Work, How You Work, and How Your Work Works You

I felt a wacky title coming on, didn’t you?

Jokes aside, I attended a webinar on the Anatomy of Work by Asana which was entirely on this topic and agility in the workplace. The panel of Catherine Avendaño, Nick Bloom of Stanford University, and Dr. Sahar Yousef of UC Berkeley, all brought up useful insight on the workplace and where we are going.

I’m going to brush over some major takeaways as well as a few thoughtful statistics in the mix.

Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index showed this data for 2022:

• Work about Work took up 58% of worker’s time
• Strategizing took up 9% of worker’s time
• And the remaining 33% worker’s did actual skilled work
• 58% of those in interpersonal or collaborative roles prefer a hybrid work environment, while 50% of skilled workers say it’s easier to concentrate at home.

The stats that really hit home for the enneagram 2 in me were the well-being stats:

• 52% of workers reported feeling imposter syndrome (high in recent college graduates)
• 77% of US workers report burnout

This is a smack in the face of any young person hoping to join the business world someday. In 2022, we are finding more burnt out workers and unconfident workers. At the same time, there is a divide between those preferring working at home whilst others prefer the office.

How do we adapt to these trends? Our panelists, and some who were with me in the audience, brought useful insight for these struggles for us as individual workers but also the workplace as a whole.

Nick Bloom brought in his expertise in organizational strategy and communication. Those in hybrid workplaces have to coordinate days — you can’t be flexible. Those who allow free reign of choice days will find their interpersonal collaborative workers feeling frustrated and confused and will only fill the ‘Work about Work’ bucket, rather than actual skilled work being done.

For both the worker and the workplace, intentionality is more vital than ever today. Dr. Sahar Yousef emphasized that yes, you can be as or more productive at home, but you must set boundaries. Your bedroom is not part of your office. You must, as she calls it, “psychologically detach” from your work. This hit home for me and many of my fellow audience members. That big pain of a job at work, or that angry client? That is going to be okay tomorrow. You don’t, nor probably can you, help the situation in the evening when you’ve devoted time to your family. And that is okay.

The Anatomy of Work Index pooled that 40% of workers see burnout as a necessary component of success.

Read that again.

Do you believe that too? I used to, but I simply refuse to accept that. What is living if you’re just burning the candle at both ends to get that promotion or that bigger paycheck? What then?

Success can be achieved without burnout. Burnout is not a key component and we can’t give it the time of day when we’re at the grind.

One of the audience members (forgive me, I didn’t catch your name), said

“Leaders set the pace for habits that either empower or burn out team members.”

Boom! Bingo! Insert exclamation here. This made the entire audience and the panelists go nuts. Dr. Sahar Yousef accurately addressed this as so salient for people. Leaders have to set the best example — they’re usually far and wide the most influential people in their workplace.

There was a lot more here, but I’m out of road. The important takeaways left were two points:

• The individual needs to own their own boundaries and work style, and the business provides the right for individuals to do that.
• Organize your schedule to provide those breaks to completely psychologically detach from work. Then organize your team by how they work and communicate — fully remote with fully remote, hybrid with hybrid, etc. Then coordinate.