By Chris Lowney
An unlikely pundit has challenged us to redress a bitter irony: So many contemporary products and services are delightfully innovative, but so many workers are unhappy, exhausted, and degraded.
Corporate America is blessing us with a jaw-dropping surge of innovative wonders: electric cars; ever-advanced medical diagnostics tools; same-day food and product delivery; instantaneous access to contacts; new entertainment and social media platforms; and on, and on, across a vast range of industries.
But worker discontent has surged in equally jaw-dropping fashion. Employees are quiet quitting, really quitting, suffering mass layoffs at tech companies, unionizing, or striking. Such travails have beset not only noted innovators like Amazon or Starbucks, but our whole corporate landscape. One media outlet, encapsulating Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workforce report, put it bluntly: "Job unhappiness is at a staggering all-time high”.
This bitter juxtaposition of wondrous products and woe-filled workers is not new. Nearly a century ago, a most unlikely pundit, Pope Pius XI, lamented the plight of industrial laborers in his landmark social teaching document, Quadragesimo Anno. His pithy summation: “dead matter comes forth from the factory ennobled, while men there are corrupted and degraded.”
Pius was writing as the industrial revolution took root, hence his preoccupation with “factories” and the now-tone-deaf notion that workplaces are primarily for men.
But his core challenge, regarding the fundamental mission and basic accountability of any company, is more relevant than ever: Enterprises exist not only to “ennoble” raw material so that great products emerge, but equally to ennoble workers, by respecting their dignity and unlocking their potential.
Yes, companies should transform lines of code or raw materials into fabulous products and services. But those who work the machines, customer service centers, lines of code, or delivery vehicles should also be transformed, for the better. That’s a “must do” for a worthy enterprise, not a “nice to do.” Employees should develop new skills, learn new things, feel pride in their role, make meaningful connections with colleagues or customers, contribute their ideas freely, develop their potential, and enjoy real opportunities for career progression.
This recalibrated vision of any firm’s purpose would usher in a fundamentally new standard for enterprise success. Put colloquially, if you churn out dazzling product on the backs of degraded employees, you’ve failed as an entrepreneur, and you ought to be scorned, not lionized.
Granted, attaining this new standard will be a long and near-quixotic quest. As a one-time investment banker, I understand well that stock market analysts will continue to champion executives who deliver the bottom-line goods, giving a pass to management if the “good” of employees doesn’t figure so highly as a priority. As long as the company hits its numbers and avoids illegal workplace practices, all will be well on Wall St.
But there still remains a clear, immediate way to ignite fundamental change. Those of us who manage a few (or a few thousand) folks have manifold opportunities to lead workplaces into a future we can be proud of. Seizing these opportunities may sometimes require ingenuity, for example, the imagination to design more interesting, fulfilling roles for those stuck in mind-numbing, dead end jobs; or who don’t earn a living wage; or who have resorted to peeing into bottles in order to manage aggressive productivity expectations. But, heck, anyone ingenious enough to engineer an innovative product is surely resourceful enough to engineer a more meaning-filled workplace.
Anyway, the most significant steps forward require not ingenuity and courage but only decency and common sense. The Gallup team who gave us the state of the workforce report also pinpointed the foremost causes of worker dissatisfaction and burnout, and these ills are mostly controllable by front-line managers: unfair treatment, unmanageable workload, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support and, unreasonable time pressure.
Managers who care about their teams can begin driving change, tomorrow. Frontline managers should not only ask themselves, “Have I increased shareholder value today?” but also, “Have I done anything today to ‘ennoble’ those who work for me?”
Originally published on Forbes
