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what changed? · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Bring it back in one piece, will you, Bond?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Nicely done.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: You pause there, and I didn't I was like, it took me a minute to figure out if I was gonna try to pull off the accent, if I was just uh, you know.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_02: Anyways, we've been talking on the podcast for a while about personal effectiveness, but today I'd like to focus on whether it's gotten harder to be as effective.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: It feels to me like it has.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, actually, I I do think it has.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that and I think that there are actually a a bunch of reasons why.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, first off, the formal structures of life have have largely broken down.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when I mean formal structures of life, I'm thinking about how our day, for example, used to be organized.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: We used to get up in the morning at a particular time.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us, we would have that sort of personal uh early morning routine.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if our work job started at nine o'clock, maybe we'd roll in at five to nine and say, you know, say hi to the receptionist and and uh and put our coat up somewhere and just start work bang on nine o'clock.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then we go through our day and we'd probably have a set of fixed tasks that we were doing during our day.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: We might even have fixed periods of time where we took breaks.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, there were coffee breaks and things like that in the middle in the middle of our day that people observed and and uh used for socialization periods.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: We get to the end of our day and then we'd physically shut the door on work.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And when we physically shut the door on work, we basically mentally shut the door on work at the same time.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And those formal structures, which we spent almost no time thinking about, they were just there, um, were the basis of the separation of our work and our non-work lives and brought us a series of uh of emotional benefits, um, psychological benefits, giving us appropriate rest between the periods of time when we were doing uh work and when we were going to be doing work again.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and of course, technology has played a really important part in that, as we've discussed on some of these podcasts.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Technology systems have been largely built for flexibility.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: They've been built to enable us to be extremely flexible in terms of the way we work.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, as individuals, we crave uh you know autonomy and flexibility and things like that.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so those tools have been very popular.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but as we built those tools for flexibility, the res the end result of it is the idea that basically work is invading our personal lives, and our personal lives are invading work, and there is very, very little separation between the two.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: There is no digital equivalent of that physical door that we used to close.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it got even worse during the pandemic, obviously, uh became vivid relief at that point, right?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: When we were when we were forming this company, um Billion Minds, we started off uh during the pandemic interviewing, of course, largely over uh uh over Zoom, interviewing hundreds of people.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I will say that almost all of them that resonated with this problem, and almost all of them did resonate with this problem, almost all of them also mentioned that in the pandemic it had got worse.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you're it's just the act of physically traveling to a workplace uh helped create a degree of separation.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And and if you're not traveling to a workplace and you're accustomed to it, now all of a sudden you are basically literally having to potentially move from one room to another room and switch the context of who you are, going from being uh you know a worker in your company to being a dad or a husband or or whatever it happens to be.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes during your meetings, making those switches.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I know my life has changed a lot over the last few years, even before that, but some of it's been positive, some of it negative.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what's the overall impact on society on this on these switches?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what's interesting is that uh a lot of people kind of uh attribute everything that's happening to the pandemic.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, if you if you look at what's been happening, it's been a it's been kind of a slow burn to this point that we're at, which I mean we're not shy about calling it a breaking point.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the statistics now, um, some of the most recent ones came about in the uh the HBR study called Beyond Burnout.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they interviewed 1,500 people in in 46 countries, I believe.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and 89% of those people said uh their work life is worse.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: 85% say that their well-being has declined, 56% say that job demands have increased, and then 55% say that they can't balance their home and work life.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: But what's interesting is that um even though the study was done after the pandemic, as I mentioned, it was a slow burn to get to this point.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: You could look back all the way to the late 70s and and early 80s to start seeing this coming.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, when you started with computing in general, you know, PCs.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh then you get into multitasking PCs.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that's uh allowing you to, or giving you the ability uh theoretically to do multiple things at once.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Then you start getting into the connected nature of computing, LANs, web, web 2.0, et cetera, and you get into the just internet era, um, it's it's giving us more abilities, um, but it's also adding more tax, it's adding more stress, it's adding more demands on us.