Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
Burnout solutions go far deeper than working less or even aligning our work to our interests. Burnout is the logical consequence of the mental model we hold about the role of humans in work: if we are not humans, but human resources, businesses will treat employees as such.
Since businesses are logically incentivized to extract as much as possible from their available resources, we shouldn’t then be surprised when we find ourselves, well, extracted.
We need a new mental model of the role of employees in an organization, and that starts with replacing the notion of human resources with, simply, humans.
What’s in a name?
In my work over the years as the CEO of NOBL Collective and then Senior Advisor at SYPartners, both transformation consultancies, I have worked with dozens of clients to understand and improve their cultures and employee experiences. While I’ve supported the implementation of scores of new processes, tools, and curricula, I’ve consistently found that these interventions fail if the leaders continue to hold to one mindset: that employees are, primarily, resources.
HR departments have been rebranding as “People teams” for years now, but we still have a long way to go to re-humanize the workplace. The table below presents a binary out of what is, in reality, a spectrum of how businesses and executives view employees.
Still, understanding the ends of each spectrum can help leaders today understand where their organizations fall, and critically, where they want to be.
Read the statements below and consider which feels more true to your organization today. Note, the default for many organizations today is the human resource perspective, so it shouldn’t be surprising if the statements in that column feel more familiar.
| The human resource perspective | The human perspective | |
| Motivation | Because work is hard and employees want to do as little of it as possible, we need to use carrots and sticks to encourage performance and make the most of our resource. | Because work is fun and employees take pride in using their skills, working together, and creating impact, we need only equip them with a shared vision and the resources to do their best work. |
| Professionalism | Like cogs in a wheel, employees are easiest to work with if they’re uniformly palatable and interchangeable. Professional means: business dress, business language, one way of looking and sounding like a leader. | Human brains work just as well in a suit as in sweatpants. Professional means doing quality work, on time, while respecting others. |
| Output | To extract the most from our resources, we aim to maximize output per human-hour; therefore, we focus on efficiency— organizing and tightening work processes. | Efficiency is important, but secondary to effectiveness; truly high-impact human output is produced when we respect how human brains work, including respecting rest, movement, expansive conversations, and time for learning and reflection. |
| Engagement | Employee engagement is important because high-engagement organizations outperform those with low engagement across productivity, turnover, quality, customer loyalty, and profitability. | Employee engagement is important because employees are devoting a large portion of their lives every week to the business, and we value those human days being well-spent. |
| Compensation | We assume employees will attempt to do the least amount of work possible while trying to earn the most amount possible. Therefore, we try to extract the most amount possible while paying the least amount possible. | We assume employees take pride in their work and want to perform and contribute to the organization’s success. Therefore, we try to pay the most amount possible while ensuring a healthy, sustainable business. |
| Balance | We acknowledge that rest is necessary for peak performance. Therefore, we view PTO as a strategic investment in business performance. | We believe that work is only one part of an employee’s fuller life. Therefore, we view PTO as honoring employees’ enjoyment of life beyond work. |
Functionally, the two perspectives may look the same in many cases. For example, both perspectives value employee engagement and rest. The difference is to what end those things are valued.
The Impact of Leadership Language
It’s the difference between a leader saying, “I hope everyone had a wonderful time over the break,” and “I hope everyone was able to recharge over the break as we have a big Q1 ahead,” with the latter holding the subtext that employees are valued as a kind of organizational battery.
In interviewing hundreds of employees throughout my career, I have found that employees are highly attuned to the difference. Further, whichever perspective leadership takes will often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Employees who feel leadership sees them as “resources to be extracted” often learn to understand their relationship with leadership as a purely transactional one — one in which it is their job to extract as much money from their employer while minimizing energy expended.
Conversely, employees who come to understand their relationship with leadership as a human one will often do their best for the business because they believe leaders are not out to drain them, but instead are humans too who are also doing their best for the business.
Three Steps To Recenter The Human Perspective
Adopting the human perspective can create a virtuous cycle within your business — one of increasing mutual trust. Here are three steps you can take to bring it to life:
1.After an intense period of work, offer time back to employees.
This might look like offering a “Pause Day” or “Pause Time” after a big push. It could be a company holiday after achieving a company-wide milestone. It can also work at a team level where the leader declares an afternoon of “Pause Time” after the run-up to a big launch. Employees are then welcome to sign off for the day.
If time equals money in business, and a business would never borrow money without paying it back (in theory), why should we think differently about time?
If people have been working nights and weekends in order to support the business, one way to acknowledge them as humans is to not receive that extra time as successful extraction, but rather return time to the employee.
2.Encourage “functional professionalism” over “performative professionalism.”
While true professionalism means to do high quality work, on time, with respect, we often equate professionalism with aesthetic qualities such as business attire and sitting attentively at a desk eight hours a day. Instead, model and encourage employees to walk during the day or work from the place that serves their brain best.
Even at the office, working outside on a bench on a nice day in comfortable clothes is likely preferable to a windowless conference room in a suit. Seeing someone sitting buttoned up at a desk may feel satisfying to a manager, but encouraging a person to work with some fresh air and sunshine acknowledges that those are two things humans need — both for their happiness and their performance.
3.Believe in and model your own humanity.
I’ve known many leaders who feel so responsible to the business and so fearful that if they curb their overworking that their people will take that cue further and start slacking, that they are willing to sacrifice their wellbeing to keep the pressure on.
Unfortunately, this intensity comes at a price and it’s not a price to the business: it’s to that leader’s own sense of humanity. It’s foregoing eating or going to the bathroom during the day to pack in one more back-to-back meeting. It’s sacrificing sleep, exercise, and time with family and friends. It’s trading mental health for financial health.
For the human perspective to take root in a business, its leaders first need to respect their own humanity. This may look like proudly signing off to head to a child’s sports game, or showing up with wet hair after exercising and showering before making it to the first meeting of the day. It may be inviting a direct report to a walking on-on-one or making a healthy lunch during a meeting instead of powering through hungry.
When leaders show up with a visible sense of humanity, it allows employees to do the same.
There’s a strong business case to be made that adopting the human perspective drives business results. For example, compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report 106% more energy at work and 50% higher productivity.
But perhaps the more important case for the human perspective is the human one. At the end of our careers, would we rather say that we successfully maximized the ROI of every person we employed? Or that we respected the finite days on the planet that they devoted to our business?
And further, did we as leaders feel that we mattered beyond our economic output? Were our days well spent and full of work we enjoyed done alongside people we liked?
It’s up to us to create the organizations that we want to be a part of — that we want to see more of in the world.
