Reliant on our Imaginations
Elliot Ackerman | Bad Bosses | Factoids | Anti-Social Enterprise
Quote of the Moment
Without memories to restrain us, we become reliant on our imaginations.
| Elliot Ackerman, 2034
Back from the worst of all reasons to travel — a funeral — and trying to regain a sense of normalcy. Slow to return, though.
Bad Bosses
Just how bad are bosses, in general? If you believe this Monster data, they are very, very bad: 75% rate bosses 1, 2, or 3 on a scale of 5, with 38% rated 'horrible'.
A poll conducted by Monster reveals that more than one-third of workers consider their boss to be “horrible” (38 percent) and 54 percent of respondents gave their boss a negative rating [1 or 2]. Only 17 percent of respondents gave their boss an “excellent” grade. To conduct the poll, Monster asked visitors to their site, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your current or former boss?”
U.S. findings were:
38 percent of respondents answered “1 (horrible)”
16 percent of respondents answered “2”
16 percent of respondents answered “3”
13 percent of respondents answered “4”
17 percent of respondents answered “5 (excellent)”
“Your relationship with your boss can do more than upset your day — it can make or break your entire career,” said Mary Ellen Slayter, Career Advice Expert for Monster. “Having an adversarial relationship with your direct superior can negatively impact your life in countless ways with daily stress and stunted career growth generally being the most common.”
Remember how important ‘the boss’ is for workers. Gallup analyzed data from over a decade of data from over two million workers from over 30,000 organizations and found just how important managers are:
What no one saw coming, however, was the sheer size of that correlation—something Gallup calls “the single most profound, distinct and clarifying finding” in its 80-year history. The study showed that managers didn’t just influence the results their teams achieved, they explained a full 70% of the variance. In other words, if it’s a superior team you’re after, hiring the right manager is nearly three-fourths of the battle.
No other single factor, from compensation levels to the perception of senior leadership, even came close.
And companies continue to get that wrong.
Factoids
1,600: Shopify has rolled out a calculator embedded in employees’ calendar app that estimates the cost of any meeting with three or more people. A typical 30-minute meeting with three employees can run from $700 up to $1,600 | via Dense Discovery
It’s not just the money, but still, great to know.
…
Here’s some good news. U.S. per capita CO2 emissions have fallen below WWI levels! Maybe we can avert catastrophe? Need to get the world on a downward slope.
source: Our World in Data
…
Teams that do regular debriefs (meetings focused only on learning from past team performance) improve team performance by up to 25%, but they are often infrequent, conducted only after things go wrong or big projects end. | NOBL
All projects should start with a pre-mortem, periodic (monthly? quarterly?) reviews, and a post-mortem.
…
New research found that flexible outfits — those with hybrid, fully remote or electively remote staffs — added headcount at more than two times the rate of fully in-office counterparts during the March-through-May period. | Scoop Technologies
It’s a competitive advantage.
…
Jobs advertising full-time remote work attracted almost half of all applications on LinkedIn in May, compared with just 19% for hybrid positions. | Mia Gindis
Attracting the best and the brightest, I bet.
…
76% -- The percentage of hybrid workers who said they would return to the office any day other than Monday | according to a survey by B2B Reviews.
I don’t like Mondays! But Fridays are bad, too.
…
A few years ago, the International Monetary Fund did a systematic study of the ability of economists to call recessions in advance, and basically found that they never succeed. | Paul Krugman
and then, this:
The Fed’s influential staff economists — who help policymakers assess the outlook — no longer think America will fall into a recession late this year, Mr. Powell said. They previously had forecast a mild one. | Jeanna Smialek
Anti-Social Enterprise
LJ Parker raises some great questions about the decreasing returns from social media — precipitated to a great extent by the meltdown at Twitter, er, X.
The Verge lamented last week on the end of this social era, wondering where we were all supposed to go now, but I think the point is we aren't all supposed to go any one place.
As Noah Smith put it in his insightful analysis of recent internet history:
"Slowly, people seemed to be rediscovering the truth that the old internet had taught us — that discussions work better when you can pick and choose who you’re talking to."
As we know now, putting the world in a single "town square" with too little, too late moderation meant it evolved into a continual firehose of toxic sludge. Fuelled by secretive algorithms, bots and twitter mob polarity and devoid of any productive utility, we were a million miles away from its early promise of connection and community. In this environment, Noah's argument for the fragmentation of the internet as the next paradigm shift makes a lot of sense, particularly when you look, as he does, at how the next generation of internet users are interacting. Conspicuously absent on the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they spend most of their time connecting on smaller platforms that optimise for group interactions rather than public debate.
