Why Americans Really Hate Their Jobs

Given Luman International’s work with hundreds of organizations over the past 30 years, we weren’t the least bit surprised by Gallup’s 2013 “State of the American Workplace” report. It turns out that you get what you design your culture to give you, and too many cultures are designed to give you unhappy people.

Only 30% of surveyed employees are “engaged and inspired.” This is pathetic, especially so in a free country where people can live, learn, and work wherever they want to. 70% are doing stuff they don’t like to do or even hate to do? Only 3 in 10 really care? That means that if you have 10,000 people, except for how it inconveniences them 7,000 of them really don’t care if your organization lives or dies.

It turns out that you get what you design your culture to give you, and too many cultures are designed to give you unhappy people.

But even that 30% stat is misleading, because engagement is only slightly better than the low bar of “employee satisfaction.” You can be engaged with your work but not passionate about the organization, you can be inspired to do things that make you feel good but which are misaligned with your organization’s direction.

Luman recognized long ago that you can be both engaged and inspired and still not be creating value or delivering results – the best and ultimately only real way to achieve passion in the workplace.

And it goes downhill from there. 52% have the “so-so’s” – they can take your workplace or…not. They’re willing to move it forward if it isn’t too hard, and willing to tell you to shove it if it is. The way too many organizations try to address this? With trinkets – 1501 ways to reward employees, recognition programs, or benefits like gyms, daycare centers, cafeterias. All of these may be fine ideas, but none of them are going to create passion and commitment.

Or money, of course. Some of the unhappiest, least passionate people are making the most money. Money is not only not the answer, it can become a big part of the problem. How? Miserable, destructive, morale-killing people just won’t leave, because they’re making too much money. These aren’t golden handcuffs, but just handcuffs. And you’re organization is chained to them.

There is one more group, the 18% who are “actively disengaged.” They actually do care about your organization more than the 52%. The only problem is that what they care about is tearing everything down.

The only thing that works – that gets you out of the 30% trap, that gives you a shot at having 95% who are truly passionate and committed – is to design a culture around key elements that are doable by real leaders in real situations. We have identified 10 of those keys, which we teach in our course Building a Passionate Organization™. The course is interesting and incisive and way out of the box, and even comes with CEUs. If you implement these far-reaching principles and practices, you can win over all of the 52%, and convert or marginalize the 18%.

Last but not least, if you design these 10 key elements into your culture, your employees can become one of Gallup’s biggest exceptions.

Merging Cultures Would Be Easy…If It Wasn’t for the Cultures

Let’s face it: Merging organizations is really, really hard. There are so many issues – strategic, structural, process, financial, technical, policies, procedures – to sort out, to work out, to optimize.

And often, those are the easy parts.

In our experience with mergers – of teams, departments, divisions, and entire organizations – the cultures, no matter how vibrant, often carry the seeds of organizational disarray. Culture is an organization’s DNA, the thing that makes it what it is and that allows it to function. Culture is intangible, often invisible, but never ever insignificant. Get it right, and you can have 1 + 1 = 3 or 4 or 5. Get it wrong, and you can have 1 + 1 = really?

A current example of this was the merger of Apple culture with J. C. Penney culture. It came in the form of a wunderkind from Apple, Ron Johnson, who was brought in to “Apple-ize” Penney’s. He used a powerful personality and a lot of confidence to cram that excellent but alien culture into an old company with a very powerful culture of its own. The result? He didn’t even last 2 years. Sadly, J. C. Penney might not last 2 more.

Culture is intangible, often invisible, but never ever insignificant.

Watching culture clashes was a part of what led us to develop the concept of cultural design™. You can design principles and practices into the cultural merger that takes the best of both and blends them into an effective whole – preferably something even better than either one was alone. Success isn’t just a matter of having smart, high-quality leaders, but having leaders who know that culture is designable and mergeable.

You can have a combined, solidly integrated culture. We have 10 CEU-accredited courses to help you do it, and assessments to make sure that you have no illusions, delusions, or contusions as you do. You can create a new, living culture out of the DNA of two fine organizations. You just have to remember that in the matter of cultural mergers, all undesigned efforts will be memorable, for all the wrong reasons.