The Money Factory - A Business Approach to Workplace Design

Creating a Better World of Work Is Not About Creating a Better World

I’ve had some interesting discussions lately about how I’m perceived as a Workplace Transformation- and Future of Work advisor.

Since I advocate for innovative and human-centric people strategies, I’m often seen as a 'do-gooder'—a mission-driven entrepreneur aiming to change the world for the better.

For example, when I explained that I help clients achieve their best business outcomes, someone responded:

"But only if that aligns with your values around building great places to work and social responsibility, right?"

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might think the same. But I must clarify that this is not what my work is about. Not because it isn't important, but because I don’t think it’s the right approach for organizational development.

Despite what some seem to think, I am a business-driven professional on a mission to support leadership teams in reaching their goals. I focus on adding business value and keep my 'do-good' work to my volunteering.

Understanding Organizations

To understand the best approach for organizational development, we should start with understanding what an organization is. As an organizational sociologist, my simplest and most frequently used definition of an organization is:

An organization is a group of people working towards a common goal.

I use this definition as the lens from which I approach HR and workplace design. From that perspective, everyone in the organization is ultimately on the same page. There is no conflict of interest or power struggle between employer and employee. Both are in the same organization, working on the same goal, and achieving that goal is in everyone's interest, including stakeholders. For instance, in the debate about whether HR is there for the employer or the employee, my answer is: HR is there for the organization. If HR thinks it is serving two masters, or needs to juggle interests and compromise, something is wrong.

A Shoe Factory or a Money Factory?

If an organization is a group of people working towards the same goal, we need to understand what that goal is.

Often, when I ask, "What is the purpose or higher goal of this organization?" people fall silent for a moment and then say, "To make money."

My favorite answer?

“If your goal is to make money, you should build a money factory. It is a lot easier”

For a shoe factory, the common goal is ‘to create shoes’. To find the shoe factory's true (higher) purpose, we need to dig deeper a bit deeper by asking why.

Why are we making shoes? For people can protect their feet, so people can be healthy and safe while living their life.

This shoe factory might also identify other higher goals: optimizing shoes for posture to avoid back problems, creating elegant shoes that boost self-esteem, ensuring shoes are always in the latest fashion, or designing great hiking shoes so people can spend more time in nature.

Money is ideally a byproduct, a hygiene factor, needed as fuel for the organization to fulfill its true purpose. Just as a healthy financial situation is a necessity rather than the primary goal, offering a great Employee Value Proposition is also essential.

What Companies Need to Reach Their Goals

Modern-day knowledge-intensive companies rely on people, with money and technology as secondary assets.

Optimizing the effectiveness of their workforce is essential for companies to reach their goals.

In my research, "The Knowledge Worker, The Boss?" on the most effective management style for knowledge workers, I found that 80% of companies do not apply the most effective management style.

(Want to know more? Download the Executive Summary of this research)

My findings provide the academic foundation for optimal workplace design for knowledge workers: high autonomy, challenging projects, a visionary leader, and a higher purpose. This has been the solid foundation of my advisory work over the last decade.

Advocating for More Women in the Workplace is Not Feminism

Part of this misconception is that my advocacy for certain elements of modern, human-centric workplace designs is driven by a desire to make companies'do the right thing' and a personal vision on what that is.

This led to a great exchange recently about women in the workplace and feminism where I explained it like this:

Say, company XYZ needs to be innovative to stay ahead and develop new, better solutions for their clients. Innovation doesn’t happen in every environment and can’t be forced. It’s not as simple as more hours = more innovation. If a company wants to be innovative, it has to create an environment that fosters innovation.

Research shows that female leadership is directly correlated to innovation, such as the Woman Matter report by McKinsey.

So, to be innovative, company XYZ now wants to increase female leadership. Is it just about hiring and promoting more women in leadership positions? Unfortunately not. Despite decades of efforts and government-imposed quotas, women make up only a quarter of C-suite leadership in 2023, according to the Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey.

We need to do much more to increase the number of women in leadership positions to achieve our business goal: more innovation. The solution lies in workplace designs.

Companies need to address every layer of their organizations to increase female leadership: from hiring bias, micro-aggressions, and the gender pay gap to flexible hours, part-time work, role redesign, childcare and parental leave, and the structure of meetings and feedback loops.

Not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the best thing to do for business.

So if I am talking to the CEO of an IT company with 1,000 employees who wants the organization to be more productive, reduce costs, and become more innovative, and I suggest a 30-hour workweek with flexible hours and a remote-first setup.

Is that because it aligns with my values or because I am driven to bring more happiness to the employees (strangers to me)? Is it because I am a feminist and I want to help women juggle their responsibilities? Do I feel it is my mission to tell companies to adjust themselves to serve the higher good of workplace happiness?

No, of course not. My advice is simply based on academic findings around building the most intelligent organization design.

We Have Inherited a Broken Belief System

So where are these misconceptions coming from? We might suffer from a collective polarization bias around the why of human-centric workplace designs. Our paradigm around work is shaped by 'scientific management' from the industrial era. Because of that school of management, we have inherited a broken belief system: employees and employers have conflicting interests, and what is good for one is automatically bad for the other.

With the rise of knowledge work, those conflicting interests have fundamentally changed, but we can’t seem to move past this polarization bias. Combined with the persistent industrial time-and-place mindset (your time for my money and work is a place you go to), we now understand why the CEO in this story might send me away before I even finish my coffee after sharing my ideas. The CEO likely sees me as being on the side of the employee, and this polarization bias is now a bottleneck for solving business challenges.

Pulling the Social Responsibility Card

That said, no company is an island, and of course, there is a social responsibility at stake when building the Employee Value Proposition. Given how complex it already is to beat this bias and find a way to break down outdated systems and implement effective and sustainable workplace designs, I am careful about pulling the social responsibility card too often.

Building a business case around 'the right thing to do' or painting a picture of 'this is needed to attract talent' without addressing the actual needs of the organization as a whole makes structural change difficult. However, we can place social responsibility to the context of stakeholder management and tie it to the business goals of the company.

Adding Business Value

In work, instead of 'being a good person,' I choose to be an even better professional who can add value to my clients in solving pressing business challenges by using data, research, and facts, and supporting them in building sustainable, future-proof companies.

And although I have made the choice to show up as the best professional I can be, it happens that my work contributes to a better world at the same time.

What is good for you is good for them. Isn’t that wonderful?

Let’s talk

Interested in finding out how to solve business challenges by building a human-centric Employee Value Proposition?

Join the discussion (live event)

​Recent research shows that women fall behind in the use of AI, with Gen Z women already using 35% less AI compared to their male counterparts.

Without interventions this gender gap will increase and cause farfetched implications on the position of women in the workplace, innovative power of organisations, job market and society.

Last week I attended European Women in Tech event in Amsterdam where I organised a meet up around AI's impact on Gender Equality.

Let discuss how we can increase awareness to up-skill and re-skill the female workforce and secure diverse and inclusive workplaces.

You are invited to join the online discussion on how we can increase awareness to up-skill and re-skill the female workforce and secure diverse and inclusive workplaces.

Go to the event page for more information and sign up to join on Thursday July 4, 16:00 CET.

Wishing you a great week.

Angelique

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash