Workomics is closed this week for our summer shutdown. It is one of two we do each year. The other is in December, in that liminal space when the old year is not quite over, and the new one not quite begun. Shutdowns are fully-paid days off, over and above the twenty vacation days each employee receives each year.
A shutdown is very different from individual vacations because everyone is off at the same time. In the lead-up, there is a shared focus on making it to the break. This spring at Workomics was particularly hectic, and our July shutdown was a bright light at the end of the tunnel — something to galvanize and motivate us like little else can. Unlike a week of vacation, there’s no hand-off to over-burdened colleagues, and you don’t return to a full inbox and context to catch up on. The work just stops, for once assuming its proper place in your life: set aside for the people that matter most, for unstructured time to do as you please, for real rest and rejuvenation.
You can probably tell the Workomics illustrators are all on holiday this week…
In a client services business, it is not easy to shut down for a full week. It takes advance planning and communication. We choose weeks that tend to be vacation-heavy and less productive anyway. Even so, a closure will sometimes inconvenience clients who have urgent timelines that clash with our planned downtime. That’s why, as much as you plan and communicate, you also need conviction: this is not open-heart surgery, and the corporate deadlines can wait; the value we offer outweighs the temporary inconvenience of a week away; the rest and downtime is in fact integral to that value, and to our ability to sustain it in the long run.
It’s not perfect, either. Most of the team will be disconnected for most of the week. But a couple of people will take a meeting to keep a critical deliverable moving forward. Someone else will monitor inboxes to be ready for research that starts next week. Others will (ahem) finish up their newsletter. But the concessions are small ones, made smaller because there are no new assignments piling up, no last-minute meetings dropping into your calendar. During a shutdown week, for once it feels possible to actually get ahead.
The secret ingredient is the coordination. We have one client who also shuts down for this first week, and it’s magic. From the beginning of the year, every project is planned with the understanding that everything will pause for the first week of July. It’s actually much easier and more efficient compared to working around the key stakeholders’ interwoven vacations the rest of the year. The only downside is that it’s only one client and only one week. How much better would it be if it were all the clients for two or even three weeks?
Human beings are not designed to work at full speed, without a break. We are healthier, happier, and more productive when we rest. Alas, capitalism will take every available hour, if you let it. Someone has to confine it — draw a box around the time work can have vs. time it cannot. Drawing those lines is hardest when it falls to the individual, protecting their own vacation and drawing boundaries around their own off-hours. It’s much easier when an organization sets a limit for everyone. Now, you are not protecting vacation time just for you, but for the collective. It feels less open to debate. And it is easier still if it can happen on an even larger scale: a whole industry, or even a whole country. As ever, the Nordics got there first — the whole country of Norway shuts down for three weeks each July.
If it sounds idyllic, that’s probably because it’s ideal. If anyone is spearheading a movement for a North American equivalent, please sign me up.
Workomics Staff Picks
Some links from the team this month:
With increasing time spent in front of screens, employers like Deloitte have started to offer subsidized Lego and puzzles as part of their employee wellbeing program. We love the inclusion of tangible problem-solving. And also, those Lego sets ain’t cheap.
As more companies send employees back to the office 4+ days a week, workplace biohacking becomes a more relevant trend. This Worklife article runs down how everything from carbon dioxide levels to light quality can affect productivity, and how companies are increasingly using technology to achieve optimal environments.
In the medical realm, we were super interested to read about the early success of off-the-shelf stem cell therapy for treating diabetes. When implanted in patients, the manufactured cells started sensing glucose and secreting hormones almost instantly, allowing patients to stop taking insulin. What an exciting scientific development!
Twenty years ago, I was a computer science graduate student, building predictive models for natural language. I dabbled with the neural networks that underpin today’s GenAI agents, but at the time they were neither fashionable nor terribly powerful, so my models were built with supervised discriminative machine learning techniques. I ended up with two peer-reviewedpublications and a profound sense of ennui from doing work that didn’t feel like it had much practical relevance.
So, you can view this month’s essay as coming from someone with higher-than-average understanding of the field, or you can view it as coming from someone so short-sighted and foolish that she didn’t feel like AI and natural language had enough potential. Both are probably true.
As with all my writing, this post was generated without any assistance from GenAI, and indeed started as old-fashioned, handwritten notes. Because of the subject matter, I took special care to keep track of all the links I read while working on this newsletter. Bye and bye, I will feed them into a GenAI and see what kind of essay comes out. Perhaps it will undo all my convictions and I will wish I had skipped the struggle of writing altogether.
Where I did have help was from the Workomics team. They have a singular ability to question the status quo, surface new perspectives, and insist on better. They pushed me to think more deeply on this topic, and I’m grateful for it.
In comradeship,
S.
Looking out from Mount Nemo
GenAI, capitalism, and human flourishing
It’s hard to write about Generative AI and Large Language Models without writing about capitalism. That’s the point of GenAI, isn’t it? To further the capitalist ideal of maximizing profit?
