Dart Lindsley: On why work is a product your employees are buying

0:02
Welcome to season two of EXtra! EXtra!, the podcast where we dig deep into how businesses can prioritize their most valuable asset, their people. Last season we cracked open the EX playbook and this time we are rewriting the rules. Join us for candid conversations where there are no rules, no cliches, no jargon and no one-size-fits-all solutions. Just real talk about what's reshaping the employee experience landscape. So if you want to get to the heart of what makes workplaces tick, just hit that subscribe button and let's get started.Kiran Menon: 0:42

Welcome once again, everyone, and thank you for tuning in. I'm Kiran. We have Debbie, who is my co host, and we also have Dart over here with us. joining us on this episode, Dart, so good to have you.

Dart Lindsley: 0:58

Thank you, Kiran. Thank you, Debbie, for having me on the show.

Kiran Menon: 1:01

Absolutely Dart. Our pleasure. And would be great if you could just start by quickly introducing yourself and then, we'll get started from there.

Dart Lindsley: 1:09

So I'm Dart Lindsley. I'm a lot of things. Right now more things than I've been for a long time. One of them is I'm a strategic advisor to Google's people experience team. And what that really means the way to think of that is that I'm an emeritus. I work part time. I mostly consult on operations excellence related things. And I am also the host of a podcast called Work for Humans and Work for Humans starts off with the assumption that employees are customers and work is a product that we sell to them. And so it's a show about design and it's a show about business models. It's been exploring that for almost a hundred episodes now.

Kiran Menon: 1:49

I think that's a good place to start, right? Cause I think one of the things that you keep asking everyone from the perspective of work is what did you hire your job to do for you?" And so when Debbie kind of pointed that out to me and I read it, it took me a second to fully understand it. And then I would say I did not have an answer, straight off, but I had to think about it a little bit. But I'm sure you've gotten some really interesting answers to that question. First of all, why do you ask it from that perspective? And secondly, what are some of those answers that you might've received?

Dart Lindsley: 2:30

So i've been asking that question now for a decade and I have asked hundreds of people and I've created surveys and i've sent them out and I've gotten answers to how people answer that question. And here's the origin of it. Years ago the truth is for about a decade when I was first starting in human resources. I was a very traditional human resources practitioner, and I believed the argument that employees are inputs to production and that as such, our whole job should be to make that input as productive as possible. And it was, and I was absolutely, I was like a high priest of that religion. I absolutely bought into it. But over the years I began to not believe it anymore. It didn't match what I was seeing on the ground and it wasn't producing the results that I thought we wanted. And honestly, it was causing me moral injury. I thought it was wrong. Because what that argues is that you can neglect the needs of the people in your organization so long as they're being productive. If they're productive and unhappy, you don't care in that model. And what I realized is that there's a moral problem with that, that neglect and harm are very close neighbors. If I can neglect what you need, I can harm you. And so over time, I just, and through all of my work as the head of business architecture for Cisco systems, where I started looking at how HR really fit into the business I started to realize that was the wrong model, but I didn't have an alternative model. And what I realized through my work was that in fact, not by metaphor, not just an idea, that employees are customers. And if employees are customers and I can explain why I make that argument if you'd like, but if employees are customers, then what are they buying? They're buying the experience of work. And. If they're buying the experience of work, then it's a product or a service that companies are selling. And if that's the case, we should be using design practices to understand what they really want from that product and build it better. And so one of those tools, which it was Clay Christensen at Harvard Business school who popularized it, but I don't think he started it was'job to be done' theory. And that's where you say, what do you want from this product? What do you want it to do for you so that I can design it better?

Kiran Menon: 5:04

That makes sense. What were some of the answers?

Dart Lindsley: 5:08

So there's a lot of answers and I think this is really important. I have between 30 and 40 common responses to that question. And the reason that's important is that when you read a book on what people want from work, you're going to get something like this. People want autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And I'm getting 40 different answers for what people want from work. Why am I getting a different answer from what everybody else is getting? A part of it is that if you're an input to production, I'm looking for a simple formula that I can use to optimize you. It's like you're a math problem. You're an engineering problem. And what i'm looking for is i'm looking for what everybody wants in common so that I can solve it all at once at scale..

