Employers are forcing their employees back to the office to impose control over workers, but they are failing to recognize that remote work enables worker power. In fact, remote work is empowering workers by giving them more control over their lives and work. With remote work, workers can choose where and when to work, which gives them more control over their schedules and their work-life balance.
Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts
Remote work is possible.
You can have trust and connection within a digital space.
You just need a leader who is comfortable with and optimized for working that way, of which most conventional leaders aren’t, which is why they’re forcing their workers back to a conventional way of working that they are comfortable with.
One of the better documents that I’ve found that highlights what digital leadership is capable of and how it will be the way of the future is the IBM paper entitled Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders.
Obviously the key difference here though is that these are real communities where leaders are chosen by the community themselves, thus these leaders can’t dictate their way into leadership by controlling others, they have to earn their community’s trust and respect to be in them.
Gaming leaders are more comfortable with risk, accepting failure, and the resulting iterative improvement, as part of their reality. Many of these leaders are able to make sense of disparate and constantly changing data, translating it all into a compelling vision. And the relationship skills of the best gaming leaders would put many Fortune 500 managers to shame.
If you want to see what business leadership may look like in three to five years, look at what’s happening in online games.
Byron Reeves, Ph.D. The Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication at Stanford University and Co-founder of Seriosity, Inc.
The wave of recorded outbursts from CEOs is often “about control,” says Jacob. “That’s definitely how it felt in my instance. It felt like she just wanted to be able to watch over everyone and just be in control of us. It feels like something about the freedom and flexibility that remote work gives employees somehow makes the people in charge feel threatened.”
This is a phenomenal quote that communicates so much about the changes occurring in our world today.
Why its poignant is because within the context of vertical (psychological) development, there is a midpoint shift from conventional thinking to postconventional thinking that focuses on control. In effect, the peak of conventional thinking focuses on trying to control everything (including people) as much as possible, so as to create a sense of order in your world. With the shift to postconventional thinking though, there is realization that you can’t control people, so there is a letting go of control which empowers people by giving them the space to be who they are, thus releasing their potential in the process.
For this to work in an organization setting though, it requires that the individuals who are freed from control need to take responsibility and control of themselves and their work. Right now there seems to be a noticeable desire for this by workers but a hesitancy by employers to allow it. In other words, employers still don’t trust their employees to be responsible.
Yet if we want to evolve and be prepared for The Future of Work, everyone needs to let go, mature, and evolve, taking responsibility for just themselves, rather than trying to control others. Until this occurs, work will continue to not work for people as a whole.
Some CEOs are thinking, “‘But they used to do this,’” says Lewi. “‘They used to come in five days a week. Why are they complaining about three?’ I try to help them see that the world has changed.”
“COVID changed everything,” he says. “We all looked in the mirror and rethought what our purpose and priorities are and, Why are we doing this? That’s reset on the workforce.”
This discrepancy in evolutionary development between the individual and the cultures the person is embedded in, is one of the reasons people decide to leave the corporate world. As they get further along in their evolutionary journey, they reach a stage in their development where they no longer feel aligned with the values and beliefs of the organisation they are working in. They become gradually more stressed and begin to feel burned out, either because their needs —the opportunities they require to move ahead with their development—cannot be met by the culture they are working in, or because they no longer feel a sense of alignment with the values of the organisation.
Many people put up with such situations for far too long. Because of their loyalty to the organisation or their commitment to their work, they stay longer than they should. They justify their actions by entertaining the dream that somehow the culture will magically change. Others stay because they believe they will not be able to make the same level of income or get the benefits they now enjoy, elsewhere.
They lock themselves into a cultural environment where they feel they have to park their values in the car park every time they enter their place of work. Spending long periods in such a state of misalignment sickens the soul. Eventually, most people get to the point where they cannot stand it anymore. They feel so unhappy that they look for alternative employment, perhaps accepting a lower-paying job, one with fewer benefits, or part-time employment. They will be willing to go anywhere, to get away from the toxic environment of their current place of work. The more talented and courageous among them will start their own businesses.
