Can we really get our work culture fixed?
Lots of memes contained ahead
One of my favourite memes is like the image below, a photo being labelled with the caption: ‘not a phone in sight, just people living in the moment’.
Clearly it satirises Boomer comments about the demise of society into a legion of phone-fixated Zombies. (I personally enjoy capturing clips at gigs, but it drives some attendees crazy with anger).
The meme can of course be adapted for lots of uses:
Not a phone in sight, just people living in the moment
Taking my fondness for that joke in mind, believe me I thought about it when pulling together the free Presence deck that I gave away last week.
Presence is the idea of, yes, being in the flow of connection, being in the moment.
Is there a danger of describing something like Presence that I’m harping back nostalgically to an era that didn’t exist? Nostalgia is the go to for those devoid of imagination after all.
But no that’s not what’s happening here.
The average employee spends twice as much time in meetings as they did in 2019 and workers say 71% of meetings are pointless.
For those who missed it Presence is a free deck for those wrestling with improving their workplace culture. It’s been accessed and shared over 10,000 times in the first week - an incredible response from a truly global audience. The success of it has taken this newsletter to over 30,000 subscribers (across Substack and LinkedIn).
As one person just messaged me: “Having spent much of the last year in a small booth in an office on calls from 8-7 just to 'badge in' I think you describe the problems we're facing in a hybrid world perfectly”.
The Presence deck reflects that work has become a hectic haze of Teams pings, check-in meetings and conference calls. Books like Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus have become bestsellers suggesting that our brains been hijacked by our phones, but in fact I would suggest it’s something more insidious. Our brains have been hijacked by our jobs. We can fix this and it’s not with more mandated office time.
The Presence deck ends with a manifesto for change. Six clear steps for organisations to set about to improve their culture. I’ve had lots of feedback on the project this week - please do get in touch if you use the work.
This Adam Grant interview with Airbnb’s Brian Chesky gives an insight to the company’s very human approach to job layoffs. Also includes mention of this paper that says leaders are ten times more likely to be criticised to be uncommunicating as overcommunicating
I’ve heard from multiple Meta/Facebook employees how different it is to work using Workplace as a communication tool (compared to email/Teams/Slack). The platform is like an internal version of Facebook with a feed and a DM message box. “You see updates of what people are doing round the business but your focus is reaching out to people to get stuff done, rather than just ploughing through an inbox,” a recent leaver told me. Maybe it was the right idea from the wrong company because Meta has announced they are closing it. There’s a precedent for this, in 2009 Google launched Wave, a new way of communicating based on threads rather than emails. Wave was a direct antecedent to the messaging style later picked up by Slack and Teams, but came too soon and only lasted a few months after its full public launch in 2010.
MIT Sloan ran a Work ‘24 conference this week tackling some of the themes of the contemporary workplace. You can view all of the presentations if you register here (it includes content on DEI, burnout and lots on AI)
My highlight was Zeynep Ton talking about Good Jobs and how ‘lean and mean doesn’t mean efficient’. Low investment in people leaves to high employee turnover, leads to poor service, leads to poor performance. It’s always good to be reminded of Zeynep’s work and her 4 critical pillars of good jobs: focus and simplify; standardise and empower; cross-train; operate with slack. Her presentation includes lots of examples of companies to learn from as they tried to break from the vicious cycle of paying low pay.
A presentation of the impact of generative AI on work also stood out. “Will LLM cut jobs?” asked Professor Peter Cappelli. Currently no, was his conclusion.
This isn't the first time recently I've read that meetings are bad. But I don't get it. I simply don't understand.
What meetings are people referring to when they say that meetings are bad? Are they talking about regular diarised meetings that happen regardless of whether anyone has anything to say?
I can't think of many or actually any meetings that I go to these days where they're a waste of time I I learn nothing. We have few 'come anyway, whether you like it or not' meetings and most are the alternative to the 'have you two both some time to discuss this'.
What are organisations doing that means meetings are this bad??