I recently read this book called, roughly translated, Giving Back Meaning to Work: a revolutionary approach.
The main gist of the book is that most jobs are bullshit jobs. Yes, the French authors of the book actually used this English term. They even used expressions like “the bullshit-ization of work.”
The book is divided into two main parts. In the first part, the authors spend time describing the problems that cause this lack of meaning or purpose at work. Then, in the second part, they attempt to provide some solutions for these problems.
Let’s start with my thoughts on the book
Normally I like to recap the book I’m reviewing before giving my thoughts at the end. However, some of the conclusions or calls to action are a bit too much out of left field for me. I want to clear up early that I may not agree with the authors.
Let’s start with the title itself, which initially confused me. I thought that this book is about tips and tricks on how to find meaning or purpose at work. At face value, this sounds great! But as I read the book, I quickly realized that this is not the case. I’ll translate the title and subtitle here for you.
Translated directly to English, the title is: Giving back meaning to work
And the subtitle is: A revolutionary approach
The subtitle here adds a bit of extra color. Taken together, the title and subtitle correctly explain that the authors’ goal is to show revolutionary ways of giving meaning to white collar employees’ work in ways that have not been done in the mainstream business world.
As you’ll see in this review, the authors “solutions” are indeed revolutionary, but in the sense that they would require a mini revolution in order to implement them.
I feel like the authors failed to dig a little deeper into the methods they proposed. For example, the idea of giving every employee in an organization an equal vote into how the business is run is ridiculous in my mind! Maybe it would increase their happiness at work. But the business would quickly screech to a halt due to internal conflicts and politics. Anyone with experience working in a regular business would realize that the idea is not that good.
But the authors don’t really work in actual businesses. They are economists and researchers in academic and government settings and may simply be talking philosophically. So, while the idea might be fun to debate during a dinner party with friends, it doesn’t really help readers who may have lost their sense of purpose at work.
It’s too bad! The first part of the book brilliantly demonstrates the actual issues that we face today as white-collar workers. But unfortunately, the authors follow up their clear problem definition with wishy-washy, hand wavy and philosophical ideas on how to solve the problems.
The fact that they are French is also relevant her. There are strong cultural differences between the French and some other countries (like us in the USA) when it comes to how we see and live work. Those cultural differences are visible throughout the book. For example, the people surveyed when the book was being written are mostly French and most French people are part of unions. Also, whatever you think about socialism, the French have lived in that culture for a long time. Deviations from socialistic norms will affect their levels of happiness.
All in all, I think the book is worth a read. It lists all the problems of the modern business world in a single location. And while it may lack pragmatism in the solutions it proposes, I do like some of their ideas and would enjoy debating them at a dinner party.
So, what is the book about?
Since the Covid pandemic started, workers have started questioning themselves: is our work useful and essential to life in general? If so, then why is the work so hard, not paid well, and not worth anyone’s respect and recognition? And if not, then why should I keep contributing to something that is useless?
Issues of the modern workplace
According to this book about bullshit jobs, more than half of the work done in our society today is pointless. In the last hundred years we have automated, offshored or given the most difficult and labor-intensive jobs to machines. However, we have in the process created many useless jobs so that we can remain relevant and earn a paycheck.
Middle managers have recently started to use metrics as a way to track the creation of value in a company. Think about how Boeing famously split management and value creation between two geographical locations. Managers there have lost the ability to track the work in person. They must rely on metrics from people on the ground.
In the service domains, employees are stuck between achieving quotas and serving customers well. Workers are constantly having to negotiate between the two, which causes a huge psychological drain.
There are also many other issues that lower employees’ sense of meaning or purpose:
- Managers that do not care about the actual work being done
- Initiatives to give more control about the work to the employees but turn out to just be lip-service
- The lack of an actual mission for the company beyond “making more money than last year”
- Having objectives to reach that are clearly against the implicit objectives of the senior leaders of the business
Management by numbers
Management by Excel spreadsheets, also called management by numbers, causes an endless loop in which processes need to be redefined, and reports continuously filled. Managers get to decide what metrics they measure, and their own success depends on them achieving the numbers they wanted. Nobody wants to get fired so achieving those numbers and making those little Excel cells turn green takes priority over the actual success of the company.
Slowly during the past few decades, the center of gravity of our economy has moved away from production towards finance. This causes endless new processes, constant reporting responsibilities, business objectives that are just numbers, and countless reorganizations. All of this so that metrics on a spreadsheet somewhere can look good to shareholders.
Some movements in the 1950s and 1980s tried to bring the focus back on production and its workers. Drucker’s proposition to define work by objective instead of repetitive tasks is an example. Another is the Toyota Production System and the Lean methodologies that inherited from it. But after some initial successes, managers once again progressively moved control away from production workers and back to themselves so that they can track the financial success of the company for the shareholders and enforce policies that maximize finances.
What gives meaning to your work?
Friedman said in 1970 that a business’ social responsibility is to increase its profits. However, achieving this does not give the workers a sense of accomplishment. They will usually not find themselves motivated by that mission, so senior leaders have come up different ways to “motivate” them: the threat of being fired, bonuses, stock options and yearly performance reviews.
