4 Non-Negotiables for Creating the Next Workplace

There is a 7–Eleven by my house which sits across the street from a particularly large and particularly rowdy middle school. Before and after school there is a rush of 11–13 year old customers. The downside, I suppose, is that they like to loiter. So, these proactive owners have affixed some very large and very loud speakers to the entrance of the store. They play, exclusively, and at an unnaturally high volume; Italian opera. You don’t realize just how strange and unnerving that is until you stand still for a few minutes filling your gas tank. It does make you want to leave as soon as possible (no offense to opera fans). Bottom line, if repulsion is the goal; it works.

While this may seem novel, it isn’t. We have been employing what has been called hostile architecture or defensive design in its various forms for years. If you have ever tried to lay down on a bench with armrests built into the middle, or tried to grind your skateboard on a railing with steel ball bearings attached to it, you know what I mean. The idea is to design and build something with the intention of making some use impossible, and in turn, driving certain kinds of users away. We do it all the time. But what happens when our architecture is hostile by accident? What if the owner of that 7–11 actually thought, “Kids love opera!” Carrying on thinking that their choice of music was a draw or at least neutral in their hope of selling big gulps and slurpees.

It is hard to imagine someone designing a work environment with hostile intent. No one creates a workplace wanting to drive their employees away. Still, this is exactly what can and is happening to the modern workspace. Without meaning to, we might just be playing music no one wants to hear.

The Grand Experiment

In one sense, the recent global pandemic has acted as a massive experiment in workplace viability. This unplanned, multinational experiment has given us an almost unfathomable sample size, spanning language, climate, culture, nation and industry in a way that is hard to overstate. The only problem has been collecting the data. It is now up to each individual business and in turn their industry, to analyze the results. Among other things, one conclusion that corporate citizens are coming to is that allowing their employees to work from home was not the disaster they might have imagined it to be.

In fact, there were plenty of advantages to this workplace reorganization. One study I read reported that productivity increased by 16% for those who work from home.[1] This might be a confirmation for the importance (and rarity) of what Cal Newport has called “deep work”[2] in the traditional office environment. Turns out we were losing lots of productivity because we were surrounded by coworkers. Being able to work from home or some other neutral environment meant that we had time to really bear down and enjoy uninterrupted focus. Even the phenomenon of zoom fatigue may be a contributing factor here. Those dreaded zoom calls were always scheduled, never impromptu and because they were uniquely distasteful, we actively tried to limit them.

As we return to work as usual, there is not only the realization that there may be a better way, but a corresponding appetite for that improved approach. Knowledge workers got a taste of a 20 second commute, the comfort and focus of working from home and the all-day access to our own refrigerators. In turn, there is a new expectation that our jobs should embody what Harvard researcher Prithwiraj Choudhury has called “radical flexibility.”[3] The minimum, going forward, will be a hybrid work environment. But it is not just where we work that is being re-evaluated, it is also how we work. Everything it seems is now on the table, as a record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs last month.[4]

Part of the reason why I am personally investing my time in building and nurturing cutting edge coworking environments like COhatch is because I believe they are going to quickly move from the fringe to normative work environments, not just for freelancers and knowledge workers, but for every kind and size of business. I see this trend coming precisely because this kind of workplace ecology is a lifestyle solution. It looks to help businesses and nonprofits recreate the environments where they work in a way that not only makes financial sense but that responds to the new non-negotiables that we are all starting to expect. Here are those new non-negotiables I see emerging: Flexibility, Empathy, Integration and Impact.

The New Ecology of Work

1. Flexibility

Offering flexibility in work is not just about where we work. Certainly, a hybrid locus of work will need to include some ratio of work from home, coworking and even offsite team experiences. But radical flexibility is as philosophical as it is tactical. The idea here is that our jobs are listening to us, responding to what we need so that we will be not just more productive, but healthier as well. Flexibility here also means allowing more freedom in time management. Trusting good employees to manage the hours they keep and maintaining a higher sensitivity to the balancing of families and extra-vocational commitments. Flexibility, then, is a feature of the second non-negotiable, empathy.

2. Empathy

One of the gifts of design thinking (and the axiom that every problem is really a design problem) is the tactical sense it makes of empathy. Being sensitive to the emotional health of the people around us is a meta skill emerging in our time. In design thinking you begin with empathy for the end user. In other words, designing a product or process starts with concern for the implicit struggle of the user with the current system. We begin by caring about the pain points the user feels. In this sense, empathy is both a new core competency for supervisors (caring about and being aware of the emotional health of the people they oversee) but also a design requirement for constructing the workplace in the 21st century. The epidemic of anxiety for instance is something that must be taken into consideration as we create healthy environments for work and productivity.

3. Integration

Empathy, while crucial, is also just a starting point. The result of an empathetic work environment is integration. Martin Buber famously bifurcated all human relationships into two categories.[5] “I and thou” is the relationship we have with another human being, seeing them as fully other and fully equal to us. “I and it” represents the relationship that is transactional, where we see the other as an object, performing some function for us. Objectification is always a danger with people we employ to do a job. If we see them simply as functionaries and not as fully formed human beings, we risk not only dehumanizing them but (in the current milieu) losing them. The work of integration is a matter of seeing the people we work with as not just having a life “outside” of work, but as wonderfully complex people with families, passions and emotional lives that should matter to us as well. Finding ways to allow for those passions and extra-vocational concerns to find airtime and even investment in the places we work, goes a long way to keeping us and even improving the quality of the work we do.

4. Impact

In his wonderful little book Three Signs of Miserable Job[6], Patrick Lencioni cites Irrelevance as one of three core reasons people are unhappy at work. The bottom-line question we are all asking, does the work I do matter? Does it make the world better somehow? Lencioni imagines this as mostly a framing problem. In other words, we need to help people see how their job matters, without asking the more unnerving question if it really does. This comes back to job design. It is not enough to create a job and then try to spin it into something that makes an impact. Instead we need to create jobs that have impact built into them. Even jobs that are especially menial can be coupled with a corporate volunteer policy that affords those positions some paid time to invest in social causes. Corporate responsibility and even philanthropy might need to move from writing big checks supporting causes the owners care about, to philanthropy-sharing programs that allow employees to allocate some of that time and money to the causes they care about.

Postscript on Paradox

Having said all of that, these new values are not embodied in a vacuum. As we create new work environments for the modern worker, it is always a danger that we will overcompensate. Each new non-negotiable is held in tension by other values (paradoxes) that if neglected will become the next reason why we hate our jobs.

So we have to keep in mind that while we need to move toward flexibly we will also need to provide stability for the development of soft skills and for the more important yearning to belong. In other words, while we want to be able to work from anywhere, we actually shouldn’t. It is the freedom and flexibility that are the gift, not the isolation. In turn we will need physical office solutions, not just digital ones, to bridge the gap.

While we need empathy for our people, we will also need to maintain what Edwin Friedman would call organizational nerve[7], holding to our mission and our customer as our primary corporate concern. If we neglect the core work of the company in favor of job satisfaction, there won’t be any jobs left to dislike.

While we need integration we need to also maintain a healthy distinction between work and home, because Reed Hastings is right, work isn’t really a family.[8] Using that language and creating that expectation could be a recipe for disaster as all our caring is quickly undone when, for professional reasons, people simply need to move on.

Finally, while we need to find ways to empower and connect our people to real impact we all still need to be willing to do the humble jobs too. Being asked to do something I am not good at is valuable for self-discovery, humility, and true teamwork.

Holding these additional values in tension will give us the best chance of success as we navigate and create the new ecology of work.

[1] Bloom, Nicholas, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying. “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment*.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, no. 1 (2014): 165–218. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qju032.

[2] Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

[3] Harvard Business Review, Riegel, Deborah Grayson., Gulati, Ranjay., Fuller, Joseph B., Kropp, Brian. The Future of Work: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review. United States: Harvard Business Review Press, (n.d.)

[4] Kelly, Jack. “We’ve Become a Nation of Quitters: 4.4 Million Americans Left Their Jobs in September.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, November 16, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/11/15/weve-become-a-nation-of-quitters-44-million-americans-left-their-jobs-in-september/?sh=3378ac97893e.

[5] Buber, Martin. I And Thou. New York, NY: Clydesdale Press, 2020.

[6] Lencioni, Patrick. The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and Their Employees). San Francisco, CA: Wiley, 2007.

[7] Friedman, Edwin H., Margaret M. Treadwell, and Edward W. Beal. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. New York, NY: Seabury Books, 2007.

[8] Hastings, Reed, and Meyer, Erin. No Rules Rules Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2020.