The technology-driven age of work should be making our lives easier. But instead, work intensification is a growing problem, says American organisational consultant Melissa Swift.
“At heart a huge capitalist”, Swift specialises in the human side of digital transformation and is the author of Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace.
She says research has found work is getting harder because people are getting asked to do too much in less time, there are too many people involved in decision-making, and work is increasingly emotionally demanding.
While technology was meant to be the saviour of workloads, it isn’t always being utilised in the right ways, Swift told RNZ’s Sunday Morning.
“Let’s say we were going to hop on a Zoom call, you can have 50 people on a Zoom call. So there’s this false illusion from technology that we can just do an infinite amount of stuff, and we’ve got to pull it back a little bit.
“Some of this is just the natural outgrowth of companies have gotten larger, more global. A lot of it is just the kind of negative outgrowth of positive trends that we’ve gotten to kind of a level of scale and complexity where it’s possible to really shoot ourselves in the foot.”
Companies’ priorities can collapse because of this intensification, Swift says. She recalls being in a meeting where someone pointed out to the chief executive they had 37 priorities.
“By the time you have 37 priorities, you don’t have any priorities at all. And again, I think it’s this illusion of infinite space, right? I can list 37 bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, therefore, it’s okay to have 37 priorities when it’s not.
“The overload of tasks really starts at the top of organisations, C-suite and senior leadership feel overloaded. So if your CEO’s overloaded by work tasks, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
When it comes to interdependence, a certain amount of bureaucracy is healthy, she says, but time can be wasted on reporting instead of completing tasks.
She believes intensification is also partly to blame for the degenerating quality of management. And she worries about how AI might reinforce bad patterns in leadership selection.
“We have to change a little bit of our mindset about leadership selection, that we select for confidence.
“All the research bears out that if you don’t have a bit of imposter syndrome, you really don’t know what you’re doing. But these are the leaders that we reach for, right?”
Maxing out
There’s an “efficient frontier” of the right amount of work and adding more tasks beyond that won’t produce more results, Swift says. Stanford University research has found people are only productive for up to about 55 hours a week.
“Everybody’s got a version of this kind of hustle culture thing that if I just really grind it out, we’ll get to success, and it’s only true up to a certain point.”
Added to that is the emotional burden of spiralling into a cycle of stress, she says, where you feel bad at work but cover it up and end up feeling worse.
It’s not just nine to five office jobs that are affected, she says.
Her firm Anthrome Insight’s survey of 1000 workers from five industries found a quarter always or often felt overwhelmed and half felt overwhelmed at least some of the time. Over half (62%) were experiencing task overload. Over a quarter were getting whacked by bureaucracy and a lack of priorities. Almost a third were dealing with angry coworkers, bosses, and/or customers.
The good news is that we have dealt with putting guardrails around work in the mid-20th Century which led to a burst of productivity, she says.
“I’ve really thought about this stuff in truly humanist terms. I mean, it’s the original working title of my book Work Here Now was ‘you wouldn’t run a machine this way’.
“Because we do things to human beings that we would say it was bad economics to run this machine till it breaks, but we run people till they break. I think until we have that, that ‘aha!’ moment that actually treating people like human beings and making money are not inconsistent.”
Melissa Swift received her MBA from Columbia University’s Business School and her BA from Harvard University. She writes a column for the MIT Management Review and has featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Newsweek.
rnz.co.nz
