Wall Street should be obsessed with making work joyous 📈
When you create joyous work, you create massive productivity gains
In response to requests for content in video format, I am experimenting with this post: the usual written piece, and a short video (always less than three minutes). The content is similar, though the written piece allows for a bit more detail. I will keep iterating both, always value your feedback, keep it coming.
- John (john@joyouswork.com)
I am conflicted about the four-day work week.
*Hovers over unsubscribe button* (Hear me out!)
In a hyper-connected, always-on world, work has become pervasive. It permeates life. It erodes and corrupts time for raising children, romance, learning, care, friendship, invention, entertainment. The four-day work week pushes back on the time corrosion of modern work, and for this, I love it.
But it also feels to me like an admission of defeat. It is a mollifier (albeit a grand one) - something which appeases and smooths over unpleasantries without fixing them - just like office pizza parties, table tennis tables, and after work drinks. It is like we are saying, we can’t make the experience of work one that you will love, so let’s just do less of it. There is a certain anaesthesia to it; it helps us numb the pain, but the cause of the pain remains and will continue its affliction.
We all deserve the four-day work week. But even more, we deserve those four days to be joyous.
Not giving in
I am not admitting defeat, no way. For too long we have accepted that work must include some degree of suffering. Work is work.
Nope. No more.
Let’s get real specific about what joyous work is. After years of research and decades of leadership and personal experience and reflection, this is my definition:
The feeling of doing a thing that matters, and doing it well.
Hands in the dirt creating a beautiful garden. Hands on coding to create a super-secure payment portal. Caring for the vulnerable. Deep exploration of data to learn something important. Coaching. Teaching. Investigating. Building. Fixing. Designing. Discovering.
I believe it is fundamentally human to want to do things that matter, and do them well. Put in even simpler terms, joyous work is about executing craft. Craft can be of the hands or of the mind. But it always has a clear objective, space to pursue that objective with appropriate autonomy, and clear feedback.
This sounds simple, because it is. It is why moments of joyous work happen. The planets align, and the results are beautiful. We love work. That was an amazing day. An amazing week. An amazing project. An amazing team.
But as quick as it happened, it is gone. For most people in the modern organisation, joyous work is fleeting. So what is getting in the way? Who or what exactly is the enemy of executing craft?
There is one chief villain, one big-bad I will pick on. The Thanos of the Work Universe: work-about-work. The email chains debating which department is responsible for what. The weeks spent preparing reports that you are quite sure have no impact whatsoever on decisions. The chase for approvals. The debate about why you need that data. The pre-meeting meetings to align on meeting content to ensure a stakeholder does not have an adverse reaction in the meeting. This work has nothing to do with craft and is now an absolutely staggering and frightening 60% of modern work.
It is here, in knowing what makes work joyous, and knowing what gets in the way, that we the people find common ground with the apex stakeholders1 of the modern organisation: shareholders.
Wall Street, rejoice!
At the risk of being reductive, for more than 200 years Wall Street has proved it cares about one thing: making as much money as possible, as fast as possible. On that basis and on name alone, joyous work must sound like a grand waste of time and money. But gosh that could not be more wrong.
Ok, joyous work has an issue here. It is not a lever that you pull for the kind of obvious outcome that gets shareholders all hot under the collar, be those real outcomes (e.g. costs eliminated from downsizing) or hoped-for outcomes (e.g. costs eliminated by AI). Rather, it is a “swarm of hacks”2 that over time, eliminate work-about-work and allow people to spend much more of their time doing things that matter, and doing them well. This is, in mechanical terms, productive and effective work. In his book, Reinventing Organisations, Frederic Laloux reflects on this challenge, arguing that such a pursuit “is not taking a foolish risk, despite what people might say. There is good reason to claim the opposite:...leaders can shoot for outcomes that would otherwise be hard to achieve.”
These hard to achieve results are not hoped-for, they have been proven by the pioneers creating joyous work every day. It is for this reason that Wall Street should rejoice at the idea of joyous work. Corporate Rebels reports that organisations creating joyous work achieve, relative to their peers, 30% more profit, 50% less staff turnover, and 67% less overhead costs. This is not marginal. This is the step-change in outcomes that Wall Street has excitable dreams about. It just so happens to also be how we create joyous work for all of us. How’s that for a bloody great win-win.
And so this is why I commit myself to joyous work, to creating this change. I am driven by the belief that the next step-change in business outcomes is borne of joyous work, as much as I am driven by belief in the moral imperative that we deserve work to be a source of joy in our lives.
We can have the four day work week. But let’s not use that as an excuse to continue with our neglect of the experience of work; we all deserve that it be joyous.
And Wall Street gets what they want too.
- John
What we do
At Joyous Work, we provide support to help you uncover the underlying currents in your organisation—what drives or detracts from a joyous work experience and effective outcomes. We work with you to design and implement high-impact changes that foster both. Visit joyouswork.com or reach out to john@joyouswork.com.
Apex stakeholders: The peak stakeholder in a system of work, the stakeholder that does not experience meaningful force impacting their behaviour and decisions (excluding regulations and laws), but is able to exert force onto others.
Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini, Humanocracy