LEADERSHIP
What’s the mattering?
Is “mattering” the secret to engagement in a new hybrid-working economy, or just a patronizing and wrong-headed buzzword?
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THERE HAS BEEN no shortage of talk recently about how workplace team leaders and managers can hold on to their employees in the new economy, something that continues to confound many. Some will say it’s about work-life balance; many more will say all you really need to hold on to a good employee is to pay them a good salary (pizza parties are now routinely mocked.)
But at this year’s Davos conference, among the economic and business elite the big buzzword was something different: “mattering.”
“This is the secret to management in a fragmented world,” proclaimed the CEO of BetterUp Alexi Robichaux. “Mattering is crucial because it provides the ‘why’ that fuels us. The working world is fragmented in terms of where work occurs and who does it, but also in terms of time, levels of effort and direction.”
Robichaux urged managers to do all they could to make sure their employees felt like they mattered — not by flattering them, but by making sure that they do matter, that they aren’t disposable.
The North American economy is frantically trying to solve the problem of flagging productivity, and research suggests that mattering might be helpful. In a 2021 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers found that firms whose employees felt like they mattered saw that reflected in the bottom line.
“When employees feel like they matter to their organization, they are more satisfied with their jobs and life, more likely to occupy leadership positions, more likely to be rewarded and promoted and less likely to quit,” they wrote.
But others are less sure about the modern workplace’s ability to do this authentically. “I don’t wish to argue that employee happiness and wellbeing is unimportant, or even that organizations are wrong to think about these things in relation to productivity and performance. But the idea that you can make someone feel like they matter simply by telling managers to 'deliver mattering’ is not just patronizing, it is also wrong-headed” writes the Financial Times’ Jemima Kelly.
“Delivering mattering as a management technique, rather than making someone feel like they matter by showing them, over time, that they really do, is not going to achieve that.” Kieran Delamont
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PRODUCTIVITY
A hyper-productive hellscape?
The notion that AI will free us from drudgery is an attractive narrative, but some fear a different outcome
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ALTHOUGH THE TECH industry for years has been claiming that innovation will lead to better conditions for workers and ultimately easier, more enjoyable work, something curious (some might say predictable) has happened with the rise of AI tools ― those tools are increasingly being seen not as tools of collaboration, but as competition.
Reacting to the recent release of OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT-4 tech, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson writes: “It ushers in a new era of hyper-efficiency, where professionals will have to work smarter and faster ― or perish.”
She predicts that the rise of these tools won’t replace workers (as is often feared) but rather that it will force them all to boost their output to machine-like levels, turning work into “a hyper-productive hellscape.”
It’s perhaps a bit of a dramatic way to pose a legitimate question, one that researchers have been working on as AI tools have developed in recent years. People are understandably afraid that AI will be taken simply as a tool to decrease labour costs and eliminate jobs. But it doesn’t have to play out that way.
“Never before have digital tools been so responsive to us, nor we to our tools,” wrote H. James Wilson and Paul Daugherty of Accenture back in 2018, in the early days of what would become the AI boom. “The technology’s larger impact will be in complementing and augmenting human capabilities, not replacing them.”
Bolstering their argument was research that showed that firms that implemented AI into their existing workforce (rather than trying to replace it) “achieve the most significant performance improvements when humans and machines work together.”
Ultimately though, this question is one of perception. We use the term as a catch-all pejorative for anti-technology views now, but the 19th-century English Luddites were not destroying textile machinery because they hated technology ― it was because they resented how the steam engine threw them out of work. AI and the business owners who intend to use are today at a similar crossroads — if AI is to be the productivity miracle it claims, then using it as a collaborator is in everyone’s best interest. Kieran Delamont
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Terry Talks: Salary review strategies
| As employees decide what’s right for them, employers are having to reconsider what actually makes their company worth working for. If you feel like your business may be at risk of losing top talent, or you have already begun losing your best workers, it is probably time to consider effective strategies to boost employee job satisfaction and help you hold on to your best workers. | | | |
WORKSPACE
The power of the printer person
The printer is dead. Nobody buys one, nobody needs one ― except when you do
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UNSURPRISINGLY, DEMAND FOR home and office printers and copiers has been waning for some time; every year for at least a decade or more, at least one consumer market analyst declares the market for printers dead or dying. The trend line in sales slopes reliably downward.
And yet, people still ― on occasion, every now and then ― need to print, making the “printer person” a very important node, both in home and office printing. Even in an increasingly paperless world, a simple maxim is still true: he who holds the printer, holds the power.
“It comes for all of us eventually ― the need to print, and print now,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Feintzeig. “How much of our lives have we given to the mad dash of trying to find a working printer? Why invest in a hulking piece of hardware when you’re living in a nearly paperless world? Until you realize that that return label, or your kid’s homework assignment, isn’t going to print itself.”
Some still see opportunity in the printer business. In a recent interview, Steve Bandrowczak, the CEO of Xerox ― a company you might imagine to be panicked by the trends in printer sales ― said he still believes an entire business model can be built off it.
“If you think about printing as just printing a piece of paper,” he proposed, “I think about it differently. I think about the data that’s on that paper and being scanned each and every day in the devices. How do I start to bring insight and value to both documents and things that are scanned? Xerox has a great brand, but it’s synonymous with print, right? I have to get the industry to understand that we are more than just print.”
In other words, printing is a data business, and data is value, and to Xerox being the biggest printer guy in the room looks like a good place to be.
But back down on the consumer level, it has made those who do have home printers all that much more in demand. And some of them are getting sick of being the go-to printer person.
“Attention printer freeloaders: your mooching days are over,” declared PCWorld’s editor Gordon Ung. “No more Phish concert tickets, no more Braniff boarding passes and no more passport applications will be printed for you at 10 p.m. on a Sunday. Maybe after you’ve racked up enough printing costs at FedEx, you’ll realize that, yes, you need a printer too. Until then, your printer-freeloading privileges are cut off.” Kieran Delamont
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CONSUMERISM
About last night...
Drunk shopping: bad for your liver, billions for the economy
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IF YOU’VE EVER woken up after a night on the town, checked the ol’ credit card bill and found an expensive surprise ― some new clothes or something as unusual as a new clarinet, as one Guardian writer fessed up to ― you can take solace in one thing, at least: you’re not alone, according to new data on the drunk shopping habits of consumers.
According to Finder, one in six of us shopped under the influence last year, part of a staggering $14-billion drunk shopping economy. The average drunk shopper dishes out about $309 a year on drunk shopping, mostly on clothes, shoes and accessories. That was followed by food, cigarettes, alcohol and gambling to round out the top five.
“So, what to make of this?” asks Inc.’s Bill Murphy Jr. “Well, as a person who may or may not have been in a bar or two once or twice in his life, I'm going to profess very little surprise at the idea that people who have been drinking might be inclined to buy food, cigarettes or more alcohol. You'll forgive me if I don't take our time to commission a separate field study to figure that one out.”
As for the top category of shoes, clothes and accessories, Murphy continued, “I think we can all assume fairly safely that a lot of that drunk clothes shopping is done with a glass of their favourite beverage in one hand and a smartphone in the other.”
Maybe most surprising, though, is simply how much tipsy consumerism has fallen off since the start of the pandemic. In 2019, the same survey estimated a whopping $45.3 billion was spent on drunk shopping. In 2020, it was $44.9 billion. If anything, the drunk shopping industry might be crashing ― another sign, perhaps, of inflation’s vicious sting. Kieran Delamont
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