design for work

I’ll be bringing the 3D install of the Elements of Work out of storage for this very special Design Week Portland event -- you don’t want to miss it (and I’m not saying this because of aforementioned install). 

Tickets are $15, available here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dwp-2018-lessons-from-the-jazz-ensemble-tickets-43495858283

Other details:

This NYT piece/section has a lot of content and is a good refresher, as it were, but the following in particular caught my eye:

There’s a way to redesign our jobs so they make us happier. A Yale professor named Amy Wrzesniewski, together with her colleagues, came up with an idea called job crafting, inspired by what freelancers and entrepreneurs do.

Put simply, job crafting means breaking down your job into individual tasks, and then asking which you want to do less of and more of.

“Instead of focusing on a business’ values, perhaps the answer is right under our noses and so close to our faces that we cannot see it. Businesses are made up of individuals and collectively they create productivity. Simply stated but true.

In an environment of ongoing uncertainty, growing inflation, the rising cost of living but, for many, static pay, there needs to be a rethink.”

I don’t believe this is a zero-sum scenario and that we disregard a business’ values -- not at all. BUT so much of my master’s capstone was devoted to this precisely, looking at the micro, the individual, the human part of work at its elemental level.

To revisit an HBR post noted here,

Success AND happiness at work is a winning combination for individuals and employers. When both are possible, an ‘enduring accomplishment’ can be created. Research by Harvard Business Review shows that enduring accomplishments can be created when 4 key needs are met and activities are intentionally structured around the pursuit of activities:

•    Happiness – that produce pleasure and satisfaction •    Achievement – activities that get tangible results •    Significance – activities that make a positive impact on the people that matter most •    Legacy – through which values and knowledge are passed on to others

Earlier in the post, this struck me (again, bolding is mine):

Research by Warwick Institute of Employment Research and UKCES published August 2015, looked at career adaptability competences. They identified ‘5 Cs’:

Control – being proactive, decisive and taking responsibility for your career

Curiosity – broadening your horizons by seeking options, possibilities and knowledge

Commitment – passionately pursuing and taking action to move to the career horizon of your choosing

Confidence – belief in yourself and that this can achieve your goal

Concern – having a positive and philosophical attitude to mistakes and rejection

In a world which is in a perpetual state of change and uncertainty, not things most people would choose, it would make sense to recruit people with these career adaptability values and behaviours.

“...according to a forecast from the Institute for the Future (IFTF), 85% of the jobs in 2030 haven’t even been invented yet. Ten years after that, the workforce may be totally unrecognizable.”

Alexis C. Madrigal, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/it-might-be-impossible-for-future-historians-to-understand-our-internet/547463/

This Tumblr has been paused for a good half year or so, as I’ve caught my breath after grad school, worked on securing marks for the prototype and other IP, and otherwise busying myself between contract work and other employment searches. That said, Design for Work is very much a thing, and I will attempt to post here as often as possible (along with Twitter).

And so, this new piece via Politico. I don’t find any particular revelations here other than more of what we already know: specifically, that our new modes of work do not align with current government policy and systemic architecture. 

In the mid-20th century, the federal government developed a litany of workplace protections—minimum wage, overtime, collective bargaining, workplace safety, tax withholding, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation—that apply to people only classified as employees. Even more importantly for many people, benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement saving plans are also administered by employers, and are less accessible for independent contractors. As new benefits arise, they’re built on the same model. For instance, Republicans included a new credit in their 2017 tax bill that encourages companies to provide paid leave to their workers—a break that would apply to only employees, not independent contractors.

“The fetishization of hours clocked in the office is nothing new for this crowd. Silicon Valley’s sense of self-worth is deeply tied to the idea that hard work is a prerequisite for success. Why else would mild bromides about burn-out strike such a nerve? For the rest of the business world, ‘working smart’ is a time-management cliche, not a call to arms.”

I’ve been posting about this general “fetishization” in the American workforce -- not just Silicon Valley -- for the last few months now. See also, a bit further down:

A new study completed this year shows that certain personality types are drawn to an entrepreneurial mindset. For the Myers-Briggs fans out there, you may already know the Intuition and Perceiving (N and P) personality types. The study found those folks have more of an entrepreneurial nature than the Sensing and Judging types.

From the study: "The entrepreneurs in the group showed a significantly higher orientation for creativity, risk-taking, impulsivity, and especially autonomy than did non-entrepreneurs. Competitive ambition did not distinguish between those who were or were not entrepreneurs, but did relate to those who saw themselves as more entrepreneurial. People with a preference for extraversion, intuition, thinking, and perceiving tended to show greater levels of entrepreneurial orientation."

Pew Research weighs in on global trends and economic attitudes.

In brief, “While global publics are increasingly upbeat about economic conditions, the overall view of the economy is still in negative territory in many countries. Overall, a median of only 46% in the 32 nations surveyed this year say their current economy is doing well.”

A bit further down the post,

Nearly six-in-ten Americans (58%) believe the economic situation in the U.S. is good. The U.S. economy has experienced roughly 80 months of job growth and the unemployment rate was only 4.9% in 2016. In the spring of 2009, when the jobless rate was 9.3%, just 17% thought economic conditions were good. In 2007, before the economic downturn, 50% said conditions were favorable.

In France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom, a median of 51% now give their economy a positive grade.

Just setting this here.

More on full employment, as reported of late.

“The May job numbers raise a depressing possibility: that this is as good as it will get for the United States labor market... if we keep getting monthly reports like the one for May, we will have to grapple with the possibility that a low unemployment rate and plentiful jobs aren’t going to be enough to pull [the nonemployed] into the labor market.”