Workers are not motivated solely by money or the success of the company they work for. So, what motivates them? First, let’s talk about the nature of work and then see how we can find purpose in it.
What is work?
Work is the activity that we do by which we transform the natural or social world, or by which we transform ourselves. There are three dimensions for these transformations:
- Impact on the world
- Impact on the standards of how we live together
- Impact on the workers themselves
Work is what closes the gap between what is being prescribed and what is reality. We are told what to do and we have to find a way to get it done. But the world resists change and there are always obstacles to work through and issues to solve. Work is the act of breaking through this resistance, which can sometimes be natural, like a giant rock in the middle of a street, or social, like getting consensus across a heavy social hierarchy.
Finding purpose
In general, people who find their work more purposeful are those in the care business: doctors, nurses, at home helpers, but also mechanics, plumbers, etc. On the other side, bank and insurance employees have more trouble finding meaning to their work.
So, it seems that contact with the public or providing aid to others tends to make work more satisfying. It can also be satisfying when we work on something that has an impact on one of the three work dimensions described in the previous section. When there is alignment between the betterment of the world in general, our standards of living or on ourselves, we tend to value that work more.
Pride in your work is also important, as is respect and recognition from peers and higher ups that know the work intimately. However, this aspect is subjective and depends on how people view the quality of your work. Managers and workers rarely see eye-to-eye when it comes to work quality and there can be tension, unfortunately.
Solutions?
I will save you some time and tell you right now that there are no practical solutions right now, besides maybe finding yourself a job with a company that takes care of the world and its people instead of being part of its destruction.
But otherwise, read on for a few interesting ideas that will surely give you something to talk about over a few beers with friends.
In this part of the book, the authors look at different ideas that can help create a business that provides meaning to its employees. The lack of purpose at work is rooted in the structure of businesses. So, the entire business must change if a solution is to be found. Good luck with that!
The problem is that these solutions are mostly impossible to achieve for most existing businesses because it involves the following:
- Having employees participate in business decisions that concern them. Sometimes employees, or an elected representative who must be an employee, are sitting on the board of directors.
- Having employees sit on committees that influence big decisions. According to the authors, this is already happening in Germany and some Scandinavian countries.
- Having companies be not for profit, or being B-Corporations, which is a non profit that has been certified by B Lab as having a social and environmental performance that is adequate.
Will this solve anything? I don’t believe so. There will always be for-profit companies out there due to the potential rewards they provide to their owners. The authors also don’t discuss international competition and how that could affect a company, brushing that aside as off-topic for the book. That’s convenient for them, because I think the topic of competition would undermine most of their ideas in this section of the book.
Self-organization
One glimmer of hope is that giving employees some measure of decision making when it comes to how value is created within the company can help provide some meaning to their work. However, we first need to do away with today’s management-by-numbers methodology, which would be a hard sell to today’s decision makers. Regardless, this to me seems like the most achievable solution, if just barely.
There are 4 pillars to achieving this:
- We need a clear definition of the company mission. Why do we work here?
- Abolish bureaucratic norms and control mechanisms
- Bring in employees into process of making and coordinating decisions
- Managers need to support employees instead of bossing them around
(I want to note here that all of the above, with the exception of the second bullet point have been done in some companies where I have worked before. But self-organization was never achieved because senior leaders always seem to operate in a different class and are above the “law”. They can sweep in at any moment and change priorities, objectives, or processes and will cause this house of cards to collapse)
There are also three levels of autonomy for workers, each more liberated from management-by-number philosophy:
- Operational: how to achieve predefined tasks
- Professional: how to organize to achieve an objective
- Strategic: how to define our work and our own objectives to achieve our mission
People prefer being responsible for a large part of the value chain, although the work becomes more intense. Employees now have to perform some management or control over the creation of value. Old managers in this paradigm become experts or coaches and work alongside the workers.
Ironically, while being touted as a solution, the authors mention that the experiment was tried at Michelin, which caused an increase in employee absences…
Democracy at work?
I don’t think democracy in a company would work very well, but it is a proposed solution in the book. If the business does not grind to a halt due to needing a vote for everything, it will be destroyed by a nimbler competitor. What’s more, the authors themselves acknowledge that most workers are not even interested in the internal workings of the business, which has a big impact on the success of the company. Instead, they are more interested in governing it and making the big decisions.
Again, did the authors take the time to evaluate the effect of having employees make big decisions when they usually lack the big picture? Are these companies going to be subjected to endless internal political campaigns to influence them to pick one direction over another? I’m not entirely certain, that democracy works in the business world.
Another proposed solution is to do away with senior leaders and have the workers own and operate the business, like in cooperatives. But while it can give a lot of meaning and purpose, it also brings its load of employee conflicts with regards to the direction the company is headed in, long hours and intense work.
Conclusion
So, what are we supposed to do?
After reading this book I really can’t tell. I know more about the causes of the disappearance of the sense of purpose and meaning at work. It makes sense that the root of all of this stems from moving our focus away from production to finance. Mission statements, company values, trying to get employees to participate in business decisions, calling employees “partners” or “associates” are all actions that feel like lip service and do nothing to provide a sense of purpose at work.
I think our best bet is to find work that aligns with our personal values. This will be left as an exercise to the reader.