What does it mean to make work work better for humanity?
When I was 23 years old, my dad died unexpectedly on Thanksgiving Day. And suddenly, my life had shifted in a major way.
My sisters and I had to do the one million urgent things that families are responsible for when someone dies. We had to call everyone my dad knew and share over and over again the painful news. We had to plan a wake, a funeral, and a repast, and shop for clothes to wear to all of those events. (The New Jersey mall is my personal hell, and now I had to go there on Black Friday to shop for funeral clothes.) We had to clean out my dad’s office and his apartment. We had to figure out how my mother was going to continue to live in our childhood home with a balloon mortgage payment due in two months. Oh, right, and I had to grieve the loss of my father. It’s an understatement to say it was a stressful moment in time.
I was a young professional, making just enough to pay the rent on the 600 ft² apartment I shared with my roommate and enjoy $1 beers at our local watering hole on Wednesday nights. I was working in a small youth-focused non-profit organization in New York City, and I had to call my boss and tell him that, no, I wouldn’t be at work next week. My boss showed up for me with compassion, love, and humanity. He told me to take whatever time I needed, and for the weeks that I focused on my family, with no questions asked, I continued to receive my paychecks. I had a good relationship with my boss - actually we keep in touch until this day. And while I appreciated his grace at the time, it’s only in retrospect that I realize how very fortunate I was to work in a place that valued my humanity over my productivity.
Where are we today?
With 61% of US employees considering leaving their jobs in 2023, and over 4 million Americans quitting their jobs each month, it’s pretty clear that work is not working for most people. Many people are working too many hours and experiencing burnout. Others can’t get enough hours at their part time jobs or aren’t paid enough to take care of their families’ basic needs.
Workplaces are an integral part of our societal ecosystem. The way we manage our employees impacts their health, wellness, and capacity to be good parents, friends, and citizens. Without intention towards building a mutually beneficial partnership, our workplaces can become parasitic. Like strangler fig trees who suck the nutrients from their host trees, some workplaces squeeze the joy, the passion, and the energy out of their employees until they have nothing left to give. And these toxic cultures damage our human ecosystem by debilitating our most precious resource - our people. A few sobering statistics:
61% of employees say that workplace stress has made them sick.
Working long hours is associated with heart disease & stroke, alcoholism, and family conflict.
More than 120,000 deaths in the United States each year are associated with how companies manage their workforces.
People are leaving their jobs in record numbers because the American workplace is not designed to value the humanity and messiness of life. Humans get sick. We have to take care of other humans who get sick. We have disabilities and experience trauma. And we have to grieve loved ones who die. And it’s not just the hard stuff we need time and energy for outside of work. Humans have passions and goals beyond their careers that add meaning to their life. We celebrate birthdays, climb mountains, and volunteer for causes that speak to us. What does it look like to create a workplace that takes those realities into consideration?
Towards a more sustainable culture of work
What if workplaces viewed themselves as being part of an ecosystem that they depended on to flourish? Like coral and the microorganisms that rely on one another to thrive, workplaces could intentionally frame their relationships to employees as one of mutualism - where each party contributes, and each party benefits. Perhaps then, we would realize a more sustainable culture of work in this country.
How do we make work work better for humanity?
When I reached out to my community to hear what a workplace that values humanity looks like, here are the themes that emerged:
Checking in on and reducing workloads as needed
Flexibility that recognizes that employees have lives outside of work
An ability to show up as my “whole unvarnished self”
Encouragement to take care of myself and others
A focus on learning and growing
It’s not easy. Humans are messy. And individual. And so creating a workplace that works for humanity means being responsive and adaptable. It requires us to keep listening so that like the coral, we can provide safety and shelter for the organisms that nourish our growth.
And while there is part of me that begrudges needing to make a business case for being good humans, I’m also pragmatic so I think it’s important to underscore that creating a culture that supports your workers isn’t counter indicative to financial success. In fact the research shows the opposite. Companies that care about staff wellbeing are more than twice as likely to meet financial targets.
As a leader, I’ve always appreciated someone who walks into my office with both a complaint and some suggested solutions. So while the below isn’t an exhaustive list of what we can do to make work work better for humanity, I’m sharing a few ideas to start the conversation. I’m leaving off reasonable compensation and basic benefits, because to me this is a baseline. We haven’t yet achieved that baseline for most people living in the United States, and we could and should have a long discussion about that, but my hope here is to push the conversation beyond basic needs.
1. Allow for meaningful work within a reasonable workload.
In 2021, the U.S. was ranked as the 10th most overworked country in the world, averaging about 400 more hours - that’s 10 more weeks! - of work a year than our German counterparts. People who work fifty-five or more hours each week have an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease than people who work 35-40 hours a week. And once we work more than 50 hours a week, our productivity dives.
Companies should train managers on creating reasonable workloads for their employees. And yes, this will likely look different for each individual (I know, humanity is hard). Some tips for how to do this:
Ask workers to periodically track their hours worked. (We tend to overestimate how much we are working and this causes added stress.)
Discuss which tasks are rewarding, boring, or overwhelming.
Eliminate tasks that aren’t highly aligned with an employee’s strengths or don’t highly impact a company’s mission.
Cut down on meeting time by ensuring meetings have agendas, clear outcomes, time limits, and the right people in the room. Consider meetingless Mondays or whatever ½ day or day works for your team!
Teach employees skills for setting boundaries and attention management, and ensure leaders model those skills.
2. Give people the flexibility to bring work and life into symbiosis.
If there’s one clear lesson that’s come out of the pandemic about office culture, it’s that workers value flexibility, and companies that offer flexibility will be better positioned to attract and retain top talent. Not every flexibility option is a match for every company or every job. But let’s do some experimenting and not just rely on doing things the way they’ve traditionally been done! Here are a few structures that give employees choice about when and where work happens:
Work from home and hybrid work schedules
Structured time off such as whole office closures once or twice a year
Compressed schedules or reduced hours (Research is showing a 4 day work week may lead to increased employee retention without losses in productivity or revenues.)
Generous paid leave and sabbaticals (Personally, I have mixed feelings about unlimited PTO policies - check out some pros and cons.)
Space for obligations like doctors’ appointments or school plays during traditional 9-5 hours
3. Create a culture of belonging.
It takes intention to cultivate a workplace culture that fosters a sense of belonging and connection. We need to move beyond talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion to actually building a work environment that supports people who hold marginalized identities and experience the impacts of intergenerational trauma. Some suggestions for your ongoing journey:
Gather regular feedback on whether people feel cared about in the workplace. Make sure to disaggregate this data and examine how those holding marginalized identities are responding differently. Don’t forget to both take action based on feedback and tell people how you are using their feedback to make changes.
Make building relationships a core expectation for everyone in your workplace, especially people managers. Provide training opportunities for human skills people need such as listening, building trust, and leading courageous conversations. Reflect on how our identities influence our experience of these human skills.
Provide opportunities for people to get to know who their coworkers really are. This could be achieved by starting each meeting with personal warm up questions, having monthly informal breakfast burrito gatherings, or organizing social outings outside of work. Have each employee fill out a questionnaire (I love Liz and Mollie’s Guide to Working with Me) and encourage them to share it with others on their team. Providing a variety of options ensures there is something for each person to access.
Prioritize celebrating successes and appreciating one another’s contributions. Train your people on the positive impact of giving regular, specific praise to one another. Create traditions for celebrating team wins. One company I admire rings an office bell when they finish a big project or win a new contract. You could create a (physical or virtual) gratitude wall where people leave notes of recognition for one another. You can give out awards at staff meetings to people who are demonstrating your company values. Perhaps even let people select their prize to match what makes them feel appreciated - an extra day off? Lunch with the CEO? A self care gift box?
Set high expectations for people and invest in their growth. People feel loved when you demonstrate you believe in them, hold them accountable, and help them learn from their mistakes.
4. Invest in holistic & financial wellness.
While team yoga classes aren’t going to solve all of our wellness challenges, creating a culture of community care instead of telling each person to care for themselves is essential. Here are some tips for how to do this:
Provide mental health benefits and model using them
Offer wellness funds for people to invest in whatever brings them peace and joy
Provide family funds that can be used for caring for children, elders, or ill relatives
Offer retirement savings matching
Pay for or bring mindfulness and fitness resources into your office space
Create team rituals around wellness such as engaging in a monthly journaling prompt during your team meetings or regularly asking - “How can we find more balance this week?”
5. Embrace the privilege and the responsibility of leadership.
Leadership consistently emerges in the research as the most important driver of workplace culture. While it is everyone’s responsibility to embody a company’s culture, it’s the job of leadership to define and model it.
Invest in leadership development and coaching that offers leaders the opportunity to build self awareness and learn human skills such as giving and receiving feedback.
Elevate people management by defining the importance of this work, setting clear expectations, and training managers on the core skills they need to thrive in this vital leadership role.
Ensure your leadership models boundary setting, prioritizing their own wellbeing, and setting the tone of community care. If you tell people to take vacation days while you are relentlessly working 60 hour work weeks, what you are really saying is, “Successful people here work 60 hour work weeks”. People need to see what you want them to be.
Carve out time for small group and one-on-one conversations with people across your company so you can keep a finger on the pulse of their needs and experiences.
Valuing humanity over productivity
That boss I had when I was 23 showed up for me in a consequential moment in my personal life. But trust is primarily built in the smallest of moments, through consistency and predictability. I can see that, though I didn’t necessarily have the language for it at the time, that leader illustrated so many of the essential skills and behaviors that make work a human place. He set high expectations for our team because our mission was paramount. He modeled taking vacations to spend time with his family and pursue his passion for fishing. He gave us a paid month off every summer. He noticed that I always ate lunch at 11am, and I knew that he was proud that he had taught his ex-girlfriends the importance of flossing. It’s all of this that reminds us that while we are workers collaborating to achieve a common goal, we are always humans first.
My ideas above are just the beginning of the conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What workplace practices have honored your human needs for connection, rest, joy, and learning? What can you do in the next week to introduce an idea to your workplace, lift up a colleague, or feed your own humanity at work?
Special gratitude to Kate Bishop for helping me organize my messy thoughts and refine my language on this topic. And thanks to everyone in my community who took the time to share their experiences and hopes for a human workplace.