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then when we hit this mobility phase in terms of our technological growth, um you know that was seen as a very strong benefit to be able to access things from anywhere at any time.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and indeed it is, but we weren't really tracking the amount of tax that had on people.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly, you're always on.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly you're always reachable and you're always available.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And again, um, there's positives, but there's byproducts that for a long time went unrecognized.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think COVID was just pouring gasoline on it, right?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it was just now um this work from anywhere trend is not just a trend anymore.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's it's a way of life.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and people weren't trained for that.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't prepared for that mentally.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't prepared for that in terms of their productivity workflow.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and so this kind of chronic stress that it that we're seeing right now, this breaking point that we're seeing right now, um, has actually been coming for a while.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: But on the positive side, it's forced us to reevaluate our workflows, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's forced us to assess that things are important to us.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's forced us into this um intertwined work, personal life uh you know situation that has um, you know, caused us to self-evaluate.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people have realized things about themselves and about their families.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: They've gotten to know their families again in different ways.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's kind of the positive side.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think people have kind of reimagined what their day can and should be.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's a positive thing.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's really interesting.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: I I it strikes me too that there's an element here where there was a little bit of hero worship around being a good multitasker.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Which is often venerated.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um that people that can juggle the most simultaneously or complete the most tasks, or or even the badge of honor.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you've seen this, Matt, in the workplace, um, of uh the person who's stressed out because they're working so hard.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: That was that was seen as a positive thing.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and it sounds, it sounds odd to us now, but just a year ago, you know, he or she who who was venerated in the workplace was the hardest worker, right?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: The one that would stay up all night, the one that would work the weekends.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think we're getting to the point now where those behaviors are are no longer venerated by by the other employees and peers.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's intriguing, isn't it?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you when you think about it, what we're all about is what we refer to as sustainable productivity.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And what you just described there, Ryan, is the end is the utter antithesis of that, right?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it what you tend to see in the workplace, I guess, is a fraction of people's lives, as in a fraction of their of people's days, I should say, um, across a fraction of people's lives.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you work inside one company, you work your tail off, you're nobody else gets to see what happens in the rest of your life.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you leave the company after a year, nobody else gets to see what happens in the rest of your life as a whole.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the damage can be pretty significant.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think organizations are having to start to think about what the impact is on them, on those organizations, of literally burning their employees into the ground.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and this is something obviously that was raised with some high profile recently at Goldman Sachs.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: But um, this is something that I think, uh, particularly with the new generation of workers coming in, that is being raised as more of an issue overall.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and they're gonna have to look at, you know, as an organization, you look at productivity uh as a as this measure, this thing you're looking at all the time.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like we didn't have to used to think about how productive you would be in most jobs, it just kind of shook out of your job description.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now we do.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is it that simple?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is kind of.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'd I'd certainly say if you look back over the last 30, 40 years, there's some super interesting trends that come out of it.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So, first off, um, there have obviously always been jobs that have been, let's say, more creative in nature and more unstructured and ambiguous in nature.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Those jobs have always existed, but they were a relatively small part of the overall economy.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, today, the number of people that are are doing these jobs that are more ambiguous in nature, that aren't measured in terms of when somebody shows up and when they leave and how many things they move from the left-hand side of the ledger to the right-hand side of the ledger, that number of jobs is exploding.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, they used to say 80% of life is showing up.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And to a certain extent, that was true in the workplace for a uh for a large number of people.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you showed up on time, if you did what the job description said you should do, um, and you completed that successfully, then you it was very easy for the company to see that you were valuable.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was very easy for you to define what success looked like, and you could end the day confident that you'd done a good job because you'd fulfilled your job description.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this explosion that has happened enabled by technology, this explosion that has happened in the types of jobs that have unclear outcomes is has been very, very dramatic.