There is no such thing as a “job creator.” There are employers, who hire employees, because they need them. And then employers pay the employees less than the value they generate. That’s the system. How did we get to the point at which people behave as if the wealthy are giving a gift to working people? I realize it’s not a new attitude, but it remains proudly f’d up.
Stumbled across this talk on TV today, only to go online and find out it’s from a couple of months ago but a great round table discussion nevertheless on the current upheaval affecting the work world.
One thing I felt while watching this was flashbacks of pain and frustration from previous work experiences. I’ve mentioned before that due to my highly sensitive personality, I’m kind of like a canary in a coal mine, thus I’m able to detect and empathetically feel the cultural atmosphere of the organizational environment based on its people. But trying to talk to management and get them to understand the feeling of the needs of their people can be an exhausting affair.
We can’t even get to the table to talk to people.
Of particular note was one employer in the restaurant industry saying it’s even difficult to try to start a conversation with potential employees because many don’t show up for interviews and others even quit and disappear without giving notice as to why.
And as soon as I heard this and another employer complaining about potential employees ghosting them without notice, it’s evident to me that this is effectively decades of horrible business practices by employers that are effectively coming back and haunting them. In effect, employees are only mirroring the hiring practices of most business in that they often don’t respond, indicating if you’ve gotten a job or not, or even if why.
And it’s only the beginning, once you’re hired. Trying repeatedly for days, months, or years to talk to management to get them to see and understand issues is exhausting. Employees have had enough. They’re exhausted trying to talk to someone who won’t listen and won’t try to understand their perspective.
Why this is poignant is because over the Christmas holidays, I spent time with my wife’s family and a discussion came up about the labour issues in Canada and the feeling for some was that people are “lazy and don’t want to work anymore.” I immediately turned around and disagreed with this.
I indicated that work is one of the primary ways people feel a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and of being valued by others. People want to work. They’re just exhausted working the old way and have had enough of it because work is no longer working for them.
And this is most evident by the one employer indicating how her remaining employees are being overloaded because she can’t find and hire people, as if she has no choice but to overload them with work. As usual, employees always become the ones who have to stretch and fill the gap. The only problem today is that you can’t fill these gaps anymore because they’re too bottomless and can’t be hidden.
All said and done, I find the situation somewhat ironic in that here we have employers now finally in distress and knowing what employees have felt like for decades in trying to talk but no one was interested in truly listening to them.
This discrepancy in evolutionary development between the individual and the cultures the person is embedded in, is one of the reasons people decide to leave the corporate world. As they get further along in their evolutionary journey, they reach a stage in their development where they no longer feel aligned with the values and beliefs of the organisation they are working in. They become gradually more stressed and begin to feel burned out, either because their needs —the opportunities they require to move ahead with their development—cannot be met by the culture they are working in, or because they no longer feel a sense of alignment with the values of the organisation.
Many people put up with such situations for far too long. Because of their loyalty to the organisation or their commitment to their work, they stay longer than they should. They justify their actions by entertaining the dream that somehow the culture will magically change. Others stay because they believe they will not be able to make the same level of income or get the benefits they now enjoy, elsewhere.
They lock themselves into a cultural environment where they feel they have to park their values in the car park every time they enter their place of work. Spending long periods in such a state of misalignment sickens the soul. Eventually, most people get to the point where they cannot stand it anymore. They feel so unhappy that they look for alternative employment, perhaps accepting a lower-paying job, one with fewer benefits, or part-time employment. They will be willing to go anywhere, to get away from the toxic environment of their current place of work. The more talented and courageous among them will start their own businesses.
That’s because those behaviors are common signs of a sensitive person—someone whose mind is wired to go deep. And sensitive people tend to be high performers in the workplace, often bringing unique gifts that create value and drive innovation.
There’s just one problem: many sensitive people try to downplay and even deny their sensitivity—especially in their careers.
As someone who has similar traits such as these, I completely disagree that we downplay our sensitivity. Actually we are the ones being downplayed by others, especially management. I’ll explain further below.
