Navigate Workplace Fractures with Vibrant Relationships

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We have broken work activities into countless pieces. Vibrant human relationships, and not more processes and systems, are the way to bring everything together.

Division of labour

The striking characteristic of the modern workplace is that work is broken into tiny pieces. We call it ‘division of labour’, whereby various teams and individuals own different elements of a process.

I plant, tend to, and harvest your potatoes, whilst you build my house, our friend preaches in church, and his neighbour keeps rowdy villagers in check. At a high level, role specialisation enables efficiency and societal advances.

Were it not for division of labour we should each spend life throwing rocks at fish and digging plants from the ground. My piece in HRZone Division of labour: Is AI one cut too far? outlines the concept in more depth.

Cogs in a machine

But division of labour causes problems too.

The customer service agent makes you scream because she has no authority over all the tasks that go into solving your question. Nor does she have a relationship with you, so may care little about your outcome. You are a name on a screen: she wants to press one of two buttons and move on.

This also explains why it can be exhausting to get things done at work. People increasingly operate in functional silos with little understanding of, or regard for, what happens outside their role, team, or department.

Extreme division of labour similarly bleaches work of meaning, insofar as everyone operates on a small task in isolation of wider value created. Karl Marx insisted that to partition labour in this way was bad for workers and society. People become cogs in the machine of production.

Mending the fractures

Now we have fractured the workplace in this way, we must recombine it so that sales, marketing, research, manufacturing, legal, technology, HR, etc. can collaborate, to provide your phone service or put chocolate biscuits on your table.

Firms use bureaucratic methods to secure cooperation across specialists.

Goals describe expected outcomes and manuals set out tasks, all captured in rules: individuals are surveilled, evaluated against the rules, then rewarded or penalised for their ‘performance’.

These methods sufficed for the factory assembly line, when tasks were a simple matter of screwing widget A to widget B, and when people were expected to work without thought or feeling.

But for modern work, bureaucracy limits autonomy, harms innovation, and diminishes results.

The use of bureaucracy encourages a jobsworth attitude that amplifies the disconnection that troubled Karl Marx: people follow the rules and processes and yet rarely think about the value they create.

Vibrant relationships

In recent months, I have found myself talking often about how, if organisations do one thing to improve performance, they should encourage more vibrant relationships.

Unlike rules and processes, relationships evolve in an organic way, in response to real-life needs: I ask you for support because I know from experience (not from the org chart) that you have the appetite, skills, and resources to help; we solve an issue together. Next week I am happy to help you in return.

More broadly, relationships provide an informal network to get things done. When formal system and processes fail, as they surely will, people know who will help, who cares, and who is competent. They pick up the phone or go for a coffee. Such conversations aid learning.

People generally care more about people than they do about formal goals. Jane is more likely to work overtime to help her colleagues than because red tape binds her to her desk. Relationships inspire and encourage.

Relationships can become the energy behind what we do. They help us solve the problems of performance and change, of efficacy and belonging. In fact, relationships are an answer to many of the ills that plague our work lives.

Investment in relationships can be made at the organisation, executive, and team levels. Below are a few steps everyone can take to build more vibrant human relationships at work.