These trends — labor force participation that is barely rising, fewer jobs being added, and a quite low unemployment rate — are all in line with one another. They’re what you would expect to see if the job market were close to full employment, a state where nearly everyone who wants a job can get one, and the great constraint on growth is the number of workers.

On one hand, that’s the goal. If the Federal Reserve judges that’s where the economy stands, for example, it will view its task of healing the job market as having been accomplished.

The Atlantic provides this illuminating new read, in which “we found that many Americans, even some squarely in the middle class, worry as much about swings in income and expenses from month to month as they do their overall earnings.”

Most financial surveys gather aggregated information such as annual income, or they provide snapshots such as the total amount owed on credit cards or held in retirement accounts. While useful in a macro sense, the standard measures of economic well-being—poverty and unemployment rates, the level of consumer debt—obscure what’s happening day to day. We had the chance to see how money moved through a family’s life over time. And, because our team collected the data in person, we got to ask why households made the choices they did.

Further down the piece,

This type of volatility isn’t reserved for people like the Ohio family we met, whose incomes vary with the seasons. Workers who depend on tips and commissions experience it; the success or failure of the business falls partly on their shoulders. Workers who are self-employed or part of the gig economy do, too. Even full-time employees paid hourly wages, who account for over half of American workers, can face substantial fluctuations in the number of hours assigned each week. Many do not get paid leave, so a few days staying in with the flu or a child home sick from school can make a dent in people’s paychecks. Just 2 percent of the families in the Financial Diaries study had relatively steady income during the year, experiencing no spikes or dips of 25 percent or more.

The obvious advice is to save during the $9,000 month and the $7,000 month so that there’s an ample cushion during the $3,000 months. But that advice is far easier to dole out than it is to follow. 

Right. But...

Saving is also made difficult by the fact that inflation-adjusted incomes have stagnated for working families, even while the costs of housing, education, health care and transportation have risen. It’s not altogether surprising that families had a hard time saving the “extra” $4,000  from a $9,000 month for a rainy day. Instead, that $4,000 went to pay overdue bills, fees, and credit-card payments that had piled up during the low months.

Continuing later...

Volatility is much easier to deal with for people with ample savings, access to good credit and insurance products, and/or social networks that can afford to lend a hand. But these coping mechanisms are currently reserved primarily for those with higher incomes—people who need them less. Those with low incomes are losing out in multiple ways. They are also more likely to have jobs with unpredictable incomes, and less negotiating power to change that. They are less likely to have access to low-priced credit to manage an emergency or invest in education or a home, and less likely to have friends and family with enough money to help out. Those with the most difficult financial lives are also the least able to get good financial advice.

As a result, a large share of people, even if they’re employed and even if they budget and plan, are financially unstable. It’s no wonder many people are frustrated by where the economy has left them, given that they’re doing a lot of things right and still struggling.

In a nutshell, this:

Location, location, location.

Contrary to perception, the nation is continuing to become more suburban, and at an accelerating pace. The prevailing pattern is growing out, not up, although with notable exceptions.

Rural areas are lagging metropolitan areas in numerous measures, but within metro areas the suburbs are growing faster in both population and jobs.

On the other hand, as anyone who has tried to rent an apartment or buy a condo in a big city knows, housing prices are climbing faster in urban neighborhoods than in the suburbs. And urban neighborhoods are younger and richer than they used to be, with more educated residents and fewer school-age children. Higher-wage jobs are increasingly in city centers, with urban retail catering to these well-paid workers and residents.

h/t to Sophia for a link to this great read.

Zooming in on this cluster:

In 1970, Charles A. Reich, a law professor who’d experienced a countercultural conversion after hanging with young people out West, published “The Greening of America,” a cotton-candy cone that wound together wispy revelations from the sixties. Casting an eye across modern history, he traced a turn from a world view that he called Consciousness I (the outlook of local farmers, self-directed workers, and small-business people, reaching a crisis in the exploitations of the Gilded Age) to what he called Consciousness II (the outlook of a society of systems, hierarchies, corporations, and gray flannel suits). He thought that Consciousness II was giving way to Consciousness III, the outlook of a rising generation whose virtues included direct action, community power, and self-definition. “For most Americans, work is mindless, exhausting, boring, servile, and hateful, something to be endured while ‘life’ is confined to ‘time off,’ ” Reich wrote. “Consciousness III people simply do not imagine a career along the old vertical lines.” His accessible theory of the baffling sixties carried the imprimatur of William Shawn’s New Yorker, which published an excerpt of the book that stretched over nearly seventy pages. “The Greening of America” spent months on the Times best-seller list.

Exponents of the futuristic tech economy frequently adopt this fifty-year-old perspective. Like Reich, they eschew the hedgehog grind of the forty-hour week; they seek a freer way to work. This productivity-minded spirit of defiance holds appeal for many children of the Consciousness III generation: the so-called millennials.

“People are now, more than ever before, aware of the careers that they’re not pursuing,” says Kathryn Minshew, the C.E.O. of the Muse, a job-search and career-advice site, and a co-author of “The New Rules of Work.” Minshew co-founded the Muse in her mid-twenties, after working at the consulting firm McKinsey and yearning for a job that felt more distinctive. She didn’t know what that was, and her peers seemed similarly stuck. Jennifer Fonstad, a venture capitalist whose firm, Aspect Ventures, backed Minshew’s company, told me that “the future of work” is now a promising investment field.

Whoa (but yeah, I get that) to that final sentence (bolding is mine). 

In closing,

Revolution or disruption is easy. Spreading long-term social benefit is hard.