The Myth of the “Modern” Workforce
Despite decades of focus on corporate efficiency, retrograde attitudes and questionable norms are holding back team productivity and performance.
Today, productivity continues to flatline, while the average lifespan of companies continues to plummet, down an extraordinary 78% since the 1920s to just 8-15 years today.
This means not only are organizations often failing to achieve peak performance: those that continue to fail at this are at even greater risk of disruption, and being leapfrogged not just by new technologies but by the workforces that are able to deliver and capitalize on those innovations.
The last two decades have, at least, seen a significant shift in business priorities - much less often does one hear the mantra of ‘shareholder is king’, for example, and there has unquestionably been a much greater spotlight on the importance of a happy employee base. With cohesive, inclusive teams, it has been proven, good things happen that benefit customers and shareholders alike.
But it is false, sadly, to assume that all is well when it comes to . Many organizations and teams continue to feature endemic issues that hold back individual and human potential. Here, below, to illustrate this point, are five such issues: each all too common, despite strong evidence of their potential and real damage:
Hiring ‘People like Me’
Despite the fleeting trend of unconscious bias training, biases are often left to run wild in both filtering and assessing applicants. The result - what has been termed “rapport-based” hiring, one that prioritizes immediate social connection over true fit and skills for a role. “We need another me”, a manager might think, or “we need another Steve.” Such approaches, combined with biases (for example, mental pictures of the “ideal” candidate, or expecting a certain logical answer flow in an interviews) can serve to impede the diversity that is proven to drive innovative outcomes through diversity of thought.
Focusing on Process Over Innovation
Balancing short vs long term priorities, how we do things now vs how we could in the future, is difficult. Too often, though, there is no such balance - and instead the former is prioritized to the detriment of the latter. Innovation, despite the rise of AI, still comes principally from human brains coming together, and the conditions for it must be cultivated, with safe spaces, sufficient time, the encouragement of risks and ideas, and so on. In reality, though, 3/4 teams are not considered psychologically safe by their participants, and nearly half (46%) of all workers don’t believe their employer and manager values their insights, ideas and contributions.
Narrow Progression Paths
Many people are top contributors who don’t necessarily want to be conventional managers or administrators. I interviewed some folks for my book ‘A Hidden Force’, for example, who described being top stars in their firm… but found themselves punished in performance assessments because of a lack of social polish, something that restricted their ability to continue to build their career and ultimately caused them to seek pastures new.
Does your organization allow for different types of contributors to seek and achieve different reward paths? And for those that do want to become conventional leaders, are they given the opportunity? Sadly, many promising leaders can find themselves excluded from promotion opportunities because of narrow conceptions of ‘what a leader looks like’ (charismatic, etc) that, remarkably, are still in vogue - this despite significant evidence that leaders absolutely don’t all look the same or think the same, and different people can draw on very different skills for success in that field. Neurodivergent leaders, for example, can often leverage a particular empathy for others in ensuring their teams are comfortable, supported, and optimally productive.
Constant Interruptions
How we manage our energy and focus is key, and very individual, and should be respected. However, ignorance of neurodiversity (more than 1/3 of workers still don’t know what neurodiversity even means) often results in a marked lack of sensitivity to this crucial issue. The interruption culture is a classic example of a norm emerging (it’s ok to ping people all the time and demand instant responses) that works for some but not others. And it’s wasting valuable time and lessening productivity: one study has found that the average person experiences one interruption every 8 minutes during their workday, creating approximately 3 hours of wasted time per day.
Meetings That Don’t Work For Everybody
Most people would know that meetings are likely to work best with a clear agenda, space for everybody to contribute, break times to refocus and move around, and defined next steps. But many meetings are rushed, without these, meaning those who need them suffer.
Some people also simply find many meetings unhelpful, and can often contribute by other means if this is facilitated by colleagues. But too often such people find themselves obliged to attend, regardless. How we communicate, problem-solve and learn are all shaped by how our brains are wired: and until these differences are better appreciated and welcomed, less productive meetings are likely to be far more common than truly productive ones.
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Thus, despite decades of Industrial Revolution-legacy obsession on efficiency, “modern” workforces are often nothing of the kind. Ways of working, in many cases, need fixing, to ensure that productivity isn’t damaged by non-inclusive, lazy, or otherwise ill-informed practices.
To finish, though, on a more positive note: no fix here is beyond any team or organization willing to look itself in the mirror and improve. Simple changes and small things, instilled and ultimately practiced at scale, can be the difference between a workforce with an unhelpful culture, restrictive norms, and lower output, and one that is truly more than the sum of its parts.
Understand why neuroinclusion is essential to improve employee experience within your organization in our Employee Experience e-book.