The Human-Centric Enterprise ebook is the result of a partnership between Thinkers50 and Mercer. The subject is close to our hearts at Thinkers50: understanding how to manage and lead organisations in the most humane way — in a way which truly maximizes the amazing variety of human potential.
With contributions from Mercer experts, The Human-Centric Enterprise portrays a working world in which best practice is being realigned to accord with the needs and aspirations of people rather than balance sheets or restrictive notions of efficiency. It acknowledges the powerful evolution of amazing technologies, but places them in the human context, as enablers of human achievement rather than replacements for people.
Melissa is a former partner at Mercer, where she lead Transformation Solutions for the US and Canada. In this role, she was responsible for the firm’s efforts in the areas of workforce transformation; HR transformation; HR digitalization; diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); and workforce analytics.
Her book on a more humanistic future of work, Work Here Now: Think Like a Human, Build a Powerhouse Workplace, was published by Wiley in January 2023. Melissa is a recognized thought leader on the subject of the future of work post-COVID. She has been quoted on the subject in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Economist, The Washington Post, Axios and Daily Mail and has appeared on NPR and Al Jazeera English.
Melissa’s work leverages data analytics, a healthy dose of pragmatism and a humanist view of the workplace to create extraordinary outcomes. She has pioneered techniques to reshape organisations for digital and workforce transformation, leading breakthrough projects across industries ranging from manufacturing and professional services to biotech and consumer goods. Earlier in her career, Melissa helped build businesses in the environmental, social and governance (ESG) transformation space, including launching the Sustainability Services and Cleantech practices at Deloitte and conducting two landmark carbon credit derivatives trades at Deutsche Bank.
Melissa received her Bachelor of Arts in English and American language and literature from Harvard University and her MBA in finance from Columbia Business School.
As the future of work rapidly evolves, we must urgently reassess our understanding of where, how and why we work.
Developed by Mercer and Thinkers50, The Human-Centric Enterprise redefines our perspective on putting people at the center of modern workplaces.
Even in an age of incredible technological progress, we want work to work better for humans. After all, we face an ongoing structural labor crisis, with workers globally continuing to cut back their hours worked or drop out of the workforce entirely. In many ways, we’ve made great strides. Human workers today are less likely to be killed or maimed by mill machinery, to be gored by rampaging livestock or to experience any number of other unpleasant outcomes of days gone by. But there is still considerable room for improvement — in service of growth/profitability and human well-being alike.
With this backdrop, we are compelled to ask a new question: Is now the time to make the ultimate transformational move and finally create a human-centered work experience?
It’s a bold question. Changing how we experience work means abandoning a longstanding tug-of-war between our work and our humanity. But many organizations have stopped pitting “how work gets done” against “how we honor our humanity” in a zero-sum game and are instead starting with the premise that economics and empathy can thrive at the same time.
The result? A human-centered work experience.
In the past, critics have often stereotyped what a human-centric environment might look like in practice, characterizing it as an unrealistic, warm-and-fuzzy sort of place where — let’s face it — not much work gets done.
In reality, creating a human-centered work environment means managing three critical, interrelated dimensions properly: the intensity of work, interactions between humans and work technology, and the purpose and logic of work. Get these three dimensions right, and your workplace can be a high-functioning, productive environment that is also characterized by optimal retention rates and high worker well-being.
Let’s examine what each of these dimensions really consists of and how organizations are able to perform well within them.
If you feel work has become harder over the years, what you are likely experiencing is increasing work intensity. Work intensity describes how many units of work per units of time an organization asks any person to do. In knowledge work, a measure of work intensity might be how many meetings your company expects you to attend during a day; in physical labor, it might be how many strawberries you are expected to pick in an hour.
Across jobs at every level and in every industry, work intensity has increased over the past few decades. Researchers fret that warehouse workers are packing more boxes than their bodies can handle, while the Harvard Business Review speculates that the job of the CEO is now too arduous for a single individual to manage. One prominent study found that the percentage of workers who believe they work “very hard” rose a stunning 16 percentage points in the past two decades, from 30% to 46%; the same study also saw a 9-point rise in workers feeling “used up” at the end of the day — from 20% to 29% of those surveyed. Across an array of studies, this kind of work intensity has been connected to a wide range of bad health outcomes.
With nearly half of workers believing they work very hard and nearly one-third feeling they have nothing left at the day’s end, we are compelled to ask, what has changed? Why has work become so much more intense? A few factors in combination seem to be the culprits for this semi-mysterious phenomenon of escalating work intensity:
Technology saturation
Technology unquestionably plays a role in our sense of work intensity. Technology extends work and makes it “greedier,” extending into nights and weekends via smartphones and laptops; technology can also manage work at a grueling pace, speeding up assembly lines or dispatching rideshare drivers to locations within unrealistic timeframes.
