The Containers Of The Past

Rishad Tobaccowala | Why is Productivity Falling? | Factoids | Elsewhere | Meritocracy

Photo by Tobias A. Müller on Unsplash

Quote of the Moment

The future does not fit in the containers of the past.

| Rishad Tobaccowala

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Why is Productivity Falling?

Via Make Work Better, we learn that Zeynep Ton, an MIT professor of operations, has strong opinions about the current decline in productivity in American business. Unlike many others, she has data to back her opinions:

If you want to understand why productivity is falling, we need to look first at high levels of employee turnover. If we want to solve productivity issues the first step needs to be to lower the resignation rate.

We all know well when people quit their jobs a period of unproductivity commences: bosses and colleagues need to cover the work of the person leaving, the recruitment process takes unproductive attention and new starters take months to ramp up. As Ton says, ‘high employee turnover is ruinous for productivity’.

And the leading cause of workers quitting is… bad bosses.

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Factoids

Cloey Callahan reports on Meeting Equity:

Technology company Barco found in its meeting equity report that 80% of people believe tech can improve meetings. Additionally, one in three workers struggle to feel heard during hybrid meetings and one in four workers find it difficult to speak up. The report revealed that 56% of workers said meeting leaders focus too heavily on those who are physically present in the meeting room.

Make it a rule for everyone to speak on matters that impact all in the group.

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Nick Bloom charts the slowing convergence of employers and employees around working from home:

The gap between what employees want and what employers offer on WFH is closing, but not closed. On average employees want about 3 days WFH a week while employers are offering 2.5 days. Given this gap, offering generous WFH is still an effective recruitment and retention policy.

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In the 101 top-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2005, just 28 percent of speaking characters were female. | Chris Colin, citing the work of Geena Davis.

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Elsewhere

Theodore Kinni provides a thoughtful review of The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, colleagues that have worked together for decades. Maslach created the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the first and leading burnout assessment, in 1981. I wrote about burnout at length in Deep Pajamaville, citing her work.

If you want to get a rise out of Maslach and Leiter, take the approach to addressing burnout that most companies follow: pin it to the individual experiencing it, and try to fix the person. The authors call this the “medicalization of burnout,” even though, they add, “there is no comprehensive body of evidence to support the idea that burnout is a disease.”

Instead, Maslach and Leiter argue that a worker experiencing burnout is akin to a canary in a coal mine. “Like the canary, a person experiencing burnout could be considered a harbinger, a sensor sounding an early warning that something is going wrong more generally,” write the authors. “To resolve problems of burnout, we must heed the canary’s distress and investigate, with both the mine and the canary in mind.”

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Charles Conn and Robert McLean offer some help for dealing with difficult problems in Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times.

Re: the primacy of curiosity:

One simple suggestion from author and economist Caroline Webb to generate more curiosity in team problem solving is to put a question mark behind your initial hypotheses or first-cut answers. This small artifice is surprisingly powerful: it tends to encourage multiple solution paths and puts the focus, correctly, on assembling evidence. We also like thesis/antithesis, or red team/blue team, sessions, in which you divide a group into opposing teams that argue against the early answers—typically, more traditional conclusions that are more likely to come from a conventional pattern. Why is this solution better? Why not that one? We’ve found that better results come from embracing uncertainty. Curiosity is the engine of creativity.

Turning a hypothesis into a question underscores the indeterminacy of the questioning. This relates to Daniel Kahneman’s notion of delaying a decision until the time is right, to keep the mind open to new information.

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The Emergent, Permissionless Organization | Stowe Boyd

Emergent organizations are where decision-making is distributed and innovation is innocent until proven guilty. Will today's leaders embrace this shift or succumb to the fear of perceived chaos?

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The Lies of Meritocracy

Debra Myerson, in her book Rocking the Boat, debunks the premise of meritocracy:

The story of meritocracy in U.S. culture is a dominant narrative that provides ready explanations for who gets ahead in organizations, who doesn’t, and why. The accepted story is “people who try hard and have the capability will get ahead.” The converse is, of course, implicit: “Those who don’t get ahead must not be as able or hard working as those who do.” The story of meritocracy justifies a wide range of existing organizational arrangements, including organizational hiring, evaluation, and promotion systems, but it is so institutionalized within U.S. culture that its truthfulness is rarely acknowledged or challenged.

Let’s just look at the numbers from just one element of the American system of meritocratic achievement: gaining access to the most elite universities. As Rob Graham explains, while a case can be made that, yes, those that get in ‘earn’ their place:

Yes, elites do earn their place. But they do so in a context of heavy parental investment, making it exceedingly hard for non-wealthy people to compete.

Graham cites Michael Sandel with some stats:

More than 70 percent of those who attend the hundred or so most competitive colleges in the United States come from the top quarter of the income scale; only 3 percent come from the bottom quarter.