Lynda Gratton - The Future of Work

The 10 Ways to Know Whether Your Job is Meaningful

In my book The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, I made the point that the formula for the traditional deal at work is as follows:

I work... to earn money... which I use... to consume stuff... which makes me happy.

I suggested that this deal is not a sufficient description of what work can and should be. Instead I put forward the following future-focused deal at work:

I work... to gain productive experiences... that are the basis... of my happiness.

But this begs the question – what exactly is a meaningful productive experience, and how do you know when your work is meaningful? So here are the 10 questions to ask yourself to establish whether your work is meaningful.

1. Do you use the majority of the knowledge you have on a daily basis?
   ...because meaningful work provides an opportunity for you to keep your knowledge fresh by using it constantly.
   
   
2. Do you feel intellectually stretched in your work?
   ...because meaningful work both uses the knowledge you have and pushes the boundaries of what you can become.
   
   
3. Are you able to learn something new at least once a week?
   ...because meaningful work creates constant opportunity for learning.
   
   
4. In your view are your colleagues at work knowledgeable and do you learn from them constantly?
   ...because meaningful work is also about the colleagues who come with it, and your learning and development comes primarily through learning from others: what I have called ‘The Posse’.
   
   
5. Are the tasks you do at work interesting and complex?
   ...because at the heart of meaningful work are the day-to-day tasks that you do.
   
   
6. Do you get lots of feedback about how you are doing?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to grow, and feedback from others is a crucial part of this.
   
   
7. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on the business?
   ...because meaningful work enables you to make a clear link in your mind between the tasks you perform and the broader goals of the business.
   
   
8. Do you think that the work you do has a positive impact on society?
   ...because meaningful work is made up of tasks that you believe do good and, as a consequence, make you feel good about yourself.
   
   
9. In your daily work, do you have the opportunity to reach out to develop networks with people very different from yourself?
   ...because meaningful work creates opportunities for you to develop the ‘Big Ideas Crowd’ that is so crucial to developing your innovative and creative capacity.
   
   
10. Does your work give you time to really develop deep regenerative relationships with people inside and outside of your organisation?
    ...because meaningful work creates time and space for you to develop emotionally.

So where are you on meaningful work?

Score 8-10
Through your active choices, or sheer luck, you are working in a meaningful way. Cherish the opportunities this provides and don’t compromise in the future.

Score 5-7
Some aspects of your work are meaningful. Take a closer look at those you have said no to and search for the underlying patterns. Is it possible to focus on developing these areas?

Score 1-4
Your job lacks meaning – you already know that! The question is – what are you going to do about it?

This is my take on meaning at work – are there any areas you would add?

When Time Fragments

In last week’s blog I rallied against the 40% of time at work that seems to be spent "working on projects that had no significance, going to meetings that had no outcomes" and made some suggestions for solving the paradox at the heart of work.

My question about what to do was answered in part by Kevin Ball. His experience makes him wonder if this is a problem that needs to be solved; if there is not some universal truth about people in all this ‘wasted’ effort.

"The knowledge that some part of your day can be spent in pointless activity is really rather relaxing and it can be accomplished guilt-free if you can explain it as ‘necessary’ to comply, conform and cooperate with the organisation around you. For the early days of my working in the spare bedroom, this meant suppressing the protestant work-ethic and doing some housework in the ‘working’ day; it meant measuring the output rather than the hours spent on input and it meant wrestling myself into a position of accepting that it was OK to be unproductive sometimes."

He has been influenced by Oliver Burkeman’s piece in the Guardian about the extent to which busyness is good. Oliver quotes economist Todd Buchholz: "What you really want is to chase your tail, even if you never catch it". His view is that alternative theory: that calm is the enemy of happiness, and that it's busyness on which we thrive. Railing at the calm advocates he calls "Edenists", he proposes that striving keeps us neurologically fit: "The people who sit back and relax… those are the people who become truly miserable." Research, he notes, suggests that retirement prompts a reduction in cognitive abilities. "What you really want," he insists, "is to chase your tail, even if you never catch it."

