical limits on everything from how many meetings we can do in a day to how many physical tasks a person can perform in an hour to how many hours a person can work.
Too-muchness is a pervasive problem. Do less, and do it better. Then both organizations and employees win.
