WeWork Office, Zurich
'Veni, vidi, vici!' says Julius Ceaser in Shakespeare's great play: 'I came, I saw, I conquered!'
'Ergo, ego, eco', says the contemporary organization: we make you comfortable, we make you feel important and we make money. Companies believe they are doing the right thing by making it easy for people to work from wherever—ergonomic desks, flexible hours, hybrid work—eliminating barriers both real and imaginary.
It seems like a perfect arrangement, but is perhaps a perfect illusion, as the drive for continuous improvement inadvertently transforms people into units of economic output. Ultimately this is exhausting and alienating and translates to lower engagement and a feeling among people that they don’t really matter. Contemporary workers are actively seeking innovative work practices and experiences that align globalization and humanity, digitalization and the work and democratization and the person. Meanwhile, many organizations rely on outdated industrialist practices that deny agency to individuals.
A number of corporate practices do not serve people, rather create the illusion of care, pander to management ego and are fundamentally driven by economic outcomes. In order, therefore, to understand what people may want in a post-pandemic world, we consider three pernicious practices that you may wish to reconsider or at least reframe, and that we summarise as ergo, ego, eco.
Ergonomic environments
Consider the sharp lines, glass walls, and technology that enables you to zoom around the world or to your colleague in the next room. Furniture and fittings are barcoded and linked to an asset register. The underlying message is that everything and everyone can and should be trackable, traceable, and measurable. The person is subsumed by process.
Employers certainly seem to believe that people will come back to the office since the firm offers the most wonderful desks that go up and down and ergonomic chairs, in which you can sit for hours absorbed in your work. Thinking about the comfort of the employee is meant to send a signal of a caring, “human-centered” organization.
However, the person, who worked from home for the last two years does not want to be reduced to just another instance of humanity, one more white shirt and dark suit, clutching the handhold in a mindless commute. They want to be embraced in their entire humanity. The central challenge for the office is to create a space for the whole person at work: not only to personalize the workspace as they see fit with pot-plants and posters and desires and dreams, instead, service of something that is bigger and more noble than only the company and its shareholders.
Competing egos
The reality in most workplaces is that personal ego is never far from the surface. We are all human and we all want to be successful. Collaboration rarely extends to letting someone else eat my lunch. Staff compete with one another for the attention of their boss. People tread carefully around one another, not wanting to risk a micro-aggression or the transgression of some unwritten moral code, which can be taken as insulting or disrespectful. Awkward small talk is replacing deep conversation and human engagement.
Research, however, has consistently demonstrated that feelings are the touchstone of value in human systems: how you make me feel translates to whether I feel valued, included, seen and understood. When we feel accepted for who we are, we are less likely to engage in egotistical power plays. The post-pandemic worker has access to unlimited information and earning opportunity and so cannot simply be considered a ‘knowledge worker’ among other knowledge works. Rather, value now lies in care and wisdom. It is no longer about one, reduced to self-interest but about the whole person; and it is about us, the size of our hearts together rather than the size of one’s brain.
Industrialised economy
Taking an existential perspective—asking about deep meaning from a human point of view—reveals the office environment is designed primarily for productivity rather than for persons, who have been reduced to resources and assets, to units of economic output. Like Henry Ford’s production line, any friction point that could distract or interfere with “getting stuff done” is removed from the environment.
While companies often claim innovative work practices, they have often only digitised industrial era work practices. Ford removed impediments to production at scale by ‘unpacking’ expert systems, breaking them down into constituent parts and assigning specific tasks to specific individuals. Contemporary organizations engage in similar practices by asking employees to repeat the same task endlessly, as a link in a chain of activities in order to generate a predictable output. The new age production line is no more innovative than Ford’s production line. Nor does it in and of itself drive value metrics that ensure a quality, differentiated outcome for people and our societies.
Those businesses that see a person as a means to an end, and consider their value as it relates to productivity will not resolve the challenges of post-pandemic work and leadership by ergonomics, economics and economics.
The new paradigms of work that are emerging in response to the crises and change wrought by the 21st century require a fundamental change in our mental models, archaic work practices, and outdated systems. They require an appreciation of personal agency and the resolution of the inherent tension between the individual and the business. The breadth and depth of transformation, however, will not be satisfied by simply allowing people to work from home three days of the week. We rather need altruistic and transcendent behaviors, innovative techniques, practices and transformative new routines that derive from understanding individuals as whole persons, with needs, hopes, dreams and aspirations. Organisations that understand this connection and promote human flourishing will flourish collectively.
This article has been written in collaboration with Dr. Anthony Howard, a leadership philosopher, CEO whisperer, and adjunct Associate Professor at Notre Dame University (Australia).
