#lovework Review: Designing Work That People Love by Marcus Buckingham

#lovework Notes

In this piece, Marcus presents a fabulous argument for why love is one of the most important components of work — if we want people to perform at their best.

ARTICLE EXCERPT BELOW

As record numbers of people have quit their jobs, all sectors of the economy are struggling to fill vacancies. To get people back to work, organizations are changing long-standing policies and offering unprecedented incentives. Transportation companies, for example, have upped their wages to lure long-haul drivers back into truck cabs. California public schools are allowing retired teachers to return to work without recertification. CEOs and CHROs are falling all over themselves to offer flex-time work arrangements more attractive than those of their competitors. But such attempts miss the fundamental problem.

Simply put, work isn’t working for us. It wasn’t before the pandemic, and it isn’t now. According to surveys my colleagues and I have conducted at ADP Research Institute (ADPRI), before the pandemic only 18% of respondents were fully engaged at work, 17% felt highly resilient at work, and 14% trusted their senior leaders and team leader. The Centers for Disease Control reported in 2018 that 71% of adults had at least one symptom of workplace stress, such as headaches or feeling overwhelmed or anxious.

The pandemic has added even more pressure to our existing pain. Engagement and resilience are at all-time lows, having each dropped two percentage points during the course of the pandemic. (That may sound like a small change, but given how low those figures already were and the size of the samples, it is both statistically and practically significant.) Meanwhile, a quarter of U.S. workers quit their jobs in 2021—a historic high.

This points to a problem that increasing wages or simplifying professional on-ramps alone won’t solve, although those efforts certainly help improve employees’ quality of life. We know this because in ADPRI’s most recent 50,000-person surveys of stratified random samples of working populations around the world, the most powerful predictors of retention, performance, engagement, resilience, and inclusion did not include pay or liking one’s colleagues or work location or even a strong belief in the mission of the organization. All those provided some explanatory power, but none was as significant as these three items:

• Was I excited to work every day last week?
• Did I have a chance to use my strengths every day?
• At work do I get a chance to do what I’m good at and something I love?

These results, neuroscience research, and my decades of experience working with individuals in organizations strongly suggest that only when a company intelligently links what people love to their actual activities will it achieve higher performance, higher engagement and resilience, and lower turnover.

To stem the tide and to attract and retain the best people, then, we must redesign jobs around a simple but powerful concept: love for the content of the work itself. That word may seem strong in this context, but people’s affinity for their work can and should reach this level, and when it does, amazing things can happen.

Creating a place where all people can find love in their work means incorporating three principles in everything your business does: The people are the point.Employees, rather than customers or shareholders, are the most important stakeholders in your organization. One size fits one. Each of those employees is a unique person with distinct loves, interests, and skills. In trust we grow. For employees to discover and contribute their loves at work, leaders must explicitly make trust the foundation of all practices and policies.

We’ll take a look at how the most forward-thinking companies are beginning to implement each of these in turn. But first let’s examine why love is so important in the workplace and what companies have missed by ignoring it.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

When you’re in love with another person, your brain chemistry changes. We don’t yet know the exact biochemical cause of romantic love—it appears to be some combination of oxytocin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and vasopressin. But research does reveal that when you’re engaged in an activity you love, that same chemical cocktail is present in your brain—along with anandamide, which brings you feelings of joy and wonder.

Primed by this cocktail, you interact with the world differently. Research by neurobiologists suggests that these “love chemicals” lessen the regulatory function of your neocortex, widening your perspective on yourself and liberating your mind to accept new thoughts and feelings. You register other people’s emotions more intensely. You remember details more vividly. You perform cognitive tasks faster and better. You are more optimistic, more loyal, more forgiving, and more open to new information and experiences. One could say that doing what you love makes you more effective, but it’s so much more than that: You’re on fire without the burnout.

To attract and retain the best people, we must redesign jobs around a simple but powerful concept: love for the content of the work itself.

So if you’re doing work you love, work need not be a stressor but can instead be a source of energy and resilience. Indeed, ADPRI data on engagement shows that people who find love, strength, joy, and excitement in what they do each day are far more likely to be productive, to stay at the company longer than others do, and to sustain themselves in the face of life’s inevitable challenges. Finding love in work, therefore, is not self-indulgent or narcissistic; it is a precursor and an amplifier of performance.

To be clear, that’s not quite the same as saying that work must consist exclusively of what you love. We have no data proving that the most productive and engaged people at work love all they do. What it points to, though, is that if leaders want their employees to be high performing, to stay with the organization, and to be engaged and resilient, they should be intentional in helping them find love in some of what they do, every day.

Data from the Mayo Clinic reinforces this finding and suggests that 20% is a useful threshold. Its research into burnout in doctors and nurses suggests that if less than 20% of your work consists of things you love to do, you are far more likely to experience physical and psychological burnout. Intriguingly, loving morethan 20% doesn’t seem to net much increase in resilience. A little love of what you do at work goes a long, long way.

For many of us, finding even that level of love in our work is challenging. Perhaps daunted by the sheer range of where employees can find love, or perhaps distrustful of their intentions, or perhaps presuming that “no one could love this job,” many managers have designed loveless work, in which the job is defined by standardized steps or required competencies, and success is measured by how closely the employee conforms to them. Distribution-center work and delivery-driver roles usually fall into this category.

It’s neither fair nor realistic to put the onus on employees who are faced with jobs like those—and with the need to put food on the table—to find the love in what they do, although it’s clear from my decades of research into all manner of jobs that people can find love in surprising places. I’ve interviewed a manufacturing worker who loved to figure out the “personality” of each of the machines he operated and intervene right before one of them “chose” to break down. I’ve done focus groups with boron miners who revealed passions as diverse as a love of precision, the thrill of figuring out how to go a hundred days without even the most minor safety incident, and simply being part of a team. Slaughterhouse work, long-haul trucking, housekeeping—all these jobs include a range of activities specific enough to serve as the raw material for some love of the work. The fact that we haven’t designed those jobs through the lens of people with specific preferences and passions doesn’t mean there’s no love to be found there.

So let’s turn to organizations. It’s time to start designing jobs with love in mind. If leaders were to take all this data to heart and deliberately try to create what I call a Love + Work organization, in which a greater percentage of employees find love in what they do—even if only 20% of the time—how would they proceed? They would make sure that engaged and resilient people were uplifted rather than depleted by their jobs, and as a result delivered better services and products to their customers and made more-sustainable commitments to their communities. Although I know of no one organization today that fully embodies the Love + Work ideal, plenty are beginning to implement pieces of the three core principles.

The People Are the Point

A true Love + Work organization is built on a recognition of and commitment to the fundamental importance of each person who comes to work. This stance represents an advance on both Milton Friedman’s shareholder capitalism, which held that an organization’s sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value, andJoseph Stiglitz’s stakeholder capitalism, which introduced the idea that organizations should also maximize value to customers, employees, and the broader community.

A Love + Work organization sees employees as the integrating point for all other stakeholders rather than as merely one of many. They are, after all, where the work actually happens—where the value in products or for customers is created. That requires that every employee be seen as a full human being, not just a cog in the machine. Specifically, Love + Work organizations do the following:

1) Recruit human beings, not workers.

In a more human-centric approach to onboarding, these companies are rigorous and detailed in explaining why each candidate was selected and what specific strengths and loves they saw in the person, including but also going beyond how those can add value to the overall mission of the organization.

Lululemon is a leader in this. During the company’s onboarding process, new employees are encouraged to set goals, both career and personal. Employees are equally celebrated whether their goal is to become the company’s CEO or to start their own fashion brand sometime in the future. This focus on the person’s unique ambitions during onboarding helps lululemon’s 90-day retention and first-year employee-engagement levels rise twice as high as industry averages.

2) Commit to lifelong learning.

A Love + Work organization invests in the ongoing education of each employee. That might be in the form of direct payment for college degrees, as at Amazon, Walmart, and others; or forgiving and reimbursing student loans, as Geico, Starbucks, and UPS do; or giving employees a certain amount of discretionary time to pursue their own projects, as Google has periodically done over the years. All these efforts communicate explicitly that the employee’s growth and development have intrinsic worth, even if it doesn’t immediately accrue to the organization.

3) Support alumni.

A Love + Work organization has a formal and carefully considered offboarding program that reinforces the message that people’s worth as human beings extends far beyond their time with the organization. Many companies, including Accenture and McKinsey, have found that staying close to a strong alumni community offers practical benefits in the form of existing client growth and referrals. But it’s also a way for organizations to show their commitment to each employee as a person.

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The full article was written by Marcus Buckingham and originally posted here.