Great Workplaces vs Culture vs Attrition
Edition #019
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code, through quick snapshots, for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done.
What You Do Is Who You Are
by Ben Horowitz
A blunt, no-nonsense book by Ben Horowitz, Co-Founder and General Partner of the Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
It’s always been said culture eats strategy for breakfast. This book is a bible on what it takes to build an organisation's culture. It derives lessons from history and recent research to advise CXOs responsible for building their company culture. It also clearly brings out what challenges, in reality, it takes to create one.
The book asks hard questions, and the author presents some of his observations to CXOs responsible for building or senior leaders empowered by management for building culture in a company:
Is Culture ‘dogs at work’ and ‘yoga in the break room’?
Who you are is not the values you list on a wall.
It’s not what you say in a company-wide meeting.
It’s not your marketing campaign- it’s not even what you believe
Culture is how a company makes decisions, especially when no one is looking
How We Can Actually Pay People Enough
by Dan Schulman
In this conversation, Dan Schulman, CEO of Pay Pal, introduces a revolutionary concept called Net Disposable Income (NDI) to check every employee's financial health and assess if the pay is adequate or not.
He asserts that the sound financial health of employees is an excellent foundation for a good business. He also boldly states that capitalism needs an upgrade. Companies need to rethink compensation, not by benchmarking what the market pays but look deeper from an employee’s financial health perspective.
Go ahead and listen to this thought-provoking conversation.
How To Outwit Workplace Jerks
by Bob Sutton
Bob Sutton is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering at the School of Engineering at Stanford. He is the author of several books, one of which is The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt.
In this video, he talks about how we can avoid or deal with people demeaning, disrespecting, and draining those around us. Here are some key takeaways:
Be slow to label others as assholes but be quick to label yourself as one.
There is no correlation between the quality of an organisation and the best workplace survey. These are terrible predictors of immediate colleagues! He has 30 years’ worth of evidence!
Your distance of seating from a toxic person in a company has a direct correlation to the kind of influence you can have on yourself. Sit next to a collaborative superstar, and the odds are it is suitable for your career!
Slow down your rhythm of interactions with such toxic people
When they are nasty, kill them with your kindness
Looking back from the future reduces anxiety, anger etc. (this is called Temporal Distancing).
Emotional detachment - Look at the problem clinically and unemotionally
How to take on a jerk in your company - Aggressive Confrontation, Wrap it in humour, make the person do you a favour etc.
Great Workplaces vs Culture vs Attrition
Interestingly, this caught our attention during the week - a grand 6-page supplement (below), and it left us puzzled.
The honour list of companies was long and brilliant, and there was the who’s who in every industry. There were celebration ads, company management, team shots from the honours list, thumps-up and smiling teams, stories about how they got to the honour list, etc.
But, today, what is happening behind the closed doors of many companies- the situation is precisely the opposite.
Workplaces are a battleground of massive resignations, and they all are doing a holdback employee operation 24x7 – attrition rates are north of 20% in many firms. Even the best firms are grappling with this, and this is a state, despite their best efforts, companies are finding it difficult to stop the tide.
So, are great workplaces, excellent company culture and attrition not correlated?
At least, it is not clear right now. How long will corporates keep posturing to the outside world with such recognition/awards? It’s time to stop the who’s the greater fool theory where companies believe this recognition positively encourages others to consider a company to join or stay back in the same company. When we look at the small neighbourhood or medium-sized firms, we keep seeing the same employees for quite some time. In our view, this seems broken in big companies a long time back.
This HBR finding could give us an interesting perspective:
According to HBR, historically, job security — and the predictable income, attractive benefits, peace of mind, and career progression it represents — has been one of the main attractions of traditional full-time employment. Self-employment, or independent work, involves a series of trade-offs. You might gain greater autonomy or have more freedom to pursue a passion or career you enjoy. You’ll lose the steady paycheck, the camaraderie of co-workers, and the comfort or support that companies large and small can provide. An increasingly large majority of independent workers say that independent work is less risky and more secure than traditional employment.
This is even though they are left with no option but to do every assignment well with no guarantee that they will get the next project or contract but also the need to upskill themselves continuously else they don’t get their next project!
The Contradictions of a VUCA World vs PACS World
Companies and employees must recognise we are in a period of transition. The problem needs to be addressed and understood openly – by companies and as well as employees.
Companies need new forms of hybrid employment contracts and compensation plans. The current ones mirror the old industrialised world's needs. Also, not every quarter or every half-yearly or annual results will be better than the earlier period. But, being transparent to stakeholders like employees that there will be ups and downs and getting people who work for them ready for this volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, and new disruptions (VUCA) are essential. Employees cannot always blame companies, as there are other survival and business exigencies that companies go through in this new world order. Companies do business in a VUCA world, but Employees want the companies to address their needs in a PACS( Predictable, Assured, Clear, Simple) world. A VUCA and PACS world won’t ever meet - not even halfway. No wonder there is so much churn and poor appreciation from both sides.
If you are working or an employee, you need to get ready to work in an unstructured manner due to unpredictable market changes companies face. Start getting ready to get paid flexibly ( there may be a year of high salary increases or bonuses and nil salary increases but just a good bonus or neither in some years). Yet, keep improving your skills to add value. Else, you have no chance of holding your job as companies can’t afford non-value-added fixed costs(NVAFC) in a VUCA world. This will not be told explicitly.
Remember, that’s an investment for your future.
And more importantly, employees cannot hope they can keep jumping from one company to another or for higher pay with the expectation that the other one will be better. But, disillusionment or termination day catches up with them faster than they imagined, as they become unaffordable or unhappy to be kept on rolls. The story of massive layoffs in start-ups is here for us to see.
Many such misaligned core expectations need to be addressed openly.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Culture is what each of us in the company does when nobody is looking.
Looking at employee compensation from the lens of Net Disposable Income can give us different perspectives and ideas on how to rework and rethink the way it is done today.
Toxic behaviour is the root cause of distrust and disengagement in companies. Being self-aware of our behaviour and observing others can help us manage many odd situations.
Balancing the contradictions of the VUCA and PACS world is critical for creating good workplaces and building a valuable company culture.