Debkanya Dhar: 5:54

Right.

Dart Lindsley: 5:55

So and what I found is that statement autonomy, mastery and purpose is way too vague if you're a designer. What is your purpose? So Kiran, you're gonna have a different purpose than Debbie. And so saying purpose is like saying I'm designing a car and you ask everybody what they want and they say I need to get from point A to point B. Okay, there's only you only need one car. There's only one car that we need. So the answers, not only are there a lot of them. They are wanted in combination. On average, people want more than 10 of the 30 or 40 things that they say they want from work and out of, let's say 120 survey respondents, only four wanted the same thing. In combination. So it's a very challenging design problem. And so here's examples of what people have said. Many of them are quite expected. I hire my job to pay my bills. I hire my job to take care of my family and to give me money to buy other experiences and I hire my job to learn. And the truth is almost everybody wants those things in common. And companies are fairly good at delivering that. In most cases. As you go farther into it, you find much more diversity. Let me give you some middle examples first. I hire my job to solve puzzles. The company is a puzzle maker for me. I come here to be given really interesting puzzles to solve. Or I hire my job to be my creative medium. I don't sculpt, I don't sing, I build businesses. It's my medium. Some people say I hire my job to get me out of the house, to escape my home life. It's a mess. There's little kids there, or there's elders I'm taking care of. I just need a clean place to sit so I can do my work. One person said, and this is a story I tell a lot. He said I hire my job to pretend. And I said, what do you mean you hire your job to pretend? He says, I like to go to work and I like to pretend to be a vice president. He says, and I put on my vice president costume and and I said to him, you are a vice president. You're a vice president at a Fortune 50 company. He says, no, I'm a, I'm not, I'm a jazz musician. He said, he says, I spent my 30s, my twenties and thirties playing jazz on the stage. And he says, what I love and what I hire my company to give me is a stage and an adoring audience. I can go on and on with these. Some people say I hire my job to give me a worthy opponent. And so you dig into that and sometimes it's an external worthy opponent, like I'm in sales and I like to go up against a really good other sales team and I like to win. Sometimes it's internal. One person said to me they said, look. If there's a good idea in the company and everybody agrees, that's no fun. They said, if there's a good idea in the company and a powerful person disagrees, that's a good time. And that's their idea of a good time.

Debkanya Dhar: 9:09

That is fascinating. And it also takes a certain type of person, isn't it? To be able to articulate and really dig deep and figure out that this is why I go to work every day. The different responses you've got, because like you said, the normal response would be, Oh yeah, money. Yeah, I have something to do. I'll use the qualifications that I've got. I've studied so hard. So therefore I go to work and I use my skills. There's a lot of that. And then you dig deeper and you have, such interesting answers. But then it also takes a certain amount of skill then to translate all of this into actual actions in the workplace, right? One of the things that we keep seeing that, HR is great at running surveys. There's pulse surveys and, all kinds of surveys that happen, 30, 60, 90 day surveys that happen. But then, there's a gap between what people, respond to surveys and then what they actually see happening on ground in the workplace. So what do you do with these responses?

Dart Lindsley: 10:07

First of all, I wouldn't collect them that way. And a part of the reason for that is what do you get out of that? You get a lot of averages. What you don't get out of that is what each specific person wants. And so what I'm arguing for is this, I've been learning a lot about service design. And so I'm working with two people who are service designers, Connor Brewer and Alyssa Hatfield. And what they've taught me about it is that if I'm designing a product like this pen I'm it's physical design. When you're designing a service or something that delivers experiences, which is, I would say, this is experience design. What you're designing is the service system. And so what you have to do is you have to bake into the fabric of the company, the ability to constantly design a bespoke experience for each person's unique needs. If everybody in the company wanted the same thing. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And we knew how to deliver that we wouldn't need to do it this way. But that's not the way it is. Everybody wants a different thing. And so because of that you need to bake the capability in particular into managers who are right next to the employees and who are in a position to understand intimately the complexity of what each person is looking for at work. And so the traditional model is looking at as like a mechanics problem, like an engineering problem. What's the big thing we can design for everybody. And it is inherently a distant approach, which is that it's all about treating people as if they are uniform and when they're not uniform, trying to make them uniform. Which is, I'm going to give you a job title and that's the box you're in. And I'm going to tell you what skills you need to have to be in that box. And I'm going to reward you for being more in that box, because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to mass produce productive people, But this is a design problem where managers are uniquely positioned to be there and then respond. And this is where I'm going with my work. Last year I became what's called a Mira Fellow. And in fact, everybody should know they're opening applications for the Mira Fellowship for next year, this month. The mirror fellowship is a fellowship for people who have a big idea that could make the world better, a reframe. And with them I've been working to equip managers with the tools to be something completely new. Which is that in the traditional model, managers are controlling from above because I'm trying to make you productive. But in this model, managers are designers and are designers of the experience of work. And they are responsible for the allocation of work in such a way that it matches each person's interests. And that they find rewarding and they are brokers between where the work is coming from and how it winning the right work and making sure that work gets allocated mindfully among the team members. And so that's what I've been working on this year is creating the curriculum and the equipment for managers to be able to play that role.