Certainly, that is what the LLM purveyors are selling us: lower your costs while creating many more outputs many times faster than mere human beings. The output is not especially good, but there is so much of it and it is so instant! Who cares about excellence when you can have seemingly infinite volume with fewer of those expensive human beings?
This is the moment where capitalism has lost the plot.
Market capitalism is a system that incentivizes people to maximize efficiency in pursuit of material wealth. It has been very effective in that aim. Economist Brad Delong estimates that an unskilled laborer in 1870 London would have produced roughly the equivalent of 5,000 calories in economic value each day. In other words, not enough to feed his family. Today, an unskilled worker in London produces the equivalent of 2.4 million calories a day — enough to feed her own family and several hundred others besides.
That tremendous leap forward in material well-being is in large measure the result of market capitalism and how it incentivizes corporations and individuals to apply technological progress in pursuit of profit. To be sure, we struggle mightily to distribute the resulting wealth as equitably as we should, but after many thousands of years of humanity, we no longer struggle with not having enough. Capitalism must surely be credited with an assist.
Today, at the societal level, we don’t need more of anything. Indeed, most of us struggle under the weight of too much. Too much carbon. Too much plastic. Too many ultra-processed calories. Too much endless, unfulfilling content in endless, unfulfilling social media feeds. (Capitalism gets an assist here too.)
Nevertheless, here we are, still blithely organizing our society around the pursuit of efficiency and material wealth. Except now we stand on the cusp of a new paradigm that will allow us to create nearly infinitely, with ever less human intervention.
What is a human being for?
In capitalism, corporations are pure vehicles for maximizing profit: more output for less input, without limit. The economists like to pretend that human beings are built along similar lines, but it’s more complicated than that. Yes, we often eschew effort when we can. But left to our own devices, people are forever volunteering for unnecessarily-challenging undertakings: running marathons, baking bread, writing email newsletters, climbing mountains, raising children, playing Bracket City on hard mode.
Psychology professor Michael Inzlicht has coined the term “effort paradox” to capture this notion that effort is sometimes avoided and other times valued. He posits that effort is a mechanism for creating meaning and purpose. Only by expending effort can you feel a sense of mastery. Too, it is a form of social currency — a way to demonstrate your commitment to a group or a cause. Effort is also valuable as an antidote to boredom. People don’t actually like to do nothing for very long, and will seek out ways to spend effort once boredom sets in.
GenAI and LLMs undercut all of these positive attributes of effort. Knowledge workers who are required to integrate AI into their workflows bemoan the loss of meaning and purpose in their work. Human-human relationships are displaced by human-AI transactions. People are consigned to babysit the AI rather than drive the work themselves, representing a loss of agency and autonomy in favour of reaction and monotony.
From a capitalist perspective, none of that matters. The system is working as intended: seek profit, minimize the effort and cost, let the invisible hand take care of the rest. If that means people no longer write their own words, it is no different than when people stopped being blacksmiths. Mustn’t stand in the way of progress.
Evidence of real human effort…unless I had GenAI make the image?
The struggle is real; the AI is not
Except that language (and creating more generally) is not just some mechanism for generating revenue. It is fundamental to what it means to be human. Writing is not easy, but it is how we get clarity of thought, how we invent new ideas, how we disseminate them to others who might use their own words to build on our ideas and make them better.
If the LLMs do all the writing, what do we lose?
The written word on the page has value as output1. But the messy, frustrating, difficult process of writing is not a problem to be solved. The inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. Setting aside questions of quality, relying on the output of an LLM robs you of the benefits that come through expense of your own effort. Your understanding will be surface-level. Any objections you run into will render you inert — unable to counter because you haven’t done the heavy lifting yourself. You won’t be motivated to see your ideas through because they are not really yours. The output will be forgotten and discarded as easily as it was acquired.
Language, writing, and creating are also mechanisms for discovery and decision-making. When you set out to write about, say, AI and capitalism, the ideas do not emerge fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Rather, the ideas take shape through thousands of small decisions about words and structure, each one clarifying, refining, defining. When you let GenAI do the work, you delegate most of those decisions2.
Delegation of decision-making is a radical departure from all the automation that has come before. Whatever technical wizardry we deployed, the decision-making still resided with the human beings who designed, built, and ran the machinery. Many decisions were taken away and hidden from front-line workers, but some human somewhere still made the decision before it was programmed into the machine. The GenAI models are different, because they are making all of those small decisions on our behalf, without us ever knowing what was considered and ultimately discarded.
We lose something real when that happens. Recent research surveyed workers who use GenAI at work at least once a week. The researchers found:
“While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. ”
The kinds of work that workers did also shifted, with seeking, generating, and doing, displaced by verifying, combining, and supervising. The issue is that the cognitive skills are not switches you can turn on and off at will. We see that when people rely on GPS directions rather than building their own mental maps, the region of the brain associated with mapping literally shrinks. Cognitive skills that aren’t practiced and maintained will atrophy.