He quotes the physicist Richard Feynman who experienced the logical consequence of the dominance of productivity over all other concerns. Feynman found he didn’t envy the geniuses at Princeton who occupied a clutter-free environment where they were allowed to think without interruption: "These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves. So they don’t get any ideas for a while… a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you… and nothing happens."

But it seems to me that the choice is not between mindless busyness and tranquil edium – but rather about the extent to which we can focus and concentrate. It’s a process that is central to my new book The Shift: How The Future of Work is Already Here – the idea that what’s really crucial is that we are prepared to concentrate, focus and, from this, to master something – that could be a skill, a knowledge area, an understanding of a particular network. It’s this focus and concentration that will be increasingly crucial for the future. Focus does not need tranquility – but it does need long periods of undisturbed time – when concentration is possible. What is tough about busyness is not that it stops tranquility – but rather that it fragments work into such tiny slithers that the concentration needed to learn something deeply is gone. 

My guess is that Richard Feynman was wrong about the geniuses at Princeton when he saw "those poor bastards" sitting on their own. What they were actually experiencing was the marvelous luxury of undisturbed time, unbroken into fragments, providing them with an opportunity to develop deep mastery.

Busyness is fine - it’s the three-minute fragments that so often comes with busyness that is the curse of modern work.

When Generations Fight

I have a fascinating insight into the future of work through the 45 corporations across the world we are studying as part of the Future of Work Research Consortium. Last month we asked 2,500 executives from these companies to rate the areas they believed would  be critical for the future, together with the extent to which they believed their company was currently competent. We gave them a list of 20 areas that an earlier study had shown would be important for the future. This list included for example ecosystems, open innovation, flexible working and networked leaders.

What was extraordinary is that almost a quarter rated ‘intergenerational cohesion’ as the most significant risk their company faced, and many more rated it as one of the top three risks. This was not an isolated area of risk, but rather was seen to be a risk by executives in both West and Asia companies, and indeed across all industrial sectors. Their concern was that the potential differences and conflicts between the generations could lead to poor cooperation and knowledge sharing, but might also flare into more open sources of conflict and dissatisfaction.

Five Unique Generations at Work. 

The potential opportunities and conflicts that are arising between generations are a recent phenomena and are a factor of both demographic changes (particularly around reducing birthrates and enhanced longevity) and accelerating technological and societal trends (particularly around the use of social media and family experiences). Over the next two decades, many companies will have potentially five distinct generations in the workforce: The Traditionalists (born around 1928 to 1945); the Baby Boomers (born around 1945 to 1964); Generation X (born around 1965 to 1979); Gen Y (born around 1980 to 1995); and Gen Z (born after 1995).

Generations fight for a number of reason. They don’t understand each other, they have differential access to resources and power, their working style and use of technology is in conflict, or they are not really sharing knowledge and experience with each other.

Of course generational conflict could also be great – really create innovation, remove some old style thinking, bring creative tension. However, if companies are to move to creative rather than destructive tension, it seems to me they have to ask themselves three key questions:

1. Does technology favour one generation? The generations communicate with each other differently and one potential source of tension is that corporate communication typically favours the Baby Boomers’ preferred mode of communication rather than the younger generations. Typically, Gen Z and Y use social media such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning to access information instantly, to multi-task, and to build valuable networks and stay connected; typically Gen X use portals; whilst Baby Boomers are most comfortable with e-mail as their primary technological communication tool. Yet many companies have banned Facebook and social media, which is the lifeblood for the youngest generations and by doing so have inadvertently favoured one generation over another.  