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there are so many jobs today where people don't have a clear definition of what it is that they're supposed to do.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: They certainly don't have a clear definition of how they're supposed to do it.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in many cases, they end the day with more work than where they started it.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and what's particularly, I think, interesting about that is that when that was a smaller part of the economy, the number the people that did those types of work, that type of work, could self-select in.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if you were super comfortable in an ambiguous world, if you were super comfortable with high degrees of uh of autonomy, um, and you were super intrinsically motivated, if you had all of those characteristics, you would self-select into that type of work.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: But now it's such a large part of the economy that a bunch of people that are doing this type of work didn't necessarily self-select into it and aren't necessarily intrinsically suited for it.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just becoming the norm of what work is.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, what that implies is that it's no longer good enough just to say, all right, everybody, you figure out how to be effective and productive in this uh in this world.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: People need help.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: They need help from uh from technology, they need help from training, uh, they need help from their organizations to help them do their best work in this crazy, ambiguous, uncertain world.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this pendulum's not going to swing back.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: We certainly see a future.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we really think about 10 years out where uh it's much less about um I work for a company or Matt works for a company, uh, but rather I have a set of skills.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm good at achieving specific outcomes repeatedly.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm able to give those skills to other people or other organizations uh as necessary.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that could be um as a paid engagement, um, it could be as um, you know, philanthropy, uh, whatever I choose.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's it's my own destiny, it's my own journey.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So then productivity becomes extremely personal at that point.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my ability to achieve an outcome uh is is is in my control.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not dictated by my organization.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: All this uh company cares about, this company I'm giving myself 20% to, let's say I'm giving myself 20% to five different companies, that's gonna be more the norm than the exception.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: All the company cares about is my ability to achieve a particular outcome.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's up to me to get to that outcome as effectively and efficiently as I can.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it's in my hands.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: They're not going to prescribe to me how to do the work, they're not gonna impose structure upon me.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the the give and take, the the reward system is gonna be such that uh I benefit when I get there the most effectively and the most efficiently as possible.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And just to weave in just the well-being angle a little bit, if I'm unfit, if I'm overstressed, if I'm burned out, then I can't fulfill any of those objectives.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now all of a sudden I'm letting five companies down instead of one.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and we've talked about this on a uh on one of the other episodes, but I think it's it's something that's worth drawing attention to again, right?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: This implies something in terms of how we manage ourselves and what tools we use to uh to help ourselves do our best work.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: It also implies something about the organizations that we're working for.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in a world where you as an organization have effectively 100% of um the person's work day and you own that and you control that, there are certain demands that you can place upon the people that are working for you, there are certain requirements that you can have from them.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it then allows you to be, I would say, somewhat relatively loose in terms of how you measure their impact, because you're relying upon the relationship versus relying upon just a fraction of the uh of the time that somebody has in a day.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: But if you are getting a fraction of somebody's attention, as it were, and you're competing for that attention with the four or five other companies that the that the person is is working for, then you really need to understand the impact that they're generating.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And just knowing that they're showing up for two hours a day or showing up for four hours a month is not sufficient.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to keep you competitive if that's the way in which you're looking at it.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, really understanding how, from the perspective of the organization, number one, what impact people are driving, but number two, how to get the the best two hours out of them that you can get becomes super important in a much more uh holistic way than it's been before.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: Billion Minds has taken over a dozen years of research into the habits of the most effective among us in this new world where work and life are merging.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: They've distilled it down into a 90-day program targeted at employees that do unstructured, ambiguous work.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: Employees from five different countries around the world are using Billion Minds to help them start each day with a purpose and end it with accomplishment.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you or your team wants to discover how Billion Minds can help employees optimize their work in the context of their broader life, go to BillionMinds.com slash learnmore today.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's billionminds.com slash L E A R N M O R E.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Billion Minds, providing practical tools for our way too busy lives.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: We need to spend more time understanding ourselves, our own productivity journey, our own workflow, um, and and for a variety of reasons.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the first is dealing with ambiguous work, unstructured work is hard.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously, having the ability to deal with that um is important.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then it's also how you define success for yourself.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you're not going to be given a definition necessarily of what success might look like for you.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so then success metrics become ambiguous along with that ambiguous work.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so we need to understand more about what to do, when to do it, how to prioritize, um, and and most importantly, being able to do it day in and day out.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's the repeatability.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Paul introduced the term earlier, it's worth repeating.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we think the future of productivity is sustainable productivity.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this notion of sacrificing one thing for the other um day after day uh is not sustainable, or sacrificing your wellness for the sake of getting more done on one day uh or for a series of days, um, and then spending another day trying to recover from that and then flipping the equation.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: That this back and forth, this pendulum is not working for most people.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the reasons why is a lot of people will work really hard towards a finish line.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's go back to kind of the traditional nine to five, five days a week.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: You you work for the weekend, right?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's an expression that's been around for a long time, Friday being your finish line.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, well, if you work towards that finish line, but it's not actually a finish line because you're bringing your work into the weekend or your weekend is is just as heavy loaded, whether that's personal or professional as any other day, you're not really getting that relief.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so you train yourself to think it's coming, but it's not.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you need to be more in tune with those aspects of your life so that you can be more productive on a day-to-day basis.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing I'll mention is um this gets into, again, a more deeper understanding of yourself and how you do your best work.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: We often talk about work modalities.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Are you in a learned state?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Are you in a managed state?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Are you in a network state?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, are you in a deep thinking state?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you have to take accountability for knowing when you're in those states and how to enable yourself to be successful uh or to be productive when you're in those states.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Matt, I think it was a conversation that you and I had, it might have been on a previous episode about um if I know that I do my best thinking when I'm on a five-mile run, then it's my accountability to know that.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's my accountability to make sure that I schedule my run at the same time that I I owe my organization or myself some deep work, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and employers should really embrace that as well.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it's really it's really kind of intriguing when you start to think through all the aspects of this.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um in a sense, we've always been responsible for being effective in our lives in some way, shape, or form, right?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: We have um sets of commitments that we make to family, to friends, to others that um that are just part of our everyday lives.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we look to fulfill those commitments.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: We look to be our best selves for each uh for ourselves and for each other.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and life, general life, is kind of ambiguous and uncertain and full of curveballs that get that get thrown at you.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think fundamentally the real difference here is that the workplace.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is now often as ambiguous as the rest of our lives.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the workplace is jumbled up with those other aspects of the rest of our lives.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And once you start to think about it in that way, it actually, I for me at least, it kind of starts to explain a lot of things, explain why the stresses are as high as they are.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: For many people in the past, work has been one of two things.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's either been the thing that we do so that we can enjoy the rest of our lives.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then with my paycheck, I can pay the mortgage, I can have my car, and then maybe I can spend some of the money for other, you know, for other fun things.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: So for some people, it's that, right?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just the the thing that you have to do in order to enjoy the rest of your life.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: For other people, work was a solace, right?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Work was the organized thing that um that distracted them from the rest of their life, which maybe for them was too crazy.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so you typically had the work and the non-work thing being, I feel like, a contrast to each other and a moderating factor.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um the one would be a moderating factor of the other.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with the workplace being just as ambiguous as the rest of our lives and jumbled up with the rest of our lives, you've lost that idea of work being the moderating factor for non-work and non-work being the moderating factor for work.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are there are so many similarities between what we what many of us do in the workplace and what many of us do outside of the workplace.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when you start to look at things like, you know, overall levels of uh of stress and uh and start to compare some of those statistics with what has happened, uh what has typically happened in the past with uh people that have had a fulfilling career and then retired from their fulfilling career and then had a whole bunch of health challenges fairly shortly after the fulfilling career they've had.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think you start to see some clues there, right?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Which is that effectively um when you retire from a from a structured job with a bunch of meaning, um, you've now lost that contrast between the work and the non-work life.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're losing that contrast between the work and the non-work life while we're working.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's really interesting.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: So so what do you think should be the responsibility of good employers here?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I do think they need to be much more empirical in terms of how they measure impact.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we've talked about a bunch of reasons for that, including uh the gig economy discussion that we were just uh we're just having earlier on.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, if you're in a in a position where um you're just getting part of somebody's time, you need to be able to value that time appropriately to figure out whether it's worth uh worth using that time.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's obviously for selfish reasons as much as anything else.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: But specifically, even in the world where you have a hundred percent of somebody's time, you still now most likely have many people that are working for you that fit into the category of what we're talking about.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, that they've got those jobs that are unstructured, they've got those jobs where the outcomes are not clearly defined, and whereby where for management it's pretty difficult and pretty challenging to be able to empirically measure the impact that employees have.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: So Ryan and I have been spending some time over the uh over the last few weeks speaking more to uh to business leaders and employers um to try and investigate how they go about this process of of evaluating the impact of their employees.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I will say that one thing that is coming out loud and clear, particularly from managers inside organizations, is just how much time it takes to do that, how much time it takes to be able to evaluate as empirically as you can whether employee A is contributing positively to the organization and more positively towards the organization than employee B, for example.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do you do that in a world where it's uh where it's really uncertain?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you get empirical about it?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they make mistakes.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, an example of a mistake that is very commonly made is that you start confusing uh either raw potential from people, as in, well, they're in the right kind of job and and uh they have a bunch of knowledge associated with this, um, this particular job that they're doing, um, and they communicate well and things like that.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: You're taking that that raw potential and confusing it with actual performance.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, over a period of time, how far did somebody advance from where they are to where they need to be, or how far did they take a group from where they are to where that group needs to be?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that kind of like sustained measure of performance over time getting confused with just potential.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then it becomes even more complicated in the group dynamic, whereby um you potentially have individuals and organizations, maybe they are good communicators versus the person next to them that's a poor communicator.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe communication skills are really unimportant in this job, but it helps them just in terms of conveying themselves uh uh as performing well.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you sort of trying to measure these two people, but maybe behind the scenes, one of those people is actually not only performing well as a or performing okay as an individual, but disrupting the team.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and maybe they're making the performance of everybody else slightly worse.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: We always go into these sports analogies, but many people will be aware inside sports teams, there are countless examples of individuals that have been fantastic individual performers, but have been poisonous in the dressing room and have brought down the performance of the rest of the team great uh to a greater extent than their individual performance.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's not visible, easily visible like it is in a team in a dressing room, right?
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's distributed, everybody's doing their own stuff, much is invisible to many managers, and you've got to be able somehow to be able to determine and divine all of that stuff that is happening and then potentially take actions on it.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's also the aspect of how do you help people manage their careers inside organizations?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this has become so much harder with this type of ambiguous work that we're describing, right?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: In the in the old school world of this, right, you're doing a clearly defined job, and there's probably a clearly defined path from that clearly defined job to the promotion, to the thing that you potentially do next.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: In this new world where you're doing a whole bunch of ambiguous stuff, you're using a whole bunch of different soft skills, then the places that you can go, either within your organization or outside of your organization, are entirely different.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's an incredibly difficult thing to manage yourself inside an organization.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so we think that it's going to become much more incumbent upon employers, particularly as we shift into this gig economy, to help employees understand the opportunities that they have inside their organization and outside their organization.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: So to provide services that are effectively career management services inside the organization to help the individual find the right match that grows themselves along the path that they're looking to define.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: That is something obviously we can we can try to take ownership of ourselves, but really smart employers will take on some of that responsibility as well and provide people with the guidance and really some of the structured programming necessary to advance themselves inside the organization.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you're competing for not just a whole person, but you're competing for part of a person, you really need those parts of people that you get to be super, super effective, and you need to be able to find the ways to reward them appropriately.