Kiran Menon: 13:38

One of the things that all of our customers and, all the executives that I speak to, I think managers are always, fairly key to solving the people problem, right? And very often they're given a bad rap saying managers are the reason people leave. But I believe that managers are not equipped to service the people well enough and which is when you would start seeing, retention problems and things like that. But to your point then, Dart what are some of these ideas or tools that a manager could have to deliver such a customized experience? Because if I'm a manager of five people there's a lot on my plate. If I have a team of 20, what are those tools that are required? And the reason I ask is we're also looking at how data could be used in a better way to drive some of these behaviors, right? Simple example, onboarding very often when someone comes into an organization, the manager just says, Hey, what's up, let's get you started and let's get you rolling, right? The manager very rarely has context that, hey Kiran is an amateur musician and he loves tennis and uh, he's, extremely good at customer interactions, whatever it may be. Now, some of that data has never reached the manager. Maybe it came in a survey, maybe it came in some conversations internally, whatever it is. So I'm very curious to understand what are the tools that you were thinking of that could help a manager, get these superpowers?

Dart Lindsley: 15:14

I want to really agree with your essential point, which is that managers aren't equipped. The way the traditional model has worked is, Hey manager, your job is to get the most productivity out of the things who report to you, because that's, we frame people as things, as assets, as resources, as capital. And I'm going to equip you with all the tools that you might need to treat people like things. But you're sitting right there and you can see that those people are people and so managers are put into an impossible situation because they're being asked to do something that is actually counterfactual. It doesn't fit the reality of the world. And so what do you do? So first of all when I talk about bringing these tools to managers many of them are designer tools. So an example of that is the traditional career conversation. Is one of where do you want to end up on the org chart? And what skills do you need to acquire to get there? That's a very common structure. That's not what a career conversation is anymore. Or at least there's a different conversation that's called something else It's a need finding conversation Which is it's not what can you do for me? It's what do you want from this product to work? And so there's two big questions that go into that and the way I run those meetings and the way I teach people to run those meetings is what job do you hire your job to do for you? And you have a conversation about it. And then you have this list of 30 or 40 things where you can say have we not discussed any of the things that are important for you on this list? Because people forget them and they say, Oh yeah, I forgot about, puzzle solving. So you go through that, you get an understanding of what they really want. And, but you also, and this is something I didn't do originally is you also need to understand is what work costs them. Because when you're buying a product you want two things. You want it to do the job that you want it to get done. And you want it at a reasonable cost. People have very different experiences of cost in the same way that they have very different experiences of value. And so for instance, a cost for me is I have fairly severe social anxiety. And so that puts me into a state of pain if I'm put into a situation that challenges that. Other people are, feel status threats. Other people feel different things. Everybody feels their commute as an expense. Almost everybody. And so you need to understand what's costly to them. And what's what's valuable to them. And this is where I actually changed the role of managers from being above and an org chart where the, all the people are below to a model where the manager's below and the team is above. So that the team shows up as spreading branches growing up from the manager and the manager is in a more of a supporting role. It's up to the team plus the manager to understand what everybody on the team wants from work and to work together to both win that kind of work and allocate it fairly.