As a personality trait, being sensitive means you process more information about your environment and respond to it more strongly. That gives you a keener eye for detail and an innate ability to read the emotions of others. It also means you may think longer or feel stronger emotions than someone else in the same situation.
That explains the occasional workday crying session—and the struggle with fast-paced deadlines. However, it also means the sensitive mind is akin to a next-generation supercomputer. All that extra processing power turns up more creative solutions, insights, and a startling ability to connect dots that others miss.
Two ways I’ve described this in the past is that your sensitivity makes you too empathetic to the point of it being debilitating. If someone is fired unjustly or if someone is targeted by a toxic boss, you feel like you are that person, experiencing their emotions as if they were your own. It also makes you feel like a canary in a coal mine, which usually doesn’t end well for the canary.
A simpler way to understand people like this is to realize that our pattern recognition capabilities are supercharged, so we can detect patterns usually way before other people (i.e. in days or weeks instead of months or years).
In a survey conducted by graduate student Bhavini Shrivastava, the IT workers who tested highest for sensitivity were indeed the most stressed out at work—but they were also those whose performance was rated highest by their managers. This is no surprise to experts on giftedness, who have connected sensitivity to high ability for nearly sixty years; one recent study suggests that up to 87% of gifted individuals score as highly sensitive.
In practical terms, sensitive people come with five main gifts: they are wired for deep thinking, understand emotions, score high for empathy, are natural creatives, and have a high sensory intelligence—a trait that includes situational awareness, which wins soccer games and keeps patients alive in the ER.
Many of these gifts are in high demand in our economy; they are the building blocks of innovation and leadership. So, by rights, sensitive people ought to put their sensitivity at the top of their resumé. But that is not the message we get about being sensitive.
And yes, if you’re able to detect and recognize patterns before others, that amplifies your abilities and increases your situational awareness (which I’m impressed that this article sees the relationship between the two).
When I was a Systems Support Officer for the Federal Government, I would often have people from other departments coming to get my help instead of getting help from their own Support Officer. The reason being is that 1) I often was able to detect the cause of issues before other people, almost on an intuitive level, and 2) I actually talked to people like they were human beings, using metaphors to help explain what was going wrong, rather than talking to them using computer terminology that made them feel like they were technological idiots.
When I was initially hired as a Junior Web Developer for another web firm later in my life, I quickly became one of two Senior Web Developers, with one of the firm’s owners telling me that I was the “gem” of their hirings. This happened though because the owners specifically asked for our input, thus being very open to feedback from us. The more I opened up and provided my deeper perspective of things I was seeing and aware of, the more they were amazed by me.
Despite its many gifts, “sensitive” has become a dirty word. It’s used to mean easily offended, overreacting, and weak. Men run away from the term altogether, and women are slandered for being too sensitive—a phrase that should be retired. This stigma is why many sensitive people hide who they are.
One reason for this stigma is our culture’s obsession with toughness. We idolize people who are loud, assertive, and quick to take risks—never mind that these are traits of a toxic leader. But a sensitive person’s slower, more thoughtful approach pays off. In studies of both humans and primates, the genes associated with sensitivity also lead to measurably better decision-making.
So how do we tap that advantage in our companies and careers today? First, we must embrace sensitivity by encouraging and rewarding it at an organizational level and by owning it as sensitive people.
This is pretty much why I disagreed with the earlier statement that sensitive people downplay their abilities but rather their abilities are often downplayed by others instead, particularly management. And I’m not even talking about a “toxic leader” downplaying their abilities, it can happen with a non-toxic leader as well. I mean just think about it and imagine how things play out in a typical scenario.
A highly sensitive person detects a pattern within the organization that most other people are blind to seeing, so it’s invisible to others. This could be a cultural pattern of behaviours, beliefs, or values that are negatively affecting the organization and affecting the well-being of its people in turn. If a highly sensitive person relays what they’re perceiving to management, take a guess how management or leadership is going to react to someone critiquing their company? Probably the same as how a leader typically reacts to someone telling them about a new paradigm in their business.