"What these rising apps and platforms all share is fragmentation. Whether it’s intentional self-sorting into like-minded or community-moderated groups, or the natural fragmentation that comes from a bunch of different people watching their own algorithmically curated video feeds, these apps all have a way of separating people based on who they want to talk to and what they want to be exposed to."
I curated a conference at the Berkman Center in 2004 called Social Tools for the Enterprise, at a time when that concept was hardly more than a twinkle in our eyes. The utopian aspiration was that we’d adopt the techniques we’d learned from blogging and instant messaging and adapt them into new tools for enterprise community and communication. From that came web, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and work chat tools. And while some of the early promise still persists, social tools for the enterprise have their own shortcomings — perhaps not as horrible as the ‘toxic sludge’ that LJ alludes to.
LJ takes a hard look at social tools in the enterprise, today:
Whilst social technology inside the organisation doesn’t suffer all of these issues - after all, there's nothing like being visible to people who pay you to keep your behaviour civil - there is some overlap. Cal Newport has long been pointing out the issues with social tech in the organisation being used as "a dystopian micro-twitterverse" inside orgs. There is too much noise - too many notifications that become meaningless, too many meetings that should have been.. (more noise..?), and almost no common agreement of which tool to use for what purpose. With a lack of shared norms on this, a little bit of everything ends up across an array of tools.
Most of our daily interactions on the digital workplace have turned into hours of firefighting surface level channel chats, DMs, video-call or email interactions across disparate social tools, replacing real work. And as an added layer of distraction, return to the office mandates dictate that we need to spend time worrying about co-ordinating everyone's Taekwondo days, lest we miss out on important face-to-face collaboration (aka lunch). Against this backdrop is it any wonder many are quick to write off hybrid work models? When did social tech get so ..anti-social?
Yes, coordination, cooperation, and communication: they make up the amorphous ‘collaboration’ going on at work. Communication — and the most heated forms of it — have expanded to occupy all the space available, like a gas.
I recently wrote about collaboration tempo (inspired by LJ’s post), where I suggested that communication has three phases, like matter: gas, liquid, and solid.
Gases are a phase of matter where the atoms are the most active, and gases expand to occupy the space — and time — available. Sounds like work chat, doesn’t it?
Email — the quintessential asynch tool — is more like a liquid: it flows, never-ending, but — so long as reasonable conventions are in place — async communication flows in the background, behind atmospheric chat. However, email can be used in a near-real-time way, almost like chat. And since it can serve as a repository, it has a document-like quasi-solidity, too.
Some artifacts of communication are solid, such as documents that capture elements of governance and define work processes. But documents can also be gaseous, like the discussion thread from a group editing a Google Doc or a Miro whiteboard in real-time, synchronously. Or a document can be liquid, as with the group’s async review of the decisions made in a meeting, captured in Google Doc comments.
So, it’s not the tools that define the tempo, really. People’s needs demand phase changes, and tools are dragged along, shifting from gas to liquid, to solid, from one form to another, based on the context in the pace layers of work.
I have come to believe that individuals, groups, and companies need to operate with more communication discipline. Patterns of use that disrupt the deep work of individuals, and the overuse of tools that fragment time and constantly demand attention should be rooted out and banned. More care should be spent on asynchronous communication via thoughtful long-form writing, and well-defined dedicated periods of time should be devoted to ‘bursty’ communications.
I am not advocating anti-social patterns of work. However, people can’t get much done if everyone is shouting at everyone all the time.
What we need is slow social: where we acknowledge that deep work — me-time — should have precedence over we-time, and the order of precedence for various states of communication should go from slow to fast.
I am not optimistic that enlightenment will break out everywhere all at once, but the first step in achieving communication hygiene is paying attention to the costs of transitioning from slower (quieter) to faster (louder) sorts of communication.
Paul Krugman recently made a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost of driving into New York City, and came up with the cumulative impact for all the people following you into the Holland Tunnel is easily $100, due to congestion, parking, pollution, and so on.
Just so, in the workplace, we should have a congestion pricing model for filling up the available shared communication space, and people would have to pay to start a new thread on Slack, add an additional recipient to a CC: list, or share a Google Doc with an additional prospective editor. Something like the Shopify Meeting calculator.
Yes, zero communication is not the answer, I know. But we should aspire to a minimum viable communication model. Just enough communication, and no more. And the slower the better.