Debkanya Dhar: 18:34

Yeah, but it brings me to my next question then. We love asking this and we get a different answer usually from different people. Who then really owns this process, right? Because you've said that managers are responsible and, should be trained and equipped to understand who their people are and therefore help them thrive. Create the environment and create the experience to help each one of their reportees thrive. But then, does this then begin with HR? Does this begin from the CEO level? Does this begin from a separate EX department that has been put together only to look at this? How does that work?

Dart Lindsley: 19:17

First of all, this philosophy that I'm arguing for starts at the top and the philosophy starts at the top because I'm arguing for a different business model. I'm arguing for a business model that is multi sided. So there's lots of multi sided companies for your listeners. There's you know, Uber and Airbnb and every ad based media company in the world. You have two customers. Both of those customers need to be satisfied in order to satisfy the other? This is an argument that says that we need to recognize that every company is multisided. Only the top of the organization can really embrace that. If they don't, there's still a lot you can do, but in the ideal world, that decision is made. And a lot of companies are making that decision. There's 8,000 certified B corporations today in 162 industries in 96 countries. But I'm just going to go through the ideal. In the ideal, once you recognize that you are a multi sided business, you split your business so that there's somebody responsible for each customer. So let's take ad based media. If you're the New York Times, you've got a team that sells ads. They're the ones who are generating the revenue. And then you have a team that's the editorial team that's producing the content that's going to bring the readership that the advertisers want. And you need to satisfy the reader-customer. And if you don't, you're going to fail as a company. And so what do you do? You actually, those are two different, completely different skill sets. You split your organization at the very top and you give budget and responsibility and freedom to act to the organization that's actually delivering the work experience product. What does that team look like? Is it HR? It's not traditional HR. It's a product marketing, product design, and product delivery function. Now what do they do exactly? I'm arguing there are certain things that should be served centrally. But most things shouldn't. So something that everybody in the company wants. Let's serve that from the center and let's make that something that's going to scale. Payroll-perfect example. It's an absolute commodity. The dollar that one company gives you is identical to the dollar another company gives you. And all you really care about your payroll is that it's accurate. So serve that from the center, everybody wants the same thing. Beyond that, what the WXD function Work Experience Design. I say work experience instead of employee experience, because I'm focusing on the product of work and how it's experienced. So the work experience design function is one that needs to do a couple of things. It needs to teach managers and teams how to be great experience designers and also how to know what they want from work. Because you have to be able to be a good shopper as well. So they, they teach that. They need to set policy that is going to make those teams free to act because if you know what you want and you don't have the autonomy to act upon what you want you, you're just going to be frustrated. An example of that is you can set policies that that determine how often people can move from one role to the next. They need to produce the equipment. They need to equip managers and teams with actual tools to support these activities. And that's what I'm working on.

Kiran Menon: 22:48

I'm going to probably stretch the concept a little bit over here, right? And get your feedback on it. You talked about companies like Uber and, many other marketplaces, what are traditionally called marketplaces. You have a demand side and the supply side, and unless there's demand, supply doesn't work. Unless there's supply, there's no demand, right? Where you need to get both functions working. And, almost at the same clip you can't focus on just one first and then hope the rest come. You have to do it together, right? So if you use that analogy and you look at where you know employment itself is going and I think you talk about the fact that customers can come and go and they can choose and you're fine with that. Using this analogy of the marketplace. Do you think that work will potentially change where employees can also come and go whenever they want. Is that where you know, maybe the gig workers and the contract and the non-FTE based sort of work is going? Do you think that's what's pulling it that way?

Dart Lindsley: 23:59

There's all sorts of things in there that are worth calling out. First of all, companies that employ gig workers, and I'm going to take Uber as an example, they recognize drivers as a customer. They have customer related measures of their drivers. So for instance, the lifetime value of the driver, the churn of that customer base. In fact, it's weird because gig workers are not treated great, but they are actually treated like customers in many ways because that people recognize, especially Uber and Lyft. My God, if I can choose this next minute, whether I'm driving for Lyft or Uber, I've got both apps on my phone, so it's very competitive in terms of those two different work experiences. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is, the pandemic really reset expectations for a lot of people. And I think it reset expectations in particular for a generation. And so people already have the ability to move whenever they want. There is interestingly a switching cost, just like there's a switching cost from switching from an Android phone to an iPhone. There's your apps and your data and stuff. That's the same thing in switching jobs for one thing. A lot of people hire their job to spend time with friends. And so when you leave a job, you leave one of the things you hire your job for. Unless all your friends have already gone to that other company, in which case, awesome. Very similar situation though, of product choice. And in fact, I use the word product, it's a subscription product. And employees are subscribers. And just like being a subscriber for anything, there is, it's a hassle to switch.

