The workplace has an industrial hangover - the Great Reset of work will cure it.
The post-pandemic reset of the workplace gives us a great chance to abandon outdated working practices and revolutionise how we work, writes Gary Bolles.
As we emerge from the global pandemic into what is likely the next industrial revolution, it's clear that our workplaces haven't fully recovered from the first. Humans are not machines, and shouldn't be treated as such. Yet the pre-pandemic modern workplace had numerous holdover practices from the factories of Olde England, and by far the most prevalent was the persistence of the toxic manager.
In the UK alone, nearly two million people have left their jobs since the first wave of the pandemic, with many citing a rotten manager and an unfriendly workplace as their main motivation. In fact, in GoodHire's recent Horrible Bosses survey, 83 per cent said they'd be just fine without a manager, and about the same percentage said they might quit simply because of a bad manager. And a CultureX study illustrated how managers can be a primary source of toxicity in the workplace – and a toxic corporate culture is the number one cause of employee attrition.
We have a historic opportunity to rebuild workplace culture. It's time to scrap the rigid, top-down hierarchy that has plagued organisations since the first industrial revolution. As many around the world start envisioning the post-pandemic workplace, we must adopt a fluid, horizontal 'network' style of managing that can help to attract and retain workers, and finally build a human-centric work environment that is fit for the 21st century.
In every era, there have been rules defining when, where, why, how, and with whom we work. Industrial-age workers were expected to endure long hours in dirty and dangerous conditions, often for very little pay. People were invariably treated like the machines they tended. They took orders from foremen, floor managers, and shift supervisors in a top-down hierarchical structure, and those shop bosses doled out good shifts and back-breaking work in their fiefdoms as they saw fit.
This employee-as-asset mindset has permeated much of work today. Few organisations had pre-pandemic work-from-home policies simply due to a lack of trust by managers, resulting in "management by surveillance": if you can't see someone working, they must not be. Though many of us have for years urged systemic changes to make companies both more inclusive and competitive in the information age, those who led organisations felt little urgency to implement more human-centric policies. Then along came a virus.
In response to the Great Reset of the global pandemic, layoffs in the UK reached unprecedented levels overnight, with 7.6 million jobs being put at risk as a result of the pandemic. That was followed by more people re-joining the workforce faster than during any recession in modern history, with unemployment dropping to 4.1 per cent. There has never been such a seismic shift in such a short period of time in the history of modern work in the UK. But that also created a dramatic mismatch, with vacancies rising to a record level of 1,172,000 between August and October 2021.
That mismatch increasingly puts the worker in the driver's seat. As employers scramble to attract and retain talent while they re-envision what the workplace might become, many are coming to realise that the hierarchical systems, rigid work roles, and manager fiefdoms of the past won't draw or keep newly-empowered workers. In a twist of irony, the global pandemic has done more to erode corporate feudalism than decades of management consultants, and command-and-control management is at risk of becoming as much a relic as the creaky machinery of the first industrial wave.
The new system of guiding work in the post-pandemic organisation looks less like a pyramid, and far more like a network. In this fluid model of work, workers are no longer the unthinking "hired hands" of the industrial age. Instead, workers and teams need to be empowered with the agency to find and solve problems – without the intervention of, or necessarily even the knowledge of, those who lead the organisation. Companies must embrace project-, problem-, and team-centric work. Human skills must become an enterprise resource. And those who lead organisations must continually reward innovative approaches to create value for the organisation's stakeholders.
All of this is powered by a new mindset anchored in flexible, human-centric work. Policies such as permanent remote and distributed work, three-day offices, four-day work weeks, and 10-month years are all worker-demanded strategies. And changing the role of the manager from management-by-surveillance to a "team guide" trained for, focused on – and compensated for – empowering dynamic teams serves as the fuel for a networked organisation. Result: workplaces that are flexible, inclusive, healthy, and connected.
But just creating team guides won't be enough to attract and retain in-demand workers. Hirers must completely revamp their hiring practices, both for external and internal candidates. Fluid work roles defined around problems and skills must take the place of task-oriented job descriptions. Leveraging apprenticeships, mentorships, and "try before you buy" paid projects for candidates, all will make for far more diverse and inclusive organisations. Embracing long-ignored groups such as Black workers, 50+, and the formerly incarcerated will make for far more diverse organisations. Focusing on skills rather than degrees will dramatically expand the potential worker pool, both outside and inside the organisation. And simply creating better jobs with better pay will ensure greater worker loyalty.
We can't waste all that we've endured through the global pandemic. We have proven that with the right combinations of incentives and disincentives, we can change overnight when, where, why, how, and with whom we work. Rather than reverting back to the leaden hierarchies and trust-optional management of the past, we can leave behind the hangover practices that mired us in mechanical approaches to work. Now is the time for us to jettison the last vestiges of the first industrial era, and to co-create the next set of work rules – together.