So it’s not courage that sensitive people need to step forward with their amplified abilities. It’s management that needs the courage to accept the critique and feedback from their employees about their business. Most conventional management and leadership teams do not have this capacity though, although you might see it in Fortune 500 companies, if you’re lucky.
Again, as I’ve iterated in the past, if your a leader within a company and you’re looking for people to take leadership positions in your company, you don’t need to look outside of it to find them. There are leaders all around you. You just need the perception to be able to see them.
That’s the problem with our world today though. Most people, particularly leaders, are using outdated mindsets, paradigms, and worldviews to navigate and make decisions in their daily work lives, which is why they are blind to what’s right in front of them. Until they can broaden their perception and internal worldview, their external sight will continue to be limited, thus limiting their organizations in turn.
Disconnection is making work feel more lonely and transactional.
cnbc.com
“Everyone is recognizing this feeling of disconnectedness is the No. 1 issue they’re facing,” says Doug Camplejohn, founder and CEO of Airspeed. But, he adds, “the answer is not going back to to the office. The reality is, this problem has existed forever, and Covid had only made us all more aware and sensitive to it.”
Employee dissatisfaction and disengagement have been on the rise for years, according to Gallup.
To find better solutions, executives will need to recognize they don’t fully understand what employees want and need — at least not without further surveying and open discussions. A sweeping majority of 9 out of 10 executives say their company has a deep knowledge of their workforce, but just 6 in 10 workers agree their bosses understand what motivates them, or their personal characteristics, interests and values.
According to a recent McKinsey study, one of top reasons people are resigning has nothing to do with compensation, work–life balance, or mental health. One of the top reasons people have resigned is they didn’t feel a sense of belonging at work. And those employees from historically marginalized communities are more likely to say they left because they didn’t feel like they belonged in their organizations.
It’s not the Great Resignation; it’s the “Great Awakening.” Individuals are waking up to the realization that they deserve to be in organizations that respect and support them. Many leaders are busy chasing diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, and wanting to increase the diversity of representation on their teams. Yet those same leaders must be equally focused on ensuring all individuals feel like they have a place in their organizations.
These things actually do relate to mental health though because mental health relates to a sense of well-being which includes have a sense of meaning and purpose in one’s life. Thus if people don’t feel truly valued and connected to something larger than themselves that they’re working on and contributing to, their life is going to feel pretty meaningless and purposeless.
This is why I believe that organizations will have to adapt and become places not just for work but for learning and even play. And by play, I don’t mean something frivolous. I mean play at a higher conceptual level, whereby one is imagining possibilities far beyond the conventional and is given the freedom to explore those possibilities.
That’s what limiting our current world of work and our current possibilities. It’s outdated beliefs that are standing in the way of us, similar to the way most people feel like they spend most of their day having to work around their boss to actually get things done.
The need for innovation – the lifeblood of business – is widely recognized, and imagination and play are key ingredients for making it happen.
Workers are quitting at or near the highest rates on record in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and trade, transportation and utilities, as well as professional and business services.
Many expect the labor shortage to last at least several more years, and some say it’s permanent. Of 52 economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, 22 predicted that participation would never return to its pre-pandemic level.
“Our problem is not an economy that doesn’t want to get started—it’s already started,” said Ron Hetrick, an economist at labor analytics firm Emsi Burning Glass. “It just doesn’t have people to make the engine run. We don’t know how to reignite this thing right now.”
Just a wild guess but maybe treat people like human beings rather exploitive assets. When there’s a definitive noticed shift in people feeling like human beings again at work, they will spread the word to others and there will be noticeable return. Until employer’s mindset actually change though in terms of how they perceive and treat their employees, not much will change.
“Work—for me, at least—just wasn’t working for our family anymore,” said Stephanie Schaefer, a 36-year-old mother of two in Riverside, Calif.
Pretty much how I’ve summed up the current concept of work, at least in the conventional sense. Work is no longer working for people. It’s actually working against them and their sense of well-being. So until it changes and realigns with their humanity, not much will change.
“Two years ago I was thinking, I want to get as high as I can on the corporate ladder,” he said. “It just interests me less now if it comes with a sacrifice to my mental health and my connection with my family.”
