{"id":"5fda37d86cee07000670aeab","slug":"making-work-human-en","title":"Making Work Human","audio_url":"https://hls.blinkist.io/bibs/5fda37d86cee07000670aeab/5fda37d86cee07000670aead-T1608136950.m4a?Expires=1652848846&Signature=MX53-ckdGpPeGRRXdb9axVw3Vd8Uatewj7wxRf4FTLE-Zmg2UZ2N-362hUxBBR~GcZTioG7xf~ovHP6z2xqif6pPvWycl5AsxYINPxP2PnefM-sJBAb3id61r0ZiCf2kmS0s~FquxD19PZn7GmmxMFuqMqBjn-kdF7JLyzYm1gr1~QHHxhKBghiwseY7jg-qh4hiLjH0rmae4ej4OplI-1z74A5AHyx0hXg-GWM8BVdD9nY82Z3eE9qmiPdRcT2-mAW9yNCdeGkhulEhHssm~bvZ16ppcmEx6a7inz0cFu1HRHHdhPbz-Xf8d9UPgXYknEI0ewdTt1lakiWjnasntw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJXJM6BB7FFZXUB4A","chapters":[{"id":"5fda37d86cee07000670aead","title":"The future of work is human.","text":"

All humans have the right to work in jobs that they choose. That’s what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed back in 1948. But for the authors and other people who work for Workhuman, this is no longer enough.

They believe that in our technologically advanced present, humans have the right to work in jobs that they choose, and that also meet their essential needs. These include the need for social connection, psychological safety, growth, and meaning.

Workhuman has made it its mission to ensure that modern workplaces represent these core human values. Why? Well, the first reason is that making people happier in their work is simply the right thing to do. The second reason is that human workplaces also happen to be great for business.

The key message here is: The future of work is human.

Rapidly evolving technologies such as the internet and artificial intelligence have transformed the way we work – and they show no signs of slowing down any time soon. This ever-changing tech environment has created a market that experts sometimes describe with the military term VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

In order to stay competitive in a VUCA market, businesses need to adapt and evolve constantly, too. This means that they need to attract and retain employees who are willing to do the same. Since employees today are more socially conscious, informed, and mobile than ever, keeping them inspired and engaged isn’t an easy task.

The best thing businesses can do is create a workplace where employees feel recognized, valued, and appreciated as full human beings. The human workplace is built around positive values such as community, connectedness, and belonging, and unites a diverse set of people around a shared mission. Instead of trying to force peak performances out of employees, it inspires them to give their peak performance.

Indeed, comprehensive business research over the last three decades shows that employees in human workplaces perform better, are more engaged with their work, and stick around longer. This increases profits, boosts business growth, and saves costs in the long run.

Companies like Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Toyota have already recognized the power of positive human values in the workplace, and are designing their business structures accordingly – with great success. These blinks will show you how your business can do the same.

"},{"id":"5fda37d86cee07000670aeae","title":"A good employee experience is essential for business success.","text":"

When it comes to choosing their employers, their work models, or their pay structures, employees today have more options than ever before. This seems only fair, because they also have more responsibility and less job security than ever before. But this situation creates a unique challenge for employers: How can you attract the best employees, help them give their best, and make them want to stick around?

The answer is that you make them feel good about themselves and their work.

This sounds simple enough. Yet research shows that 58 percent of employees never receive a thank-you from their bosses. Sixty-eight percent think that their company meets new ideas with skepticism and hostility. And 80 percent are never or rarely consulted about their personal work goals.

Here’s the key message: A good employee experience is essential for business success.

The old, hierarchical business structures are hardly a source of creativity and innovation, let alone employee satisfaction. That’s why business experts like Gary Hamel advise that we transform our bureaucracies into humanocracies. This means structuring companies in a way that boosts employee satisfaction.

Research shows that employees are most satisfied when their work gives them a sense of belonging, purpose, and achievement. Human workplaces can lay the groundwork for these positive emotions through six workplace features that meet employees’ basic needs.

Let’s count them down. One, a workplace should inspire trust between employees and their company. Two, it should encourage positive relationships among coworkers. Three, it should make employees feel like their work is meaningful. Four, it should ensure everyone is recognized for their contribution. Five, it should let employees have a say in the work they do. And six, it should help them maintain an appropriate work-life balance.

How does this translate to the real world? Well, for example, it could mean an employee celebrating a personal milestone, like the birth of a child, with coworkers. Or it could mean that an employee can take a few days off to care for a sick relative without feeling guilty.

Research shows that when employees are allowed to feel fully human in this way, they’re more engaged with their work, perform better, and stay with their employers longer. That’s why companies scoring in the top 25 percent of employee experience boast twice as much return on sales as companies in the bottom 25 percent.

In short, human workplaces inspire people to reach their full potential.

"},{"id":"5fda37d86cee07000670aeaf","title":"Gratitude is the backbone of a human workplace.","text":"

We’ve just learned how important a good work experience is – for both employees and businesses. Let’s take a closer look at three elusive emotions that are essential for a positive work experience: purpose, meaning, and gratitude. Ideally, a human workplace should prompt all three of these positive feelings in employees.

Purpose in this context means the shared mission of all people in the company. Google’s mission statement, for example, declares that the company’s purpose is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Meaning is generated when employees can connect a company’s purpose to their own goals and values. Doing meaningful work is increasingly important to people. In fact, 28 percent of tech employees today say they wouldn’t work for a company unless they knew that its work had a meaningful social impact.

This is the key message: Gratitude is the backbone of a human workplace.

Both purpose and meaning are important to a good work experience, but they’re hard to manufacture. People either feel them or they don’t. Gratitude, however, is an emotion we can practice – and it just so happens to reinforce shared purpose and individual meaning, too.

Practicing gratitude can be as simple as giving a public shout-out to a coworker for his exceptional effort in a work project. Or it can be as complex as designing a peer-to-peer reward system that lets employees award tangible perks and bonuses to each other. But we’ll get to that later.

Why is it so important to create moments of gratitude?

The first reason is that giving and receiving thanks makes people happier and more productive – there are roughly 11,000 studies attesting to this. The second reason is that public expressions of gratitude highlight positive behavior to which all employees can aspire. And the third reason is that moments of gratitude can help build a database of how humans interact with each other within a company – and provide valuable insights into how work is being done.

The company culture at Workhuman is based on three pillars of gratitude: Thank, Talk, and Celebrate. Thanking people means expressing authentic appreciation for someone’s work. Talking to people means communicating openly – whether via email, social media, or offline. And celebrating means sharing the joy of a personal or professional achievement with one another. How can a company create moments of thanking, talking, and celebrating? We’ll find out in the next blink.

"},{"id":"5fda37d86cee07000670aeb0","title":"Social recognition tools create moments of gratitude.","text":"

As a company, Workhuman specializes in creating moments of thanking, talking, and celebrating through what they call Human Applications. These are company-wide networking apps that allow employees to give each other feedback, rewards, and support. Combined with deep analytics, the data gathered through these apps can chart an insightful picture of what’s going on within a company – and how they can improve the company structure to the benefit of all employees.

Some of the most powerful human applications are based on the principle of social recognition. Social recognition happens when people recognize and reward each other for their work. Social recognition platforms let managers and employees express their gratitude for displays of hard work, special effort, or kindness. Such positive feedback tools can have amazing effects on people’s happiness, engagement, and performance at work.

Here’s the key message: Social recognition tools create moments of gratitude.

One thing is clear: employees aren’t thanked nearly enough. A 2017 workplace report found that only three out of ten employees had received praise for doing a good job during the previous week. But the same report concluded that if companies moved the needle up to thanking six out of ten employees in a week, the quality of work could be improved by 24 percent – and absenteeism could be reduced by 27 percent.

But what’s the limit on expressing gratitude? The answer is simple: there is none. Of course, expressing gratitude in a meaningful way requires a little more than just sending a prewritten e-card – especially in the workplace. So what should a successful expression of gratitude look like?

Well, for one thing, the gratitude should be social: everyone in the company should be included in celebrating their coworkers’ efforts. Second, gratitude should be direct, precise, and sincere. This means it should be expressed as soon as possible after the achievement it rewards. And instead of a blanket “Thank you for all your hard work,” it should come with an authentic and meaningful message regarding why the person’s effort was so important to both coworkers and the company in general.

And last, in the workplace, gratitude should come with tangible rewards. In the next blink, we’ll see what a social, gratitude-based reward system can look like.

"},{"id":"5fda37d96cee07000670aeb1","title":"The best reward systems are social, high-frequency, and flexible.","text":"

In order for gratitude not to become a hollow gesture over time, it needs to come with tangible benefits, gifts, and bonuses for employees.

That’s why every human workplace should have a flexible, crowd-sourced reward system that ties social recognition to real rewards. This means that news of any bonuses, gifts, and benefits employees receive is shared and celebrated with coworkers – for example, through a social app. It also means that coworkers can award bonuses, gifts, and benefits to each other based on their performance.

Apart from harnessing the power of social recognition, such reward systems have two other main benefits over the traditional system of annual bonuses: their frequency, and their flexibility.

The key message is this: The best reward systems are social, high-frequency, and flexible.

Research has shown that the motivational boost that follows a work bonus wears off after three to four weeks. So even your big annual Christmas bonus only carries you to about mid-January. A social reward system consisting of smaller but more frequent bonuses can provide employees with a new boost every few weeks. The size of a reward isn’t actually that important in terms of its positive effect.

If they’re accompanied by authentic gratitude, micro-bonuses with a value of $100, $200, or $500 work even for people with high salaries. Imagine you’re a high-earner, and your mom gives you a $50 sweater for Christmas. Would you be offended that she didn’t spend more money? Most likely, you would simply appreciate the gesture.

To reward employees in a way that feels meaningful to them, social reward systems should have a flexible structure. Bonuses, for example, can consist of much more than money. In fact, rewarding employees with goods and services has proven even more effective than handing out cold, hard cash. One recent study showed that $500 in non-cash recognition decreased turnover by 58 percent – compared to $500 in cash.

Point systems are a popular way of giving employees even more choice regarding whether they want to reward themselves with frequent small gifts or save up points to spend on something bigger, such as a hotel stay. Some companies go even further: Unilever, for example, has completely restructured its compensation plan so that employees can now design their own highly personalized mix of fixed pay and variable benefits and bonuses.

"},{"id":"5fda37d96cee07000670aeb2","title":"Performance reviews should promote growth through positive feedback.","text":"

In traditional companies with a top-down command structure, performance reviews between managers and employees only happen about once a year. During such a review, the manager typically focuses on an employee’s past work – and particularly on past mistakes. Understandably, hardly anyone looks forward to this annual beatdown. And hardly anyone gets anything out of it.

Today, decades of business research have proven what disgruntled employees knew all along: negativity isn’t a very good motivator. Of course, constructive feedback isn’t the problem. In fact, humans crave constructive feedback because learning and growth are deeply satisfying to us. But we also want to feel good about ourselves and appreciated for the work we do. Meticulously pointing out employees’ past mistakes isn’t the way to make them feel valued.

So how can we make performance assessments more human?

The key message here is: Performance reviews should promote growth through positive feedback.

In a human workplace, performance reviews happen much more frequently than once a year. Sometimes they include a whole work team, and sometimes they happen in one-to-one conversations. They put the focus on future goals rather than past failures. And, most importantly, they emphasize positive feedback to encourage self-learning and growth.

In a human performance review, the golden ratio of good to negative feedback should be five-to-one – at the very least. Managers should work together with employees to help them set their own goals in alignment with the company’s goals.

To do this, managers need to rethink their ideas of leadership. They need to start thinking of themselves less as commanders and more as coaches. Their job is to help people grow, learn, and do their jobs as best they can. Like any coach, they should have a clear sense of their students’ strengths and weaknesses, and meet all of them exactly where they are.

To nudge employees in the right direction, the managers of the future can draw on the three c’s: continue, consider, and celebrate. Continue represents quick check-ins throughout a work project to make sure that an employee is on the right track. Consider means working together with employees to figure out whether they need to improve their processes or change direction. And celebrate means showing appreciation for an employee’s work once it’s done.

"},{"id":"5fda37d96cee07000670aeb3","title":"Diversity and inclusion are non-negotiable attributes of a human workplace.","text":"

Until quite recently, people believed that men were naturally more talented as musicians than women. As a result, symphonic orchestras were almost exclusively male. When, in the 1970s, orchestras started holding blind auditions to disprove this stereotype, men still outperformed women.

Why? Because those judging would subconsciously register a musician’s gender by listening to his or her footsteps on the stage. Once blind auditions started being held on carpeted stages, male and female musicians were judged to perform equally well.

This little anecdote shows the power of unconscious bias. Often, we’re completely unaware of the subtle ways in which we reproduce stereotypes and contribute to discrimination. That’s why it’s so important for human workplaces to put special effort into uncovering and addressing these biases.

This is the key message: Diversity and inclusion are non-negotiable attributes of a human workplace.

Luckily, more and more companies are waking up to the many ways in which they produce and reproduce discrimination in the workplace. Most of them are still in the first stage of overcoming unconscious bias: diversifying their workforces.

Some companies have moved on to the second stage: making all of their employees feel included. Vernā Myers, the VP of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix, describes the difference this way: “Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.”

Uncovering and addressing the last of these unconscious biases is the final step of the process. People are becoming more aware of the fact that privilege comes in many different forms – from gender, race, and sexual orientation to age, weight, and even height. If used carelessly, social recognition platforms and reward systems can amplify such privilege and perpetuate the exclusion of people who are “different.”

That’s why any such tools need to be carefully monitored and, if necessary, corrected. Advanced data analysis through artificial intelligence can help us do this. For example, natural language processing can analyze the wording a manager uses to thank his male and female employees – and flag any conspicuous differences that may reinforce stereotypes.

If the moral argument for diversity isn’t enough to convince you, just consider that ethnically diverse companies are 35 percent more likely to outperform their competitors than their less-diverse counterparts. On top of that, diversity has been shown to increase employee performance, retention, decision-making, and innovation.

In a human workplace, everyone is part of the puzzle. In turn, a human workplace should include everyone equally.

"},{"id":"5fda37d96cee07000670aeb4","title":"Final summary","text":"

The key message in these blinks:

In a rapidly evolving world, we need to reconnect our work to core human values. This means creating workplaces that allow people to thrive, learn, and feel safe. The best way to do this is by cultivating a culture of gratitude. Social recognition platforms and crowd-sourced reward systems can help employees feel a sense of purpose, meaning, and belonging – and boost performance, productivity, and innovation.

Actionable advice:

Say thank you.

Whether you’re a business owner, manager, or employee, the next time someone in your company does something that saves you a ton of work, take a moment to write that person a sincere, thoughtful thank-you note. Explain why the effort was so important to you, and express your gratitude in words – or even with a small gift. You’ll be amazed at how good you’ll feel!

Got feedback?

We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.com with Making Work Human as the subject line, and share your thoughts!

What to read next: Brave New Work, by Aaron Dignan

You’ve just discovered a lot of strategies for how to make our future workplaces more human – and why we should. If all this made you curious about how human work will look like in the near future, Brave New Work will provide you with even more scenarios.

If you’re looking for a foolproof guide to the future of work – and want to know how your business can get ahead of the curve – head over to our blinks to Brave New Work.

"}]}

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