What is important about this book
Today’s world of work is making us ill, live shorter and more unhappy lives: people are treated as commodities instead of human beings and team members. Our attitude to the world of work has fallen out of step with the flexible approaches we now need to cope with the demands of a digital world and the high expectations of customers and as job holders.
It is the assertion of this book that we may be preventing progress with deliberate or accidental neglect to the design of work: we are urging an inclusive, agile and highly participative program of organization design as a norm and a move away from constructed restructures which cause anxiety, uncertainty and psychological trauma to many.
We know that balancing work and life is hard and, with this book, the author wants to help us create a balanced life: we need an “energized workplace” to achieve a realigned, recalibrated and reinverted work proportion.
To correct this energy misalignment, we need to design work that stimulates and creates human energy rather than merely depleting it. By doing so, our work will mean something bigger than ourselves and this will see us move from functioning parts of a machine to a living part of an ecosystem that needs more sustainable ways to flourish, as do we, as a people.
The author Perry Timms is a coach, consultant, professor, ad conference speaker; founder of the consulting and BCorp company “People and Transformational HR”, he has been named by HR Magazine as one of the most influential HR thinkers.
Quotes
- “There is no work-life balance, only a balanced life”.
- “We can’t manage time. We can only manage our energy”.
- “The energy of people is – at the moment – a rarely defined or design consideration”.
- “Only you are the vessel of your own energy and only you can be the one to create the shifts you want and need to bring more energy to your working and more balanced life”.
- “We’re now literally working ourselves to death”.
- “We have neglected ourselves and others in pursuit of efficiency and financial targets.”
- “Why do people who run organizations continue to create – or perpetuate – such toxic working conditions?”
- “People being worked to a state of illness is avoidable and should be overcome at all costs”.
- “We should measure the impact of well-being initiatives and practices as much as we do outputs and profit margins”.
- “Whilst it is laudable that the physical safety attributes of workplaces and working have improved, we’ve neglected the psychological needs of people and face more complex challenges in creating safety of a different kind.”
- “People, culture and change strategies need to incorporate and activate more explicit actions to provide psychological safety for people in the workplace”.
- “Psychological safety is not a pipedream; it is what we need the most in the workplaces of the 21st century. […] People are frightened and the last thing they need is a workplace that is harmful”.
Structure and contents of the book
Timms believes that we have many inherited design flaws from the 20th-century version of work, which still haven’t been adapted despite being in the third decade of the 21st century.
Some organizations and workplaces have become tortuous, toxic and soul-destroying places to be. A safe workplace goes through Psychological Safety. We need a more balanced approach to success and measuring achievements beyond financial gain. A fundamental aspect is psychological detachment from work to ensure employees restore an replenish their individual resources.
Divided into 10 chapters, the book explores the possibilities of what the future of work might be like. The people factor is not a platitude, it is the real driving force behind organizational success and there appears to be an approach to design organizations where people flourish: we are animated by things like a sense of purpose, a feeling of transcendence about things greater than ourselves, and a sense of belonging to either movements, traditions or philosophies.
How can we design organizations with humans in mind? In this book Timms will look at the “what” and the “how”, and take some very specific angles on things like:
- How we are energized by the work we do.
- The sciences behind our creation and use of personal energy,
- how we can bring more balance and regenerative ways to our energy source/supply.
- Workplaces where there is an abundance of energy and what has been designed to make this so.
- Approaches we can all take to design for the better experiences of work, reinventing the thing we call work and/or jobs.
Instructions for reading this book
The book is targeted at Human Resource Management professionals, those who work in leadership, management, change and organization design. Agencies who recruit, academics, researchers, teachers and everyone else trying to find their best working environment to be economically sound, psychologically stimulating and emotionally rewarding.
The book ranges from analyzing the causes that have contributed to the ineffectiveness of current organizations to proposing case studies related to organizations that have successfully put people at the center of their workplace design. There is also a toolkit, a specific roadmap on organizational design so that as many as five generations can work together, happily.
It is the lofty ambition of this book to help us understand that we can do to design better work, to build better businesses for a better world.
No one function, profession or leader is likely to ‘lead the change’; a combined approach is needed and this book advocates that inclusive and wide-ranging approach.
Yet it does start with the design, with our understanding of our energy and making adjustments to our lives accordingly, in combination with roles, an organization’s expectations and systems and those of our colleagues and leaders, partners and collaborators.
What this book really calls for is a recognition that human energy by nature is a precious, fierce yet delicate force. People can have good intentions to create energized workplaces but these can be harmful if not inclusive, open, clear, well-designed, constantly tuned and genuine versions of the best environments for people to flourish. But energy can be channeled, regenerated and applied in even the most mechanical setting with the right conditions.