A lot has been said about the “Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting.” The former refers to employees leaving jobs without alternative employment; the latter refers to people putting in the bare minimum required of the job.
One survey indicates that 21 percent of working Americans are so disengaged that they do the bare minimum. Another study speculates that 7 million American men have stopped looking for work.
Some wonder if these twin phenomena reflect a buildup of frustration with bureaucracies that ignore the social, emotional and spiritual needs of employees. Despite advancements in talent management, millions are trapped in jobs that barely meet their monetary needs and do not nourish their souls.
In a Harvard Business Review Article titled “Harnessing Everyday Genius at Work,” Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini report on three studies. A 2019 Gallup survey discovered that only one in five employees in American companies strongly agreed with the statement “My opinions seem to count at work,”
In another 2015 survey, only 11 percent of American workers in frontline jobs felt that they were able to influence important decisions. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 70 percent of American employees worked in jobs that involved “little or no originality.”
Let’s explore the conundrum of employee disengagement through two metaphors.
Organizations Designed as Machines
Gareth Morgan, in “Images of Organization,” pointed out that organizations in the U.S. are modeled after machines. When managers talk about organizational improvement, they are thinking of making their company a more well-oiled, efficient machine.
If the organization is a machine, then people are merely cogs in the wheel and are treated as replaceable parts.
Contrast this with organizations where the dominant metaphor is that of the organization as a family: People feel more valued and experience a greater sense of belonging.
When organizations operate like machines, they sacrifice creativity, engagement, belonging and emotional authenticity.
Heeding Morgan’s research, the time is ripe for business to abandon the idea of organizations as machines and to explore alternative metaphors that can become a basis for organizational redesign.
People as Circus Lions
The Indian mystic Osho, who spoke on the flowering of human potential, offered a metaphor contrasting a “lion in the wild” with a circus lion. The wild lion is the king of the jungle. The well-trained circus lion, however, brings in the revenue and makes everyone happy.
But as Osho points out, a part of the wild lion must be killed in order for it to perform as the circus lion.
To Osho, our predicament in the modern economy parallels the tragedy of the lion in the wild. The lion in the circus has a job, valuable skills and a secure life. The question for each one of us is: How can we remain employed in the circus while keeping alive our freedom-loving spirit and staying true to ourselves, our talents and our intrinsic creative power?
Addressing the challenge of alienated labor in corporate America will entail new metaphors to unleash organizational imagination. Bureaucracies were designed to promote their agenda of increased efficiency, not for quenching the employee’s thirst for self-actualization.
Today’s organizational ethos, which conflicts with the quality of work life expectations of upcoming generations, will necessitate profound cultural transformations.
Instead of thinking of organizations as machines and people as circus lions, what may be other metaphors that can help unleash corporate imagination and redesign workplace culture?
In our next piece, we will explore ways to ameliorate the clash of motivational paradigms.