Debkanya Dhar: 25:41

But do you feel, we were talking about this, the pandemic changed so many things and we thought work was going to change for the better. People were finally seeing the light, there was so much flexibility. There were so many changes that were happening and then suddenly when the economy took a little bit of a beating, you are back to a world where, things are not so much for the employee anymore. Is it always going to keep fluctuating like this? Okay. There are lots of jobs it's going well, but, suddenly there are not that many jobs left anymore, so you better stick around, otherwise you're out What do you see happening?

Dart Lindsley: 26:17

I'm going to take a wait and see attitude. There's a couple of different things. First of all, the thing I'm arguing for with employees at the center, practically nobody has adopted this idea that employees are customers and work is a product. That's a pretty different idea. And the idea that all companies are multi sided. We have muscle memory. I'm going to describe something I've never described before. It's something I just realized over the last couple of days. When I pay you as an employee, what am I buying? This is not a direct answer to your question. So one of the things that I've looked at in my podcast is I had somebody from Cambridge, the Classics department talked to me about Roman slavery. And what are the norms of Roman slavery?

Kiran Menon: 27:03

Okay.

Dart Lindsley: 27:03

The norms of Roman slavery were different from the norms of Greek slavery. Greek slavery- I owned your body and your soul. Roman slavery. I only owned your body. If I'm paying you hourly today, I own your time. That's what I bought. If I'm paying you a salary I own your output. I don't own your body, your soul, or your time. I own your output. I believe that this is the case.

Kiran Menon: 27:34

I don't know if all companies look at it that same way though.

Dart Lindsley: 27:38

They don't and I will tell you that there are different kinds of organizations that you can be in in terms of philosophy,

Debkanya Dhar: 27:46

Yeah.

Dart Lindsley: 27:46

So I have a two by two which I wrote this morning. Just for this discussion. And one axis is who do I think people are? Do I think people are lazy or do I think people like work? That's one question. Theory X and theory Y, basically. And the other one is my company is here to just make money and to maximize financial profit. Or my company is here to do a lot more than that. I'm building something. My legacy is not going to be a bank account. My legacy is going to be thriving community of people working together to achieve something great where everybody is benefiting. And so depending upon where on that two by two you land, if you're in a company that thinks people are lazy and they're only here to make money, you should probably leave. But if you're in one of these other quadrants, there's going to be a way to move forward.

Debkanya Dhar: 28:46

I really like the idea, the concept, the two by two that you just described. Do you see that people will, companies will start taking the employee experience more seriously or is it just something that's going to keep fluctuating?

Dart Lindsley: 29:00

Yeah. I think we have seen a very long history of moving toward caring more about the experience of employees. And I'm talking a hundred years of history where we've been getting better and better. Change however, comes in like the tide, which is one wave at a time, and then the wave recedes. And then the next wave comes in a little farther and then the wave recedes. And if you look micro like we are right now, we see the tide, we see the wave receding. But the tide's coming in. And so you have to look at the right time scale, I think, to really understand what's happening. I think the the pandemic was a case where a set came in, the wave came up really high.

Debkanya Dhar: 29:46

Yeah,

Dart Lindsley: 29:47

it's receding a little bit right now, but everybody saw something up on the shore that they liked better. I think it's going to keep coming in. And the truth is we're talking about stories where people are asking people to come back to work, but there's a lot of companies who said, no, we're never going to have people come to work again. In fact, we're dumping our offices. We're not going to have any more real estate costs. We don't own people's bodies. We don't care where they are physically. The thing that holds our company together and holds us together as a company is going to be a lot more than the walls of a building. And we'll see if they outcompete.