• 30:57
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• 31:24
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• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think you touched on something there that's that's important to mention too is that we're also seeing simultaneously the rise of internal HR type systems to track goals, for example.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like the best advice you get is make your goal smart, make sure it's measurable and all this stuff.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it hits on what you're saying here is like, let's figure out how to measure, because we have to set up a new way to think about this.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: Even though we're rolling out systems to capture it, maybe it's not getting to the heart of the of the uh the to the root of the uh problem here, where you have the the benefits that we want to see.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: Just throwing a system at it doesn't always make it work.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's the thoughtfulness and the mindset behind it that that makes those goals there.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that is incumbent on the employers to provide.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I do think that that might be the next frontier for HR.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um traditionally, they relied on um, that is HR leaders and and and even executive CEOs relied on employee surveys to kind of get the pulse of the employees.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's very difficult to uh it's very difficult to do one-on-ones with thousands of people if you're a very large organization for one.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's very difficult, it's very time consuming.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it it also is very difficult to get the truth out of people because they're worried about saying the wrong thing, uh, upsetting the Apple cart, as it were.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then surveys aren't much better.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's still a palpable fear, even when it's anonymous, of uh are you gonna be found out for having said something bad about management or something like that?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you're not really getting the whole truth.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that's always been the holy grail for HR leaders, is to get the truth.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so um, that's very difficult to do, like I said, when you're asking for the truth.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and I think systems technology is gonna help to enable uh HR leaders to be able to visualize um the truth as opposed to just having to ask for it.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other side of it, and this is another part of this new frontier for HR, um, and this can be a little tricky, but it's understanding the whole person.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the challenges is with personal effect uh effectiveness is that it is personal.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's a lot more to a person than their day job, right?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and now I don't expect that people to divulge everything that they're doing uh across their whole lives to their employers, um, but I do think that that relationship needs to improve a bit.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um I do think that HR needs to understand and appreciate the the things that people, their employees have going on in the balance of their lives.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And like I said, it doesn't need to be very detailed analysis of every activity they're doing outside of work, uh, but how well are they tracking along with their wellness targets?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: I do believe that uh HR is going to start um asking a different set of questions to start and then hopefully being able to have an improved partnership with their employees to say, no, it's just as important to me that you're completing this personal objective as it is this professional objective.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because I know that a well mat is going to perform better than a sick mat.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, I know that a burned-out Paul is no good to me.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to make sure that I'm encouraging you to take time for yourself, uh, to take time for your family, to achieve those personal objectives because I know that you'll be a better employee for it.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so getting some uh visibility into that other side of the employee is gonna be critical.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's really complicated though, isn't it?
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's based on some underlying factors that most organizations don't have in terms of their relationships with their employees.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: And probably the biggest underlying factor it's based on is trust.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: So how many of us today would feel comfortable walking into our employer and telling our employer that, for example, we we feel we feel burned out directly and saying, you know what?
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I I think I can only give you 70% of my best work right now because I'm just too burned out.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or even going into HR and you know, explaining that there is something happening in our personal life and telling HR that that this thing that is happening in our personal life is gonna cause a significant diminishment in our in our performance for a certain period of time.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think many of us, many of us would feel very, very uncomfortable in those in those situations.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the reason that we would feel uncomfortable doing that is because what we're effectively volunteering is that the amount of value that we've been provide been providing to the company is going to be diminished.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we're asking the company directly to be okay with that, right?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: And be okay with that for a period of time because we're with the company for a longer period of time.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, most of us, as we do our work, in some way, shape, or form, whether it's at the top of the agenda or whether it's slightly lower down the agenda, are in some way, shape, or form fearful of losing our job.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we're fearful of losing our job, we're unlikely to volunteer those things.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we're gonna try attempt and we're gonna try to push through.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this, of course, is particularly difficult.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the world of mental health, right?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's uh in physical health.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you've been diagnosed with cancer or something, you can walk up to your boss and you can say, Hey, I've been diagnosed with cancer, it's gonna involve this and this and this and this.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: But for there's still a stigma associated with mental health, even though it's just a different part of the body, it's the brain instead of another part of your body, um, that there's still this stigma around saying, hey, I've got a challenge here, and uh the challenge is gonna take me a while to work through, et cetera, et cetera.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: This comes back to what the role of the employer is, right?