We need a certain amount of struggle — grappling with ideas, making trade-offs, doing hard things. It’s how we maintain and expand our capacity to think, and also how we figure out what we think. Written outputs are valuable and useful, but the process of creating them is what is essential to us as humans. We need effortful pursuits to flourish.
Human flourishing is the point
When capitalism was first emerging in the 18th century, there wasn’t enough food or shelter to go around. In that context, it seems preferable to have productivity gains from division of labour, even though it replaced fulfilling work for craftspeople with repetitive drudgery on an assembly line. “Not starving” is pretty foundational to human flourishing.
The world we live in now is very different. Mostly, we are applying GenAI to create “more” where we already have too much. If we prize efficiency and profit above all else, the LLMs seem inevitable. But the capitalist paradigm of efficiency and profit sprung from the trade-offs of a bygone era. The world today is already abundant in material wealth, and approximately no one thinks AI will help distribute it more equitably. LLMs maximize efficiency at a ludicrous scale, but in exchange, we forsake fundamentally human things like discovery, learning, autonomy, relationships, purpose, fulfillment.
We should be very sure the payoff is worth it.
Assessing the payoff will require corporations to be something other than profit-maximizing machines in the capitalist ideal — to grapple with their own version of the effort paradox. Sometimes, effort should be minimized; other times, not.
To wield AI effectively, organizations will need to have a real clarity of purpose — a reason to exist that goes beyond producing a particular output as profitably as possible. They will need to think deeply about when and how AI helps or hinders. Is near-term efficiency worth it, if the result is a long-term decline in the organization’s capacity to create, innovate, differentiate? If there is no one who can supervise the LLMs in 10 years time, because the AIs took the on-the-job learning opportunities away from junior employees? If the LLMs are commoditized and all your competitors can produce the same blandly average offerings?
Ultimately, the decision to leverage GenAI is not unlike the decision to outsource. There’s nothing wrong with it, when it’s a supporting role, in the areas where “adequate” is all you need. But if you outsource the core of your offerings, sooner or later your customers will realize you are just a middleman and cut you out.
Equally, there are some problems out there where we really should privilege efficiency above all else. If you’re using AI to develop new cancer drugs, go with God. I hope market capitalism makes you really rich because you invented new treatments and reduced human misery.
But there are all kinds of other problems where prioritizing efficiency and applying AI is to deeply misunderstand what it is to be human, what makes for a happy life. If you are using AI to call your parents for you, or write your guide to summer, or make your video game, or teach your course, then you have been led astray. When an AI makes these things, the best-case is a mid output that adds to the noise. It’s pointless. Even if there is—improbably—financial profit to be had, you have inflicted a net cost on society and robbed yourself of something meaningful.
But when a real live person makes these things, that’s a very different premise. Human beings are in the arena, connecting with each other, expanding their understanding of the world, making compromises, striving for better. It will be inefficient and effortful. The result might be mediocre or it might be profound. Either way, humans and humanity will have benefitted from the pursuit.
Workomics Staff Picks
Some links from the team this month:
We thought this article on VR in patient experience was super cool: Research recently published in the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing revealed that VR tours of Venice, Agra, and the Ecuadorian Amazon can positively impact patients' side effects during longer infusion sessions (e.g., chemotherapy and other cancer treatments).
This article explores how focused attention is one of our most important tools, and that it requires us to have actual systems for preserving it, so that we can do our best work, and so that we can help preserve our teammates’ focus as well. Distractions will happen; we can be prepared with systems for how to deal with them, and certain cases, even welcome them.
Our own Michelle Thompson-McCune was one of four featured voices on Tom Lietz's Storylinking podcast, talking about ways to build engagement with groups.
Anne Helen Petersen digs into the question of whether people are bad at their jobs, or if the jobs are just bad. As work gets faster and more demanding, burnout, poor training, and unclear expectations are making it harder to do good work. Maybe it’s time to stop blaming individuals and start redesigning the way work actually works.
Returning home from a business trip to a week’s worth of boyish detritus.
There, a discarded pirate costume, next to a treasure chest with a false bottom hiding doubloons. Alongside that, a pirate ship with three-inch high plastic pirates. Seafaring adventures, played out at different scales.
Here, it’s a costume of medieval chain mail, with helmet, bow, sword, shield, and (incongruously) a light sabre. Did the pirate and the knight meet in battle? Hard to say.
Then a pile of history books — Rescuing Titanic, What Caused the War of 1812, A Teen’s Guide to the Russian Revolution. So busy acquiring facts, storing them away, making sense of the world that was and, perhaps also, the world that will be.
A game of Battleship, partway through. They might have been interrupted by a call for dinner, but more likely by mutual accusations of, “Cheater!” — trying to sneak illicit peeks at each other’s ship locations.
On the chair, a Thomas the Tank Engine puzzle, just started. Thomas was a constant in toddlerhood, but he has been mostly outgrown. For one day this week, he was not.
A large drawing of a tank. No doubt it is a specific model of tank, but I, clueless mother that I am, couldn’t tell you.
