Who’s in the room when we’re talking about good work?

In this article I’m wondering who’s in the room when we talk about ‘good work’ for better lives and a sustainable future?

My mum is a guru of international development and equality. I mean how can I ever live up to that? I’m still laminating posters. On a recent zoom call with my mum I mentioned that I’ve started reading Schumacher’s seminal book ‘Small is Beautiful’ and asked if she knew it?. Did she know it? Turns out it was one of three books that had formed her early thinking about equality (why hadn’t she told me about it before, I thought). Anyway, it was written in 1973, a year before I was born. The book starts with how we’re on a “collision course” if we don’t evolve to a new lifestyle designed for permanence. One of the numerous ways in which to achieve this, Schumacher says, is to enable people to enjoy themselves while they are working so that work is not solely for a pay packet (p.17). And that was written 47 years ago!

Small is Beautiful (subtitled, ‘A Study of Economics as if People Mattered’) is listed by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the one hundred most influential books since the Second World War. The readers of this brilliant book in the decades since it was published will be running businesses, managing people, teaching, lecturing, bringing up families — all inevitably contributing to the economy in some way. They might be close to or in retirement now, having contributed their knowledge and skills to the UK (and other) economies. Some special ones will be like my mum and continuing to advocating fairness, equality and human rights. A huge deal, but still small fry to what needs to happen, which is systemic change — as Schumacher and economists since have advocated.

We’re all part of this ‘wicked problem’ that we find ourselves in, of course. In more recent times but still over a decade ago, Dame Carol Black launched her ‘Working for a Healthier Tomorrow’ report (2008), and over three years ago the ‘Taylor review of modern working practices’ (2017) was published, and I’m not sure any of us can truly say that things have changed in the workplace. Yes we talk lots more about mental health, we have gone some way to defining, debating and redefining what we mean by ‘engagement at work’. Well-being and wellness at work are now staple catch-phrases for being decent to people at work. But what has really changed? How is sickness absence doing (even excluding Covid-19)? How’s people’s mental health at work? How have working conditions improved? How has leadership evolved to support better good work for better lives? How are the planet’s complex ecosystems shaping up under our watch (a broader theme of Schumacher’s work)?

You don’t need stats, do you? You will have read them many times over, you probably know them off by heart. We love a good statistic and yet the numbers of work related stress cases haven’t improved by understanding the data, the reports, or attending the conferences, hearing the case-studies, the personal horror stories, meeting like-minded colleagues and networking with nice people on Linked In and Twitter. In fact they haven’t improved at all, quite the opposite.

The planet will survive us all of course, but while we’re living us humans and fellow Earth dwellers are in for a long-haul of chaotic climate patterns, mass human migration, intense social inequality, increased risk of flooding, wild fires… all of this further exacerbating the extinction crisis. That’s what we’re leaving to all the beloved young people in our lives. That’s our legacy. Tough one to swallow, right?

But, none of this will be addressed until the right people are in the room.

People Planet and Profit, or the Triple Bottom Line, have not been given equal attention since the term’s conception over 25 years ago (another number for us to digest). Profit is always the driver — I will of course be wrong in some cases, there are some incredibly future thinking and caring organisations out there e.g. B-Corps — but profit is always the bit that, even for not-for-profit organisations (ironically), holds back the People and Planet elements of the Triple Bottom Line.

The Triple Bottom Line was never intended to be about trading off the three pillars between them, it was to provide a framework for organisations and businesses to actively analyse and measure the value output of each of the three pillars (social, environmental and financial) against business and strategic goals.

So I’ll ask again, who’s in the room when we talk about ‘good work’ for better lives and a sustainable future? Who’s measuring a business decision’s impact on people and the planet? The very person who coined the phrase Triple Bottom Line, John Elkington articulates this far better than I of course, so where are you?

Point 10 of my ‘Ten Things that People Managers Know…’ is this below, and I extend it to the every people manager from the team leader running a unit or shift right through to the director of a multi-national.

You don’t know it all. Keep learning. Being a people manager is a profession in itself, alongside whatever it is you are also managing (be that services in healthcare, construction, IT, engineering, finance etc.). Yes, it is a big responsibility. Treat it as a learning curve, share skills and learn from others. Be open, listen, learn, develop. Be human.

From my perception the people in the room are people like me. We sometimes show up at the front and espouse our wares (mine being the impact of biophilia in the workplace), we often listen to other researchers and practitioners in our respective fields and write copious notes. We return to the workplace and talk about what we’ve learned to anyone open to hearing it. We encourage change and support our colleagues. We ‘lean in’ at the boardroom at times, to be heard. We see nods and hear mumbles of approval from time to time. And then… we end up back to where we were before, perhaps worse.

We need the right people in the room at the very grassroots level of learning the theory, understanding the evidence and applying messages in practice that we’re already too late in addressing. The right people are the very people making the business and organisational decisions. The right people need the courage and wisdom to shake up the status quo and shift the bias of business outcomes from profit and share it equally between People, Planet and Profit.

We really don’t have much time. Time to get in the room.

In memory of a people manager, colleague and friend who was always in the room (often with a cheeky grin on his face), Mr Paul Gould.