Why Humanising Work matters…

We’re a small team exploring what it means to make organisations more human… And to re-imagine what it means to work.

We spend a lot of time at work… across a typical (male) lifetime, almost 100,000 hours. Somewhere along the way, we start seeing our work as separate from our life. We talk about ‘work-life balance’ – usually because the two things seem mutually exclusive.

For some people, work becomes all encompassing… the source of our identity. When someone asks us who we are, we say “I am a teacher”, “I am a politician”, “I am a factory worker”. They spend long hours at work and derive their sense of self from it.

For others, work can be a source of shame or humiliation… “I don’t have a job” or “I’m between jobs” or “I was fired from my job”. The absence of paid employment feels like a signal from society that we are failing in some way. That we aren’t good enough. This feeling is compounded by the financial impact of being without work.

We also know that the nature of work is changing… slowly, for now, but the change is likely to change exponentially. Much of the work we do today will be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. Clever algorithms can perform many of the tasks we carry out today. This is a big problem if we derive our sense of self from our job… What will we do with all our new-found time?

Social norms are changing too. We expect our workplaces to be more tolerant of diversity, more creative, more innovative. We want people to bring their ‘whole selves’ to work. To be authentic. Yet most workplaces still treat employees like ‘widgets’. To fit into neat little boxes and conform to the systems and processes put in place by those in power.

Then there is a significant cluster of important, fulfilling, essential services that don’t receive financial remuneration, and aren’t treated as ‘work’. Caring, parenting, volunteering, making art… Society wants these things, but takes them for granted, arguing that the ‘market’ decides. Carrying out these roles carries a massive burden through lost income, constrained social inclusion and subsistence living. When these roles aren’t ‘optional’ and aren’t valued sufficiently, we exacerbate inequality in our society.