The whiteboard has gained an annotated drawing of a British Blue falkin [sic]. (P.s. this is imaganeri).
Next to it, paints and brushes and little jugs of water with abstract water colours in pretty pastels.
Deflated balloons, scattered every which way. Without a doubt, these were blown up and then let go, so they would fly around the room making splendid fart sounds.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid books in every corner. This is how they learn about the world of middle school that is not as far away as I like to pretend.
On another day or in another mood, I might be annoyed by the mess. But not tonight. Tonight I have been away from them, missing their jokes and bedtime stories and endless questions. Tonight, all I see is corroboration of rich inner lives, of all that they are exploring and imagining and becoming.
And I am sad for these few days I have missed, and glad that I am home again, because these days of boyhood and play never felt so fleeting.
Balancing the pursuit of new
Organizations love new: new products, new markets, new policies. New is an exciting inflection point that opens up a world of possibility. It’s all fresh starts and green fields that organizations can fill with stuff: new features, new sales aids, new marketing. New comes with clarity and purpose and urgency. It gives organizations (and the people in them) the chance to show how innovative and creative and impactful they are.
That’s not to say organizations always excel at new. Execution and results can range from terrible to outstanding. But regardless of outcome, new is organizations’ comfort zone1. They have a roadmap and milestones to follow, all on the path to delivering the next new thing.
The trouble with not-new
Alas: every new thing eventually becomes not-new2. Not-new is a lot harder. You are at a kind of anti-inflection point, on a much flatter (but hopefully still rising) trajectory. The gaps are few. If you’ve done your job well the first time around, the stuff you’ve already done is…pretty good actually! Could you make improvements? Likely. But will the juice be worth the squeeze? Will the incremental time and money actually return value to the organization? Even after you factor in the opportunity cost of what else you could do with that time and money?
And that right there is the crux of the problem. Those questions are rarely even asked. If you do ask them, the organization is poorly equipped to answer them. Worse still, new is what gets rewarded.
Suppose you ask the questions, and realize you are past the point of diminishing marginal returns. In fact, you should just double down on your two or three most successful tactics, exactly as they are today, and drop everything else. Not because those tactics are perfect, but because any money you spend improving them won’t result in new revenue.
That might be the right thing for the business, but when it comes time to hand out bonuses, raises, and promotions, “I did the best thing for the business,” almost always loses out to “I made a shiny new thing.” And so, products have bloated features, sales teams are overwhelmed with infinite offerings, and someone always seems to be redoing the positioning (again).
There is a real cost to these misaligned incentives. The organization spends money on things that don’t add commensurate value. But also, complexity incurs a cost in and of itself, and one that is rarely accounted for.
Balancing with Prioritize-and-Optimize
These kinds of incentives can only be changed at the institutional level. Organizations need to make it okay — even celebrated — to be in prioritize-and-optimize mode. It’s truly a great accomplishment: you’ve done a great job at making a new and shiny gadget. And now the reward is that you get to shift into Prioritize-and-Optimize. Make it a thing.
As part of making it a thing, you’ll need to rethink your measurement. When it isn’t neglected entirely, measurement tends to focus on whether a tactic met its goal as a standalone initiative. That’s what matters in new. But in Prioritize-and-Optimize, we’re interested in whether a tactic delivers better than others, and whether it justifies its opportunity costs. To answer those questions effectively, we have to collect different data, so that we can compare across tactics and contextualize results with their opportunity costs.
Prioritize-and-optimize should also come with a strong bias towards pruning activities and tactics. People are loss-averse, so they hate to take things away. But the inherent costs of complexity mean you should err on the side of ruthlessness. “What did you stop doing this year?” should be the key question in Prioritize-and-Optimize, and it should almost always have an answer.
One of the reasons organizations love new is that people love new. It’s exciting and rewarding to make something new happen. But when new is relentless, it can actually hinder performance. People need rest — to ward off burnout and to provide a moment for reflection and learning. Prioritize-and-Optimize should be framed as an opportunity to deepen understanding and get better at your craft. When you hop from new thing to new thing, you rarely grapple with the finer details of what worked in practice. Because Prioritize-and-Optimize typically carries less urgency and more predictability, it affords a period of rejuvenation and learning that keeps both the organization and its employees healthy and flourishing. Now, if Prioritize-and-Optimize becomes a permanent state, it starts to be indistinguishable from stagnate-and-atrophy. Instead, think of Prioritize-and-Optimize as a passing season, with people rotating in-and-out, feeling rested, grounded, and hungry for the next round of new.
Likewise, Prioritize-and-Optimize is not a permanent state for any given area of the business. Markets change. New competitors enter. Technology opens up a game-changing possibility. Inevitably, there will be new inflection points to capitalize on, and it’s critical not to miss them because you were in Prioritize-and-Optimize. In many ways, inflection points are easier to spot when the team is not consumed by delivering something new. But false positives are a real risk3, where the bias to new leads you to switch out before you’ve really had a chance to optimize or prune anything. Organizations need a way to evaluate when to switch back to making new. The most effective criteria will be outward-looking, so that you are switching into new in response to specific changes in the needs of your customers, or broader market dynamics.
New is great. Sometimes, what exists is not good enough and you need to re-do it. Sometimes, new is the spark you need to energize the organization or win back market share. Sometimes, new is the next growth engine for the organization. We all love new.
The point is that organizations are programmed for new by default. In any initiative, there is going to be a point of diminishing marginal returns. Organizations rarely recognize it, and rarely respond to it by doing less. They pour the same amount of effort (and expense) into new, even when the possible payoff is markedly less. Deliberate reprogramming to make Prioritize-and-Optimize a valued state of being, is one way to overcome the bias towards new, and find a better balance.
Workomics Staff Picks
Some links from the team this month:
We enjoyed this article about the hidden meanings behind our favourite tiny artists’ creations from the Atlantic (gift link).
Some of us have been sparking joy with custom stickers, inspired by Jukebox’s great deal.
Our team has been raving about The Pitt for many reasons, including its medically accurate depictions of ERs. Read more of our take here!
There’s a lot of talk about AI everywhere we look, but like Tressie McMillan-Cottom says, most of us are using it for pretty “mid” tasks that aren’t worth the hype. (And that’s if you avoid the worst case of AI-as-parasite!)
The average four year old laughs 300 times in a day, but once you enter the workplace, the laughs become few and far between. This article summarizes some of the research on humour in the workplace, and made us grateful for all the ongoing hijinx in the Workomics slack channels.
I grew up in a time and place where snow days were a regular occurrence. From November until April, you could count on multiple days where school was cancelled and regular activities came to a halt. During one stand-out storm, over 160cm fell in three days and school was cancelled for a full week.
I have fond memories of shoveling out snow forts and tobogganing and watching old reruns on Betamax. But most especially I have fond memories of how the world just stopped. If you had plans, they were cancelled. If you had deadlines, they were deferred. The trappings of daily life were revealed for what they were — insignificant in the face of the natural world. Especially as it happened so often, I think it helped to keep everything in proper perspective. Nothing is so important that it can’t be pre-empted by a winter storm, but everything is to be relished, because the next time it might be snowed out.
We had a small taste of that this month here in Toronto, as half a meter of snow came down in four days around a long weekend. School was cancelled, activities were called off, and everyone hunkered down at home. It turns out that grown-up deadlines don’t get deferred in quite the same way as grade school homework, but the many cancellations still had the effect of creating some rare space to breathe and just…be. We had a weekend where it was possible to read a novel cover-to-cover and catch up on admin and take the kids sledding and watch a movie and clean the house and take a nap. In a world where there is never enough time, such a surfeit of time was magical.
Magic fades, of course. In the aftermath of the long weekend, the traffic is terrible and there is endless griping about (lack of) snow removal, and all the pretty, fluffy snow has descended into slushy, icy muck. But with luck, the rejuvenation from a few days of rest will linger, and all the many scheduled and deadlined things will stay in proper perspective.
Figuring out Flexible Work
Let’s begin with a concept from social philosopher Christopher Nguyen: value capture.
Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of these values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning.
The agent is you. Your rich and subtle values are particular to you, but let’s say that some of these are in the ballpark:
“Work hard, but also have time to relax and hang with friends.”
“Do good work that makes a difference for people.”
“Learn new skills and improve existing ones.”
“Enjoy collaborating with colleagues on interesting projects.”
“Earn enough money to support myself and do fun things.”
The social environment you have entered is the workplace. Your workplace no doubt has many different values, but there is one simplified, quantified value that is present in almost every workplace and has been since the dawn of industrialization: the number of hours you spend at work.
In many jobs, that value is quite explicit: workers are paid by the hour, or the company bills by the hour. But even in those cases, the number of hours you spend at work is not what is truly valued, either by organizations or individuals. The true values are more subtle and more nuanced, harder to quantify, harder to assess.
“Hours worked” is not an unreasonable simplification. It can be compared across different kinds of jobs. It is readily observable and trackable. There is a non-inverse relationship between hours worked and output produced.
However, it’s a much worse simplification than it used to be.
When all work happened at a physical workplace, it was easier to observe and track. When more kinds of work were grounded in physical and mechanical throughput, the relationship between hours worked and output was more direct and predictable.
For modern knowledge workers, the relationship between “hours at work” and “value of work produced” is quite tenuous. You can be in back-to-back meetings from 8am to 6pm, and produce very little in the way of valued output. You can have a creative breakthrough in the shower, when you’re not really “working.” The hours you spend sitting at your laptop or being present in a physical office are poor predictors of value produced.
Even so, there are countless jobs where the relationship between hours and value remains tightly linked. ER doctors and ICU nurses must be in the hospital with patients. Teachers must be in the classroom with students. Waitstaff and chefs must be in the restaurant with diners. “Being present and available” is a primary source of value, quite apart from whatever gets accomplished during that time. The same is true for those knowledge workers having breakthroughs in the shower. Nowadays, it relies less on physical proximity, but being present and available for clients, colleagues, and internal customers is valuable in and of itself.