Kiran Menon: 30:22

The wave analogy was extremely interesting because like you said, it's dialing back and then looking at the right amount of time to understand what's happening, right? You can look at it every year and then you suddenly see huge spikes going back and forth. And in your case, the wave coming in and out, but if you see over a period of time. There is significant movement that's happened. I think we're also starting to see that a lot more with companies and executives who are understanding that the employee is also a customer. And I think the big difference is what we're starting to see now is that there are a certain number of companies who want to make that transition, but I don't think the tools still exist to make that transition happen today, right? So it exists in the customer world, sales and marketing has had tons of tools available for years and years, but that sort of thought process and sophistication and tools don't exist in the workplace for the employee. And so I think that's what most companies are, or at least the ones that are really trying to make a change, that's what they're also grappling with. Do you see that as well? And is that why you took that up as your sort of fellowship and what you wanted to contribute as well?

Dart Lindsley: 31:46

Yes. Systems change, real systems change. The foundation of systems change is mental model. And so what I've picked up as my mission is to change the mental model. And to give it a complete reframe. And then once you reframe the truth is everything else follows. But there's a lot to be developed, which is exciting, right? This is the great thing about any time there's a paradigm shift. What a paradigm shift does is it breaks open the possibilities and there's lots to develop and there's lots of interesting things. I have in my practice developed a handful of tools. I don't think for a second that they're complete because one person is not going to develop the tools. It's something we're all going to develop together within a new paradigm. And so I think it's a very green field opportunity.

Debkanya Dhar: 32:41

it's very hopeful. There's a lot that can change and will change, but it's also about taking two steps forward, one step back. So it's going to be over a period of time, but ultimately, since you, you have a lot of conversations with a lot of people, a lot of decision makers. Do you see that we're going to be moving in the right direction? Is it getting easier and easier? Is the data there to support because ultimately everyone wants to see the numbers, right? Do you find that there's enough of that in your arsenal when you are trying to, make your case?

Dart Lindsley: 33:11

No, is the answer. So first of all, as a designer, I am moving forward qualitatively as opposed to quantitatively. And all designers face this situation, which is that when you're designing something, all you can say is, you know what, this pen I designed, it has a certain je ne sais quoi I, that I think is awesome. And when you have a designer who does that, you often get awesome products. If somebody were to come to you and say about, about a design product okay what's the metric that makes that thing awesome? It's very hard to articulate. There's a progression of economic value that was put forward by Joe Pine and Gareth Gilmore. And it starts with goods, commodities, and it moves through products, then services, then experiences, and then transformations. And that's really important because a lot of work is up at the experience. It's an experience product. And it's a transformation product. And transformation products are super interesting. Getting a graduate degree as a transformation service.

Kiran Menon: 34:17

Yep. Yep.

Dart Lindsley: 34:18

So, those are particularly hard to measure and yet, when you've had a great one. I recently on the show, I had, um, Bart Houlahan is the founder of B lab, which is the organization that certifies whether or not you're a B corporation. He has determined that there are a set of measures that actually predict company performance. And so he's just founded an ETF that you can invest in that is entirely made of companies who he can measure are likely to be more successful because of how the employees perceive them.

Kiran Menon: 34:58

Wow.

Dart Lindsley: 34:58

That's a fundamental change, right? And if all of a sudden you have a set of shareholders who are buying your company shares because of how you're treating the people in your organization or whatever those measures are, that changes the landscape.

Debkanya Dhar: 35:14

It's heartening to see there's so much work, including the work that you're doing every day. And I think we're also trying to do in our small way at Tydy towards making this more and more of a reality where work is just a better place for everyone. On that note, I'd really like to thank you so much for being with us on our podcast today, Dart. There was so much that we've learned and I'm sure, there's so much more that will keep coming up. Anybody who's interested and wants to know how to make work irresistible, please head on over to Dart's podcast Work for Humans. There's a great bunch of interviews there that you should listen into. Thank you so much Dart again. It was really nice to have you on our show.

Kiran Menon: 35:56

Thank you, Dart.

Dart Lindsley: 35:58

It was wonderful being here. These were great questions and I divide podcasts into two versions. One is people who want to be podcasters and one is people who are actually looking to learn and discover new things. That's the kind of show I have. Clearly from your questions, it's the kind of show you have. They're the best to listen to. And and they're the best conversations to be into. So thank you.

Debkanya Dhar: 36:21

Thank you so much.

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