Work Here Now

1The Great Work Unpack: Understanding and Fixing Broken Work

“That for a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never‐ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society.”

—William Morris, Useful Work and Useless Toil, 1885

Work sucks.

It's important that we start there, because part of what's gone wrong, across centuries and continents, is that we've shied away from this fundamental truth. We've gone after a monstrous problem with carefully chosen words and some light waving of hands, when what we actually needed to do was stake it through the heart, cut its head off, stuff the head with garlic, and expose the mangled corpse to the sunlight so it could catch fire and evaporate.

You might read this and say, “Work doesn't suck! I love my job.” Many folks do love their jobs—but at any time, according to Mercer's data from our employee listening work with more than 8 million employees over decades, nearly a third of workers are seriously thinking about quitting. And those are just the folks who've been pushed to the point of no return.

For the rest of us, even when we're most excited about work, the dirty little secret is we kind of hate it too. I love my job—leading Transformation Solutions in North America for Mercer; I get to partner with brilliant, deeply kind colleagues to help an array of interesting organizations reshape their workforces and ways of working ...