What is not valuable is “hours spent at work.” It’s an example of pure value capture: for generations, we have organized work around a simplified, easy-to-count proxy. It dominates our thinking, making it more difficult to find new ways of approaching flexible work, because we have lost sight of what really matters.
A values-driven approach to flexibility
At Workomics, our work is flexible-by-design. You can work from home. You can work from the office. You can log in from Mexico or Thailand or the UK1. You can get a haircut or head to the gym or meet your contractor in the middle of the day. You can start your workday at 10:43 am. You can leave at 3:15pm. Our employment agreements do not actually specify a required number of hours at work each week. Instead, we say this:
Workomics team members and clients live and work across North American time zones. The shape of the work changes day-by-day: sometimes it calls for independent heads-down time, sometimes it requires high levels of responsiveness, sometimes it demands intense collaboration. You should be sufficiently connected so that your availability and responsiveness does not impede your colleagues’ productivity, the quality of your work, or the satisfaction of your clients. As a rough guideline, most days you should plan to be available for meetings and synchronous collaboration for at least six hours between 8am and 9pm Eastern Time.
As a policy, it’s unusually non-prescriptive on when work happens and how much of it you need to do. We loosely suggest that “most days” you should be working at least 6 hours inside a wide 13-hour window. But the bulk of the policy is focused on what we really value — that people are structuring their work days so that the work is high quality, the clients are happy, and no one’s progress is blocked because someone else is getting a haircut.
It’s also a policy that requires good faith on both sides. If employees take it as an invitation to do as little work as possible, or employers take it as freedom to regularly expect responsiveness at 8:30pm, the whole system breaks down.
Several things enable this level of flexibility:
Vast swaths of predictability. If you know what your deliverables are, when they are due, and what good looks like, then flexibility is easier. And indeed, Workomics puts considerable effort into rigorous project planning with realistic contingencies specifically so we can have the level of predictability we need to work so flexibly. For their part, employees accept the project schedules as natural limitations on flexibility, and adjust their schedules to meet deadlines and attend key meetings.
Nonetheless, we are a client services business, which means we are often faced with changing or emerging client needs that require responsiveness or adaptiveness. Our flexible work needs to be balanced with reciprocity and shared accountability for outcomes. Last month, we had a big deliverable that required a last-minute, weekend push, and there wasn’t a person in the company who wasn’t logging in over the weekend to pitch in and get the work done. The company affords employees enormous flexibility as long as the work gets delivered. The employees reciprocate that same level of flexibility in the rare cases it’s required to do the work.
Our day-to-day flexibility is enabled by a counterbalancing rigidity for paid time off. Vacation must be formally requested and approved via email. Planned days off are tracked centrally, and we stop accepting requests for weeks that are over-subscribed. We do this because flexible work is much harder when a team is short-staffed: there are fewer people to cover the gaps or handle any surprises. In order to maintain flexibility for people who aren’t on vacation, and to have vacations where people can be fully disconnected for multiple weeks, planned absences need to be carefully managed.
Finally, we recognize the limits of our baseline flexibility. Because there are deliverables and deadlines (sometimes aggressive!), because there is an expectation of reciprocity, so that sometimes work bleeds into personal time; because there is less flexibility in time off, it’s hard to fully segregate work time from personal time. And yet many of our staff want to have dedicated chunks of time where they can teach or take a course, pursue a creative project, or further a business venture. For those cases, we offer more formal flexible work arrangements. In those cases, employees take pro-rated pay and benefits, in exchange for protected time where they know they will not have to be present and available.
It’s hard to break free of value capture. When a sick kid or a renovation takes up most of your day, you still tend to think in terms of “making up the hours.” You need to regularly remind yourself that the important thing is delivering the work and meeting the deadlines. But if we want to really grapple with flexible work, we can’t focus narrowly on the number of hours, when you start and stop, or where you sit to do the work. Individuals value a wide array of things — yes, the ability to dictate their own schedule and balance personal and work priorities. But they also value work they feel proud of, camaraderie and collaboration, learning and growth, helping others (colleagues, clients) achieve goals. Policies for flexible work should reflect the breadth of those values and how best to achieve them within the confines of a given business model.
Workomics Staff Picks
Some links from the team this month:
We've been having a great time incorporating Made Manifest's Pebble Talk into our weekly game plan meetings. They're a curated set of ice-breaker-style questions that make it really easy to build in a few minutes of fun conversation and team-building before we get down to business.
Some pharmaceutical companies are helping to connect patients to prescribers directly via Telehealth, as a patient marketing technique. This approach is facing scrutiny as lawmakers investigate how patient requests for medications and prescribing behaviour may be influenced.