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to maintain sustainable productivity out of your employees, you have to create an atmosphere of trust with those employees so that the employees uh can feel comfortable sharing the challenges that they're facing and then potentially what the impact on the uh on the employer should be.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: But you're not gonna get that if you're governing, as it were, uh using uh using other methods.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's great.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I think there's there's so many things wrapped up in here.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: There's the trust, the safety incumbent on the on the employer to put there.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it goes so far beyond like providing a you know on-site restaurant, you know, and and childcare services and a gym, although those things are very useful.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's like we we keep seeing this this uh opportunity for employers to raise the bar of their uh appeal with wellness, with this thought, with this safety, you know, with what typically used to be HR, with almost crossing over into wellness counseling and and things like that.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like you can use your benefits to go talk to a counselor.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, we we in HR understand that you all are working in this environment.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: Here's our expectations, here's the safety, here's the trust, here's that.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: That that's really, really cool.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think it's it's a high bar to set.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: And you're gonna see, I think really quickly, especially with the introduction of hybrid work uh becoming uh dominant now, where these in these little intangibles, these impactful incentives need to be talked about on a on a much broader scale.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is really interesting.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's great.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Matt, it's interesting you mentioned that.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: I I could almost articulate that as um root cause versus just addressing the symptoms, right?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um giving somebody a gym membership um uh, you know, for free as part of a benefit or something, or some other wellness benefit is really addressing symptoms only, not root cause, unless you solve that trust problem.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: We've thought of the workplace, and employers, I think, in particular, have thought of the workplace for a long time now as a place where you address the challenges around retention uh of your best people by offering people goodies, right?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the goodies that you offer them start with a paycheck, and then the next goodie that you offer them is, you know, is a benefits package.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then surrounding that benefits package, particularly if you want to encourage people to come to the workplace, and particularly if you're a you know an IT company, maybe the next goodie you offer them is, you know, free drinks or free food or something along those lines.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we just we we ply goodies or we we offer goodies to people and say, okay, you you're still not staying enough.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's some more goodies, here's some more goodies, in order to be able to get to kind of deal with any retention challenges that they face.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: But there probably needs to be a fundamental rethinking of that, particularly as we shift into the gig economy world.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think the real job of an employer is to create and foster an environment where my employees can do their best, most fulfilling work.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's fundamentally different than the benefits package that I was talking about, or the underlying pay or anything.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Those are those become, if you like, sort of table stakes.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: But what's necessary is what the environment, the physical environment, the technology environment, um, and the overall uh underlying cultural environment is in place in order to allow my employees to do my best work.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's incredible when you think it through that for many employers, they're barely thinking about that.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're actually they're they're, if you like, they're making that the employees' problem.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: By by giving the employee, by just saying, okay, we're creating something that's incredibly flexible.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's up to you to figure out how to do your best work.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that sounds like empowerment, but it's not really empowerment, right?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're not creating the the fundamental underlying structure that enables the employees to then build upon that structure and soar.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they're just saying, no, you know, here's some stuff, here's some pay, here's some benefits.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now you go figure out how to do your best work.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that that the sustainable productivity is really going to be a the companies that do this well are going to be the companies that create that environment that allow employees to do their best work and are and are and are thinking about that on a day in, day out basis.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: What do I need to change about my workplace?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: What do I need to change about the culture?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: What do I need to change about the technology?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: What do I need to change about the underlying support structures and the underlying trust environment that is necessary to be able to do that?
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you're not going to get the best out of your employees if they don't trust you.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to get the best out of your employees if you don't give them any support structures.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to get the best out of your employees if they are constantly living in fear that the moment they tail off, their performance tails off for a week or a month or whatever, that they're out of the door.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: The Way Too Busy podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at Billion Minds.com.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives.