The 4th industrial revolution holds a wealth of opportunities for the businesses and the people in them that are able to find new ways to create value in this economy. However, we are also facing a huge risk to our ability to rise to the challenge: burnout. It’s on the rise. So much so that the World Health Organisation has added to it its list of globally recognised diseases.
As the pace of change and flow of information in our working lives increases and career paths become less linear, and the pressure to innovate becomes greater, we’re trying to navigate these challenges in working environments and cultures that are still geared to the practices of the previous industrial ages.
Fixed schedules and ‘flexism’, open-plan offices, regularly checking employee activity using distracting always-on communications – these practices contribute to (and sometimes create) the rise in employee burnout that is growing across companies regardless of size and industry. It is simply becoming unsustainable for human minds to think creatively in environments that force them to behave like machines.
It’s interesting that only now we are referring to this latest industrial shift as the age of automation when arguably automation has always been with us. The Industrial Revolution brought with it the factory floor, a physical space where all workers could be seen from a single vantage point; employees’ actions were ‘automated’ with the assembly line process.
Then the information age – despite its creation of a raft of digital businesses – has in the main not transformed workplace structure and culture. We moved from factory floors to cubicles laid out on a grid, and then finally, open plan offices, filled with noise distracting stimuli. We kept the 9-5 – a hangover from the Industrial age when workers used to ‘punch the clock’ at the start and end of a shift.
However, the cognitive demands on us differ significantly from the days of the Industrial Age. To deliver value, we need to innovate – not only in terms of creating solutions for stakeholders and clients but also we need to regularly recreate ourselves. Lifelong learning is the norm in a world where the average worker will now change careers -not just jobs – five times.
What’s more, modern careers increasingly require higher levels of emotional work – because they are more focussed on innovating bespoke solutions and managing complex stakeholder relationships – inherently high-risk activities that involve managing fears within others and within oneself. This is why empathy – as well as creativity will (as the World Economic Forum also states) become just as important as AI – if not more so in the coming era of industrial change.
So what happens when you blend the cognitive demands of an emerging industrial age (the need for people to demonstrate greater autonomy), with the restrictions on workers that are effectively cultural hangovers from the industrial revolution (the need to control humans by automating them)? The answer is burnout.
So far, the response to this challenge has been to place more pressure upon the individual – telling workers that the feelings they are having are all in their heads and that they need to change their mindsets to succeed.
It’s not the ‘mindset movement’ per se that is the problem – it’s the fact that designing our environment is arguably more important. Change does not only come from within.
A useful example of this principle is shown in an analysis of the effectiveness of ‘Growth Mindset’ training in schools – the study found that the reason why the training was not working in some schools was due to the fact that there was no sufficient environmental change. Growth mindset training worked in an optimal environment. This led to the idea’s creator – Stanford professor Carole Dweck – to address these incorrect applications of her thinking as part of a ‘false growth mindset‘.
This false application is also seen in ‘McMindfulness‘ – the way some companies deploy mindfulness programmes. In these cases, mindfulness programmes are used not as part of a wider cultural shift towards more empathetic interactions between people and greater respect for an environment that enables deeper thinking and proper rest after hours – but as a way of making people more compliant when faced with bad (or even toxic) environments.
After all, if we are constantly correcting our own minds, we don’t have the bandwidth to think about how our environment may be contributing to the issue – or even causing it. In a modern culture that believes it is meritocratic (it isn’t), the idea of being 100% responsible for our lives is not just a helpful thought experiment to use as a way to innovate, but instead a corporate mandate.
Therefore to even think of the impact of structural problems is often referred to as having a ‘victim mindset’ – this locks people into a binary way of seeing the situation – you either remould reality in your mind and ‘win’ or you are a victim of your environment and ‘lose’. These views lack empathy – a core skill in the future workplace.
There is a third way: design your environment. Become a behavioural designer that is optimising for creativity. Then, cultural issues become design challenges, rather than exclusively personal ones.
Designing your environment is arguably the most empowering move in modern workplaces – it creates a triple win scenario for leaders – who reap the benefits of a more engaged workforce with more stable churn rates, for workers who enjoy the benefits of being in a space that supports their creativity and finally the business which grows as a result.
There is arguably a moral component to environmental design, especially for those in leadership positions. If company culture happens as a result of the behaviour of management, the higher up we are in the ‘food chain’, the greater the ripple down effect of our design prototypes on the behaviours of the people working in those companies.
In an age where the cognitive demands on us are growing exponentially – the aims of these prototypes should have one goal: to give modern workers space to think.
Building in greater flexibility in work schedules by focusing on output over hours is one approach to meeting this goal – you could test the hypothesis that decreasing the volume of mandated work hours increases productivity. Microsoft in Japan did this with surprisingly effective results.
Decreasing digital distractions – especially after hours – is another. There will always be peak moments (in my industry, it’s new business pitches) that require concentrated bursts of collaborative online activity paired with meetings until late in the evening, but this is not sustainable for extended periods of time. Author of The Joy of Work Bruce Daisley has recently commented on how unproductive ‘constant collaboration’ can be – as people leave meetings with just as little clarity before as they did after. Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism also extols the importance of decreasing digital input as a way of getting better output from ourselves.
The greatest challenge for environmental designers comes with reappraising our use of physical space. As people become more aware that exercising in nature provides a positive boost for our cognitive wellbeing, proponents of the biophilic offices have found that working in nature delivers powerful benefits. Recent studies into the impact of incorporating nature-like forms, actual plants and spaces that enable people to enjoy quiet workspaces have found that it has a significant impact on productivity and creativity.
This suggests that in the future, an optimal environment will not be the open office, but rather a hub and spoke space that facilitates the empathetic collaboration needed in a more human workplace, but also distraction-free spaces to retreat to for people to find creative solutions to knotty, unpredictable business problems.
In a marketplace that, despite attempts at protectionism is still becoming more open and global, we need to position the UK to become a powerful force in business. We need to remember that businesses are just workplaces full of people thinking creatively, and to succeed we must give them the time and space to do so.