Inspired by this paper, we had a lot of fun discussing who on the Workomics team hears the words when they are reading silently, and who just sort of “absorbs” the information without hearing the words. (I am an absorber, 100%)
In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I did a podcast appearance back in December on Tom Lietz’s podcast Storylinking. We had a really great conversation about co-creation as a tool for breaking down organizational barriers, and how co-creation intersects with storytelling. You can give it a listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Stay warm out there — spring is just around the corner!
As long as you are temporarily visiting those places. We cannot handle the tax and employment law implications of employees who aren’t legal residents of specific Canadian provinces.
The festive season is upon us. The final push to the holidays and year-end always leaves me over-extended, this year more than most. We’re trying to move back into our house and get ready for Christmas while the renovation is more finished than it was, but somehow still not finished. There was a moment last week where I was packaging up Christmas cookies in my living room while someone painted the ceiling over my head. That’s pretty much the vibe.
But Christmas will come regardless, and whatever preparations have been done will turn out to be enough. And more than ever, I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks away from laptops and to-do lists.
For this holiday edition of the newsletter, I’ve got a new instalment in our women entrepreneur series. I sat down with Lindsay Housman earlier this year, and learned all about her company Hettas, the research they’ve done to design their running shoes for women, and how she’s building an organization with flexibility at its core. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
Wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season and all the best in the new year head. See you back here in 2025.
In Comradeship,
S.
An old-fashioned tree.
An conversation with Lindsay Housman
This installment in our Women’s Entrepreneur Series is an interview with Lindsay Housman. She is the CEO of Hettas, a female-specific performance running shoe brand. Hettas launched just over a year ago, in November 2023, with three different shoes that vary by workout preference. Lindsay and Hettas were recently named the grand prize winner of the 2024 High Five Grant for Moms, and last month, the Hettas Alma Cruise shoe received a very nice write-up in Canadian Running magazine. You can purchase Hettas shoes through their online store and specialty retailers.
In this interview, Lindsay talks about how Hettas emphasizes women-focused research, her philosophy on flexible work, and the challenges of fundraising as a female founder.
SB: Tell me a little about Hettas. What do you do and what makes you special?
LH: Hettas makes running shoes specifically for women. Hettas came to be through my own experience with athletics and sports. I’ve been a lifelong recreational athlete, but I experienced many foot issues, which seem to be getting worse as I get older. If I have this much foot pain now, how am I going to be active when I’m in my 80s? That was what inspired me to start learning more about the athletic shoe industry.
It blew my mind that shoes, to this day, are still largely developed, tested, and researched based on male anatomy and physiology. I was thinking about myself, the type of impact that my body puts on my feet through sport, and what a difference it would make if my anatomy had been considered. Would I still have this much foot pain? Is there a better way to make shoes fit for women, if we start by considering their physiology?
We wanted to back our shoes with research and make that research public. We partnered with Simon Fraser University to research female biomechanics to inform our development and testing process. The result is three models varying in firmness. The fit is the same across all three, but they have a very different feel in their firmness and propulsion which makes them suited for different types of runs.
Community is also a big element of our brand. Running is part of the social fabric that connects our customers to their communities. We believe in the power of community to offer support and social connection and to hold you accountable to your training schedule.
SB: Tell me more about your focus on research. Partnering with an academic institution is hard when you’re launching a business, because there is an up-front investment but the commercial pay-off is a ways off.
LH: The bigger brands have large internal research teams, but that information isn’t easily accessible to the public. We know there is a large gap in research for women’s healthcare, and it’s the same when it comes to sport and performance. Women have largely been excluded from sport and performance research for hormonal reasons. It’s a variable to control for, whether it’s your monthly menstrual cycle or your hormonal phase of life.
Women are not represented in the sports science research. We wanted to understand how hormones affect women’s bodies, muscles, tendons, and ligaments, and how we should be considering shoe design at different hormonal life stages and during your monthly menstrual cycle. These are the kinds of answers we’re looking for.
When we chose to partner with Simon Fraser, we knew it would be a long lead time. Research projects take time to set up. However, we’ve been able to act on the research when it’s in a draft state. Research we did in 2022 is under peer review to be published in 2025 but we’ve had access to it since August 2022.
Working with the university has also given us access to their labs to do mechanical shoe testing. Those research and test cycles are much quicker, allowing us to iterate on the shoe design.
SB: How do the shoes get to market and how does your organization get the brand out into the world?
LH: Doug Sheridan is our shoe partner and co-owner. He has been in the athletic shoe industry for over forty years. We have one full-time employee who is a recent university graduate. We also work with an elite athlete, Rachel Cliff, who helps us build community and training plans. She works for us part-time while recovering from an injury and being a mom to a toddler. We work with a marketing advisor and we also have a sales advisor with a lot of expertise in specialty retail. Most of us are juggling other jobs or training.
For the two and a half years leading up to the launch, we were focused on product development, research, marketing, and building the website. We had contractors helping us with PR, social strategy, and graphic design. For now, we’ve transitioned our marketing to be more grassroots — working with micro-influencers, run clubs, and so on. We’re currently doing a capital raise, and once we complete that, the plan is to bring more of those marketing capabilities back.