Organizational complexity
Organizational complexity creates work intensity as well. As a knowledge worker in one of an ever-increasing number of matrix organizations, you’d be more likely to suffer from meeting overload — just by virtue of your organizational structure generating more connection points. But meetings aren’t the only flashpoint — any increases in product or service line complexity show up quickly on frontline workers’ plates. Think about working in a fast-food restaurant that starts offering all-day breakfast — everyone from the fry cook to the cashier has suddenly added a new set of actions to their existing jobs.
Cultural pressure
Finally, work intensity is increasingly spurred on by a strangely tenacious set of cultural myths around hard work as an end in and of itself. An array of generally young, typically male spokespeople advocate vocally across social media platforms for “rise and grind” or “hustle” culture. In Asia, this phenomenon manifested as “996” culture, originating with Chinese programmers who embraced a work schedule of 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. As Elon Musk once famously tweeted, “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”
The past few years have seen a backlash of discontent brewing against this kind of cultural pressure — which comprises many aspects of intensified work, like working 100 hours per week, eschewing sleep to rise before dawn to work, and giving up family relationships, friendships and hobbies to create space for more work. The hustle movement has been labeled toxic and anti-inclusive by a number of observers, but its influence continues to be felt across organizations.
Although the origins of work intensity can be multifaceted, solving for intensified work starts in a very simple place: being aware of when and where it’s happening. At Mercer, across organizations ranging from retail to professional services, we use ethnographic techniques — where workers comment on how they’re feeling during certain task types — to identify at what moments and during what kinds of work intensity has been dialed up. Is it during a seasonally busy period or a particularly gnarly task type? This simple feedback loop — “How and when do you feel you are being asked to work beyond your natural boundaries?” — is one that organizations have to initiate if they want to retain critical talent and curb the burnout that quietly saps both employee health and productivity.
Once the organization has identified where work intensity is occurring, the next step is to talk openly about it and discover why. For too long, work intensity has been a taboo topic. Leaders fear what might happen if they say workloads should be lighter or work should happen slower. These sorts of statements were seen as broadsides against productivity or growth, when, today, we realize that excess work intensity, by impeding well-being and driving attrition, is widely known to inhibit the growth organizations are seeking.
To create a more human-centered work experience, organizations are having thoughtful conversations at organizational and team levels about where work intensity is occurring and what’s triggering it. Is it technology? Leadership culture? A particular customer profile? Speaking candidly about these stressors can boost employee engagement and shows employees that the organization has empathy for their experience of work.
Having identified where work has intensified and spoken candidly about why, the critical last step for organizations is to redesign work to alleviate the pressure. Depending on the nature of the underlying causes and organizational appetite to dive deep into solutions, there are different options.
We often see in our project work for clients that having employees identify where complexity is overgrown and connections to impact have been lost — and then removing extra complexities, such as the many meetings, initiatives and side projects that organizations layer on top of core work — can immediately de-intensify work. Another option is to eliminate performative work — such as superfluous calls, emails, meetings and attention-seeking behavior that can win plaudits from unsophisticated leaders but has no real connection to outcomes. The elimination of performative work is often met with a sigh of relief from less performatively oriented employees.
As Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau have described, and as discussed in Chapter 2, rethinking work and ultimately shifting away from jobs is likely to put us on the road to less-intensified work. In the future, many roles will be fully redesigned or deconstructed into tasks, with workers able to calibrate their level of work intensity to their own preferences.
Technology was supposed to transform work. And it has — but not always for the better. Change is never easy, and technology has accelerated our pace of change exponentially over the past 30 years. Whether you’re a factory worker fighting recalcitrant machinery or an office worker shaking your fists at a computer crash, you’ve likely encountered the dark side of technology more than once at work. It doesn’t help that, pre-pandemic, the futurists were predicting a grim future where the robots were coming for our jobs.
How does this leave people feeling? Not great:
We see these dynamics play out live with our clients. For one large, complex organization, challenging technological experiences were cited as a top-three cause of exhaustion and burnout; as a result, the organization moved to curtail the pace of rollouts. Frustratingly, while technology can, as we’ve seen, be a huge driver of new capabilities, how it’s deployed can also stymie progress. Our HR Operations Scanner research — where we data-mined studies across hundreds of client organizations that look at how HR actually spends its time — showed that the hugely useful HRIS technology advances of the past few years have only reduced transactional activity by 5%–7%. The tech is great — how we use it is not.
