The Energized Workplace

Designing Organizations where People Flourish

Perry Timms

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780749498665
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749498672
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

SHORTLISTED: Business Book Awards 2021 - HR & Management Category

Productivity is flatlining, employee wellbeing is at an all-time low and stress at an all-time high. Mental health issues are now the biggest single disability affecting the UK and are estimated to cost the economy £105bn each year. Traditional company design, structures and processes are making these issues worse and leading to unprecedented levels of staff burnout. This not only impacts individual employees, there is also a detrimental effect on overall company performance when employees can't perform to their full potential. It is the responsibility of Organizational Development and HR professionals to address these issues urgently and redesign work to allow people to flourish and businesses to thrive. Full of practical advice, tips and tools, The Energized Workplace provides a blueprint for how practitioners can redesign their organizations to support employees and ensure the business outperforms the competition.

It covers everything from why existing structures are causing business output to decline, why traditional processes are holding organizations back and what the consequences of not addressing these design issues will mean for business including increased staff turnover, a rise in employee absence and a decline in company profits. Including case studies from organizations across a range of sectors who have successfully put people at the heart of their workplace design such as CyberClick, Mind Valley, Brewdog and Wegmans and with specific guidance on designing for five generations working side by side, across different countries and on separate time zones, The Energized Workplace will help OD and HR professionals confidently tackle the organizational issues putting their company success and employee health and happiness in jeopardy. This book is essential reading for practitioners needing to deal with the wellbeing crisis and productivity puzzle in the new world of work.

04

1/20 or a 20 per cent probability

What are the chances that your work energizes you?

In this chapter, we look at the sad state of affairs in our work, workplaces and organizations providing us with something that should give us a flourishing life.

As described in our previous chapters, with only around one in five of us experiencing an engaging experience of work, isn’t it about time we addressed these chronic shortcomings?

Illnesses brought on by stressful ways of working; broken families due to absent parents always working; devices meaning we’re ‘always on’. Whilst it might not look like anything other than a first world problem, we have an epidemic of the proportions of plagues and influenzas on our hands and we’ve designed it like this.

Indeed, there are even worse signs to come where there are some predictions of a workless future, of people no longer needing to make anything and of artificial intelligence and robots of the physical and logical sort taking our jobs. To many this means no economic viability, and therefore no quality of life. No money to pay for things and experiences which the robots provide. This is the dystopian view of the future. Others predict a slip into purposeless, hedonistic ways of living which will see some bleak Blade Runner-esque or Matrix-like dismal or even fake reality.

Whether the science fiction book and movie industries have any truth in them, we shall have to see. What is clear is that there are already signs and incidents where some form of addictive, intrusive, malevolent technological interference with our lives is happening. Be it data and voting manipulation, be it gambling and pornography addiction, or be it the constant screening we seem to live our lives through, none of these appear to paint a rosy picture of the future yet to unfurl.

So in this chapter we take a look into research, opinions and stories of how the world of work is making us ill, live shorter and more unhappy lives, and the crimes against humanity in how people are treated as commodities instead of human colleagues and part of a united team doing great things together in the name of work.

Introduction – a stress pandemic

The CIPD is one of the biggest membership organizations for the HR, OD, learning and people professions in the world, with over 150,000 members globally. It has a strong future-focused agenda under its mission of better work and working lives.¹

It regularly researches hot areas and topics impacting on the world of work and people’s experiences of it, so that its professional HR members are informed and inspired to act in the most appropriate way on things like evidence rather than tired best practice or anecdotes.

One piece of research culminated in a report published in 2019² which demonstrated just how toxic workplaces have become. This extract is particularly telling:

Within UK organizations, the last year has seen an increased focus on employee mental health combined with employee well-being featuring on more senior leaders’ agendas (CIPD, Health & Wellbeing at Work, 2019).

These positive steps are, however, set against a backdrop of increasing levels of Presenteeism, Leaveism, and resultantly, increased stress. Employee burnout is becoming more common. Employers within the UK may indeed be taking mental health more seriously but with a workforce facing blurred lines between work and home (CIPD, Health & Wellbeing at Work, 2019), what will this situation look like in 2050? Furthermore, with AI advancing and replacing humans in some industries, how will humans be affected; both in terms of wellbeing and physiological and psychological energy expended at work?

The CIPD report mentioned above also reported that over a third (37 per cent) of employers have seen an increase in stress-related absence, with heavy workloads and poor management styles to blame.³

In support of this assertion, in May 2019 the World Health Organization published a declaration that burnout was now an officially recognized ill-health phenomenon.⁴ Classified as a disease. Stress-filled working is now an illness like bacterial and viral infections. An officially recognized disease where the infliction of circumstances in modern workplaces is the cause, is a travesty of modern workplace design.

Who is to blame?

Is it:

• HR, with its pro-employer policies treating all employees as work-shy payroll plunderers?
• Management, with its heavy-handed and oppressive supervisory tactics?
• Senior leaders, with their eye only on operating overheads and costs/profit?
• Society, with its fetishization of consumer products and lifestyles and its fixation on success being how hard you work and how high up the ladder you’re climbing?

I think the answer is you.

Well, you, me and all of us.

We’re all somehow to blame for this situation – through not being aware, being involved in such bad practices ourselves, for not calling out others who do such oppressive or self-harming things, and for not having our minds cleansed by alternatives.

We’ve knowledge that says things like overly long hours aren’t good for the work we do, the people we’re doing it with or the people who are waiting at home for us. Yet we persist.

So again, a pandemic. A self-designed one at that.

An extract from the WHO report mentioned earlier says this:

Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
• reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.

So the initial dimension is energy depletion or exhaustion – the entire premise of this book is in those words. We’re exhausted not just by physical exertion, but by mental overload and stressful ways of being.

Let’s take a look at this and, for a short time, explore how human energy is created, used, wasted and then regenerated.

Use of energy/depletion of energy at work

As a guide, an average man needs around 2,500kcal (10,500kJ) a day to maintain a healthy body weight. For an average woman, that figure is around 2,000kcal (8,400kJ) a day.⁵

The number of kJ varies depending on age, sex, activity level, body size and geographical location.⁶ The brain represents 2 per cent of a person’s body mass, yet uses 20 per cent of oxygen and calories.⁷

Knowing that much of the work we do is now logical and not so much physical, how do we utilize and sustain our energy when our thinking ‘muscle’ is using 20 per cent of our energy source in ‘normal’ day-to-day circumstances? At times of pressure, intensity and long hours, we’re using our mind in a way that depletes our energy without us truly realizing this until we are near to collapse. And how can we recharge our energy source to give that hard-working muscle more to keep us going?

In proving the impact of over-working, Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer (2010⁸) called for a better understanding of the human dimension of sustainability; and Fritz, Lam and Spreitzer⁹ attempted to answer this by looking into sustaining human energy at work.

The authors looked at employee strategies to sustain energy. They concluded that strategies relating to learning and positive workplace relationships were most strongly correlated to employees’ energy (rather than switching to simpler tasks, for example browsing the internet, as some form of a break).

Fritz, Lam and Spreitzer also discussed factors that lead to a depletion of human energy at work. They cite the human energy crisis¹⁰ as the term used to describe employees who are depleted of energy. Fritz et al mention:

• increased workloads during recessionary times;
• service sector jobs requiring more emotional labour; and
• attachment to mobile phones/laptops and connecting to work outside of ‘working hours’.

Either individually or collectively, these are causes of depleted energy in people at work.

Firms who are struggling financially cannot offer employees perks that would allow them to replenish energy, such as additional vacation time, bonuses, study programmes and even leave ...

Table of contents

• Foreword by Trish Uhl
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 01 2050 voyaging
• 02 20th-century design flaws
• 03 80/20 variances
• 04 1/20 or a 20 per cent probability
• 05 The 5 x 20 life and the redesign of age
• 06 20:20 vision
• 07 The 20 misuses of energy in the workplace
• 08 The 2020 list of energized workplaces
• 09 20 minutes per day to energize yourself
• 10 Tools for the next 20 years
• Index