2. Has flexibility become embedded? Each generation would value greater flexibility. Gen Y would like greater work/life balance in jobs that can be overwhelming; younger Gen X’s would like maternity and paternity leave and time off to spend with their young children, the possibilities of sabbaticals, and to temporarily step away from frontline into less demanding roles, and older Gen X’s can find themselves with ageing parents who need care; whilst Baby Boomers would like sabbatical breaks and the opportunities to work more flexibly nearer the time of their retirement through part-time and reduced hours. What is clear is that the inflexibility of work will create ever greater conflict across the generations as those that need it most (typically Gen X) are denied it. There are many reasons why the rhetoric of organizational flexibility has rarely been delivered in practice: a focus on being present rather than making results, few if any senior role models prepared to work flexibly, and under- designed and over complicated jobs. But if generations are to work together, flexibility has to be a reality.

3. Is cross-generational mentoring taking place?  There are important exchanges to be made between generations; Gen Y in particular are keen to build strong functional skills and industry knowledge and insights that those more experienced can help develop and yearn for feedback; whilst Baby Boomers want to develop their expertise in the use of social media and newly developed technology. These can be crucial issues as Baby Boomer retire taking with them valuable knowledge, insights and connections. However, too often mentoring does not take place because executives are too busy, too stressed and feel overwhelmed and under skilled. Yet the generations have so much to teach each other if only the time and resources could be focused on this.

It seems to me that the creative tensions between the generations can be a real source of innovation and excitement. Have you experienced tensions between generations – and what do you think can be done to ensure these tensions are creative rather than destructive?

 

 

 

The Magic of a Joined-Up World

We crafted the Future of Work Consortium to help people across the world think more deeply and accurately about the future. The combination of Future Proofed Cases, Thought Pieces plus the portal and webinars have together created a fertile ground for conversation and reflection across the 200 people who are engaged. 

As we near the end of 2010, I’m reflecting on what the insights from this year can tell us about the next two decades of work.

For me this year has seen ever more confirmation that a joined- up world (over five billion in the coming decade) will have magic properties as it brings opportunities to people born in those regions who, even a decade ago, would have very little hope. The programs to give computers to Rwanda’s children, to digitalize the world’s books and knowledge, and to innovate around the cost of mobile phones and connections all bode well for the future. 

I’m particularly interested in how this magic of a joined-up world will impact on one of the world’s most pressing problem – climate change. 

When we asked the executives in our consortium to talk about energy conservation and issues of carbon reduction, most saw it as a crucial factor for 2025. However, they also acknowledged that right now there is insufficient action taking place at the corporate level, in part because it is difficult to know what path to take.

However, what is interesting is that in the magic of a joined-up world, the most crucial developments in carbon reduction are more likely to come from the bottom-up, rather than top-down institutional or governmental edicts. Change will come as a result of individual team members taking action about their carbon usage, and as individual business units monitor and take action. In the past, these individual pilots and small discrete experiments often languished, unknown beyond their immediate circle. However, now with the magic of a joined-up world, processes like Open Innovation and the impact of hyper-connectivity will be that it is possible for these pilots and experiments to be shared, and for communities across the world to take a closer look at the outcomes and rapidly disseminate their findings. 

We discovered pilots in many companies designed to reduce one of the major creators of carbon – the commute to work and overseas travel. For example, at BT, many thousands of people are now working from home, and the business is also creating town ‘hubs’ in which local workers can meet without making the long commute into a major city. Technological connectivity is also becoming part of daily work. We heard from the executives at Cisco, how rapid developments in video conferencing are enabling them to build full wall videos to connect one team with another. We also saw how webinar developments are making the connectivity between virtual teams ever more efficient. It's clear that these new ways of working will over time reduce the carbon footprint of those that adopt them.

What is so exciting about the future is that we don’t have to wait for moribund governments or bureaucratic corporations to make the first move. When it comes to issues as large, complex and global as carbon use, it will be the connectivity between thousands of pilots and experiments that will make the greatest impact.

So as we look to the future, it’s the magic of a joined-up world that can give us hope. See you again in 2011!