The Workplace is Stifling Your Ideas: And it’s Making you Sick.
Nearly 85% of U.S. workers said their workplace conditions had contributed to at least one mental health challenge, according to the recent U.S. Surgeon General Document on Workplace Well-Being.
Even before the release of the document, workplace well-being was already making headlines as it relates to stress, burnout, meditation, exercise programs, flex hours, and working from home. Yet much of the conversation is still only addressing the symptoms of what causes workplace dissatisfaction.
In 2018, LinkedIn called creativity the most important skill in the world.
However, it has been undeniably clear to us for years that there is a disconnect between the aspirations for innovation and creativity to drive business and the work environments in which it is expected to occur. What’s painful here is that the business imperative for many companies is to come up with novel solutions that drive growth and impact…yet their workplace environments are designed to prevent this–and consequentially make people sick in the process.
In other words, we are setting people up for burnout, frustration, stress, and hopelessness when business leaders demand innovation and creativity in productivity-driven, task-focused environments.
How did we get here?
First, modern workplaces are born from the industrial revolution and assume that ideas are manufactured goods and that knowledge professionals produce. It is terribly ironic to consider that the 40-hour work week, or 8 hours of work a day, is not based on any psychological or neurological performance indicators, but rather the result of advocacy from the Ford Motor Company in 1926. Here we are almost 100 years later using a work week that was designed for assembly line manufacturing.
Compounded by this relatively recent development, we throw in the founding principles of the American puritan work ethic. This “Up by the bootstraps” mentality equates rest with laziness and frames your personal commitment and drive as the only obstacle to achieving your dreams. Then during the Cold War years, shorter working hours came to symbolize communist tenants, whereas capitalism stood for personal freedom and opportunity if you were willing to work hard enough for it. This sentiment was solidified by the rise of the wall street “money never sleeps” attitude in the 1980s and 1990s birthing the work day as we have known it in the first decades of the 21st century.
Additionally, established businesses in sound, financial economic markets generally foster cultures of productivity and output, excluding innovation in favor of strict processes. Optimization-focused cultures need to make it very difficult for risky, untried, and untested ideas to be prioritized and developed to ensure that core business maximizes replication and scale. With risk comes unforeseen delays, roadblocks, problems, and process incompatibilities.
We’re seeing workplaces that equate people to machines, where their measure of productivity is their ability to move as much information as possible, attend meetings, and appear active to an AI tracker.
Creatives, generators, and conceptualizers who have mandates to build, explore, and discover are given the impossible task of innovating in an environment designed purely to maximize production.
When a strong optimization culture tries to innovate without doing the intentional work of redesigning culture, systems, policies, and processes to be more nimble and agile, we see:
Reactance increases
Project, team, and company objectives become incoherent, causing a loss of focus
Resources are not allocated efficiently
Morale declines
Management credibility deteriorates
Ultimately, the best people leave
And finally, creativity neuroscience has demonstrated that creativity requires periods of mind-wandering, where the cerebral mode of the brain, the part focused on performing tasks, has a chance to turn off, and the default mode network, which helps to process information and connect data you’ve absorbed, has a chance to turn on.
Have you ever noticed that your best work ideas come to you when you’re washing the dishes, walking the dog, or singing in the shower? That’s the mind-wandering we are talking about. But that shift into the brain’s Limbic mode and passive mind-wandering is perceived as laziness in the workplace. It is not celebrated for its value in allowing your brain to process information, connect ideas, encode memories, and come up with unique, novel, original, and effective solutions.
Moreover, deeply ingrained human biases such as the Status Quo Bias and the Creativity bias are designed to prevent change to the status quo. In other words, we are trained to protect the systems we’ve already devised.
So where do we go from here?
The Great Resignation that began in early 2021 represented an undeniable rejection of these workplaces as 4 million people resigned from their jobs in April alone.
And the Surgeon General's document spotlights the severity of the health ramifications of overwork and stress. But the Surgeon General’s report is just the first step. We must remember that we can't just address the symptoms. We MUST have the courage to address the root causes.
The answer lies in more than just remote work options, free lunch, and gym memberships, the answer lies in having the courage to acknowledge the “modern industrial workplace” and to recognize that it’s causing physical harm to our most valuable creative business asset – the human mind.