All in all, humans and technology are still negotiating an uneasy peace within modern work culture as negative experiences with tech at work center on two Cs: cloud and cyber.
In general, cloud software deployment has been a blessing. Software is updated far more frequently and improves at the speed of light now that it’s not reliant on being physically shipped or loaded onto CDs. The downside of that lightning-fast pace of change is the change itself. Frequent software updates make for a rockier user experience minute to minute, even as the net impact of cloud deployment is quite positive in the long term.
Cyber brings with it similar pros and cons. As the number and intensity of cyberattacks continue to escalate, organizations are forced to implement stronger cybersecurity. Protective measures like two-factor authentication are vitally important, but they do break up the seamlessness of workers’ experience of technology. Cyber experts are confident that protections can be better embedded in the future, but, for now, we’re living in an in- between era, where what keeps us safe also slows us down.
Cloud and cyber are today’s tech issues, but our human relationship with tech is complicated by another factor — that we don’t like to talk about technology. The working world is founded on the assumption that technology will work well, if not perfectly, while human efforts are seen as hit or miss. This can be true, but the opposite is also often true: technology sometimes doesn’t work. It can be prone to glitches and failures, and human workers, seeing something go awry, often go to incredible lengths to get to a good result. Humans often end up enabling technology rather than the other way around, and it can be exhausting and demoralizing.
The good news is that the relationship between humans and technology at work is fixable and will improve naturally, one hopes, as technology gets better. Organizations should start by seeking to understand where technology is failing their human workers and where it works well. They should identify where gaps exist, asking if the issue is constant changes or interruptions thanks to cloud deployments or cyber protections. Is it glitchy software or archaic hardware? Is it simply too much technology or too many switches between apps in a day?
Having identified where technology and humans aren’t getting along well, organizations then need to have an honest conversation about expectation management. No organization has the budget or resources or even the available technological options to fix every place where user experience gears are grinding, so expectations must be clear from the beginning. Understanding what can and cannot get fixed in a given timeframe or where a choppier user experience is inevitable is helping organizations manage employee frustration. Incorporating possible tech disruptions or challenges into planning is helping companies create a far more productive and satisfying work pattern.
For many organizations and employees, a better future for human–tech interaction centers on taking a more minimalist approach to technology — with fewer, better technologies that truly “spark joy” and generate business results. This is why approaching transformation and digitalization with empathy is so critical — something we discuss at more length in Chapter 6. Organizations are beginning to assess their technology landscapes concretely with this employee perspective, curating what is used by whom and how. These efforts represent an encouraging trend — pointing to a future where humans and technology relate to each other more harmoniously.
One fascinating outcome of our collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an increased emphasis on meaning at work. Mercer’s Global Talent Trends research has made this point achingly clear: In 2023, 64% of respondents say working is an important part of their lives, and 54% say they work for more than the money.
When we think about how meaning is manifest in the workplace, there are actually two key components that relate to each other but are distinct: the purpose of work and the logic of work.
Purpose of work orients around a simple question: Why am I here? Today, organizations are doubling down on emphasizing purpose by better tying their corporate efforts to everything from community impact to environmental sustainability. Purpose doesn’t have to be altruistic, however. For instance, a company’s purpose could be to serve a key role in an industry’s value chain. One manufacturing organization we’ve worked with defined its purpose as keeping the world fed. What’s critical is that employees understand the organization’s purpose, that they find that purpose genuine and that they can connect their work to that purpose.
The notion of the logic of work — another concept connected to meaning — doesn’t get nearly as much airtime as purpose does but represents an area where organizations are applying more and more focus. When work has true logic, each worker can see — clearly and easily — how their efforts add up to results. During the COVID period, especially for knowledge workers, this link became frayed, leading workers to change jobs or even leave the workforce due to the belief that the activities they did every day didn’t actually have an impact.
Organizations can reestablish the logic of work through an array of mechanisms, including simplifying processes, using technology to make end results more transparent and breaking down the organizational silos that separate workers from the impact of their actions.
For companies driving toward a truly human-centered transformation of work, all three of the dimensions we’ve just described are in play. Workers are doing the right amount of work, and intensification is managed. Technology is mostly helpful at work, where human–tech interactions are well balanced. And, finally, workers understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, because the purpose and logic of work are clear.
It sounds so simple — but for many workplaces, this streamlined, clarified, empathic future of work is still miles away. Organizations that can focus on these three dimensions and get the basics right to make concrete progress will be the workplaces to which workers gravitate in the future — and the envy of their competitors.
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United Kingdom
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