Work in 2024 and Beyond

Create Good Jobs and Thrive as a Business

Zeynep Ton's session was all about creating good jobs. Ms. Ton is the Founder of the Good Jobs Institute, a nonprofit organization to help companies get there. For her, and I agree, for a business to thrive it needs a competitive edge. While there may be short-term advantages that give a business a shot of adrenaline, the #1 measure to use to assess how well you are thriving, is how well you are performing in creating customer value. I've said before that all businesses should aspire to having every one of its customers extend beyond simply being a one-time buyer of its goods or services, to becoming an advocate for them; this is the ultimate competitive advantage. The KPI measure for this is the Net Promoter Score or NPS.

 Read More: KPIs for the Buyer's Journey

Ms. Ton shows irrefutably that generating a consistently high NPS starts with having a strong team; by hiring the right people for the right job. These team members then need to be set up for success. To do this you invest in that strong team, as I mentioned, through proper role placement, then training them, and implementing effective one-on-one performance management. You will know when this is happening when you measure 3 things:

1. Team turnover;
2. Team productivity;
3. Customer satisfaction.

Setting up the team for success is only one key component of a Good Jobs environment. Front-line execution is the other one. This is where systems, communication, empowerment, and reward are integral. If done well, customer satisfaction will be high, and turnover will be low. The reward will be a natural output. The circle is complete.

Smarter Strategies to Beat Worker Burnout

It was very smart of MIT Sloan to have a session focused singularly on worker burnout. To have good jobs, you need to have good work to do. The opposite of good is bad, so the presenter of this segment, Melissa Swift, a VP at Cap Gemini addresses ways to eliminate, or better yet, prevent your workers from experiencing burnout. 

She starts by outlining the 5 dimensions that contribute to well-being while working. They are outlined on the graphic here:

The Surgeon General in this graphic is the USA version, but can be applied universally to all cultures. We can all resonate with each of these. They seem to be comprehensive and relevant. 

I'd like to focus on her strategies, which I found to be very informative, relevant, and, actionable.

Strategy 1 - Kill off Bad Work

This is where the "too many meetings" syndrome lives. She says 60% of our time is spent "working about work" and we all need to address our anxiety about work. Guilty as charged. I've always been focused on working smarter, seeking the unattainable utopian state of working smartest. I've realized that I have developed an anxiety over working smarter which has stepped in front of my ability to address this very thing effectively. In the last 6 months, I've observed that I've spent an average of 1.25 hrs each day (weekends included) on working smarter. That's 450 hours per year or the equivalent of 2 months of 8-hour work days. This compounds my anxiety about real work, which reduces my productivity even more so. As a business leader, this flows over...

...Working smartest is utopian, and by definition imaginary.

Strategy 2 - Attack Greedy Work

Melissa is quite firm that, while attacking greedy work (work that overruns life-balance activities) is closely tied to killing off bad work, it needs to be a strategy of its own. This particular strategy is aimed at addressing the fact that, for some historical reason, we are now paying people more to work too much. This single fact needs to change, hence this strategy.

Strategy 3 - Couples Counseling - for humans and technology

Here's where working smarter is very important. Ms. Swift provides measurable evidence that the # of apps we interact with each day is skyrocketing. That's because of the digitalization of our lives and the accessibility of the cloud. We are simply in the middle of a revolutionary change in how things are done, and we are trying to find out how. The answer is that, more than ever before this is still evolving. AI is a case in point here. All you need to do is listen to the recording of another session from this summit, where Wharton professor Ethan Mollick is interviewed on Reinventing the Organization with Generative AI.

This monumental state of change is happening, and as with all past good revolutions, something to embrace. It's precisely why my start-up Savvy-CFO exists. We're not just embracing this, we are assessing and advising, helping clients by providing such counseling, and at the same time, helping ourselves deal with it too. This summit I attended was incredibly helpful in a counseling fashion for me, for Savvy-CFO, and hopefully for our clients.

Like with the classic Organization Chart (which by the way is still relevant, but needs to take on a more modern team-based feel, and throw out the hierarchical "pyramid" model, each and every business should also have a Tech-Stack Chart, which is built optimize the value that apps bring to the table, and to eliminate any that are dilutive.

Strategy 4 - Break the Workforce Copy Machine

This strategy is one to think about carefully. Not everything new is better, but, in the sheer volume of things that are new, there are many better. They need to be found and knitted together into a system of doing things where Melissa's dimensions are thriving. I want to return to the session on Generative AI that I referred to already to quote some very current, maybe forever-lasting advice provided by Mr. Mollick when he gives guidance on when to use AI:

The BAH Principle: "Use AI when it provides information that is better than the best available human at the time."

That said, the Covid-19 period will have long-lasting positive benefits for society. It shattered many historic work-related mindsets that needed shattering and is enabling things to happen that should have happened even sooner. Embrace this and listen to what Melissa has to say here:

What does modern team-based and collective performance look like?"

Strategy 5 - Double down on fairness and dignity at work

The reason Melissa says to "double down" is to stress how important this is, and how research is showing the amount of impact this has on the dimensions of well-being at work. 

Strategy 6 - Treat work de-intensification as a goal in and of itself

Work intensification is simply, too many units of work per unit of time. As a CFO and a numbers guy generally, I see a formula here.

Firstly is the unit of time. Each business has differing units of time. We try to fit things into what a standard work-week might look like. Remember Strategy 4- Break the Workforce Copy Machine? Keeping in mind Strategy 5, each business collectively needs to address what their worker's work-week looks like, communicate this clearly, and then focus on ensuring there are enough units of work available to address the units of time required, distributed with a sense of fairness and equity. This doesn't mean equally.  

Strategy 7 - Can't measure can't manage

Here's where I return to my introduction. I like this idiom so much I'm adding it to my repertoire. Melissa simply says, to be sure to identify the drivers of burnout and measure them, ideally before burnout actually occurs. Predictive, and therefore preventive rather than responsive. I might add that you need to have benchmarks against which these measures can be compared.

I think she's provided what those measures can be in her discussions of the 6 strategies. Here are a few:

• Surveys
  Can be combined into one, but make them short yet effective, don't over-survey; hire experts. Should always be confidential and objective.
  • Surveys on fairness and dignity
  • Surveys on app utilization and frustration
  • Surveys on overall worker satisfaction
• % of work week spent in meetings, completing surveys;
• Workload
  [Total work ÷ Total available hours of work (be sure to exclude # of hours spent in meetings and completing surveys)]

Melissa's presentation on YouTube

Conclusion

At the risk of appearing to be fixated on the Buyer's Journey, I want to underscore that the whole Work/24 Summit clearly is about exactly that. Our business's workforce itself is a Buyer, this entire summit and the presentations made available are aimed at their journey. Then, Ms. Ton states that we need to focus on creating Good Jobs for everyone because this is directly related to the primary reason any business should exist is to create customer value. Clearly a cause and effect on our Customers' journeys.