For now, we’re focused on sales. That means getting the product into specialty retail stores, building operational processes to support specialty retail, and partnering with our specialty retailers to become part of their community.
SB: I’m curious how you think about building a sense of organization and culture, in a position where your one full-time employee is a recent graduate and everyone else is juggling a variety of different endeavours.
LH: I’ve always run flexible teams. One key to flexible teams is being transparent about the organization’s values, purpose, and mission. When you find people who are aligned with your mission, your culture, and your values, it’s easier to have flexibility and juggle multiple jobs because they’re passionate about the work to begin with.
We are also very supportive of making mistakes and failing. Often, I see teams fall down because there’s a culture of fear around reaching out for help, asking for support, or making a mistake. When you’re a remote team, running lean and fast, the reality is the chance for errors is higher. You have to take those as learning opportunities and ensure that everybody knows that it’s okay. It’s part of what stage we’re at. This helps us foster a willingness to ask for help and to take a risk within the team.
SB: I imagine it’s a bit tricky to get the right level of time in a role, when the job’s remote, flexible, and people are juggling a bunch of other things.
LH: I have a completely different philosophy on work and being in office. The traditional in office 9 to 5 doesn’t work for me or many women I know, particularly for women who tend to have more responsibilities with family or elder care. It hinders promotion. When my twins were preschoolers, I lived in Australia and had a job at a company that was 90% female. Most of us at the company had children under the age of ten. I ran their IT department, but I worked a half-day on Monday to take my kids to swimming lessons. The company’s leadership was open to me being at a senior level and working four days a week. They understood that there were things in my kids’ lives where I wanted to participate.
It really shaped what I saw as a healthy work environment. People didn’t feel compromised in their choices, and the amount of output was outstanding.
When I moved back to Vancouver, I started leading the IT department at Native Shoes. I had a tight budget, and I needed a lot of specialist skills. I adapted what I learned in Australia to create a team of specialists, most working less than five days a week. It’s been seven years, and everyone who started with me on that team at Native is still there today. It’s not just about being a mom. I had one woman working four days a week while doing a psychology degree. We worked flexibly around her course.
That’s the philosophy that I’ve brought to Hettas as well. Not everybody is a mom, but everyone has different things that are important to them. As we scale, we’re figuring out how to create a flexible environment where each employee has space in their job for what’s important to them, so they can feel like their whole self.
SB: You’re still doing the Native Shoes role. How do you integrate that with running Hettas?
LH: I consult at Native Shoes two and a half days a week, which is two days of meeting availability, and then people can message me at any point. That’s down from four days a week.
Right now, what I get from the Native portion of my life is a lot of stability. I know my team; I’ve worked with some of them for seven years. They’re independent, so I’m much more of a steward, an escalation point. There’s a lot of newness at Hettas, where I’m having to learn things like marketing and sales. There’s something nice about going back to a stable boat. Start-up life brings a lot of emotional highs and lows — lots of learning and fire-fighting. Native is less of a roller coaster.
SB: You mentioned you’re raising capital. Can we talk about funding?
LH: My husband and I personally funded the first two research studies out of Simon Fraser. The first 18 months were funded by my husband and me and family and friends. Doug, our product partner, has funded the shoe development. There has been a lot of bootstrapping.
It’s really challenging to raise money for consumer-packaged goods in Canada. Investors like tech. They like to know that there are contracts and set revenue streams; investing in a consumer-based product is a lot riskier. We were really fortunate and did some initial raises with angel investors and friends and family.
Last year, we went to the US with a goal of raising $2-million USD. That proved really challenging — 2023 was a tough environment. Venture capital is challenging at best. I was doing a lot of it on my own, trying to get meetings. It was nearly impossible to get past an initial first meeting. After we did a small bridge round that raised just under $200,000, I looked for help in all sorts of places: a group called Female Founders Collective, a female-focused accelerator, a program called Power to Pitch, hiring an advisor.
But the other thing I did was bring my husband back on the fundraising trail.
Female founders raising alone get less than 2% of venture funding. Having a man in the conversation takes the rate from 2% to 30%. I’ve done all that work with accelerators and advisors, and all the meetings we’ve had so far have come through him. It’s like time-travelling back to the 50s when you used to need a man to sign for your car loan. Showing up as an accomplished woman with a strong career background doesn’t matter.
When I look at the hoops that women have to jump through to raise money, I find it very frustrating. The pitch competitions are not about your business idea or your capability to run a business. It’s about the sales pitch only, not the work that comes afterwards. There isn’t enough time to get in-depth on what you are building. I feel like change is coming and there are a lot of advocates for women. But at the end of the day, funders are largely male and have an unconscious bias and look for founders who are similar to themselves. It’s harder to relate to a woman pitching, especially if she’s pitching a female-specific product.
SB: Change is coming but it is also way too slow. I would describe you as having a very feminist business — not just led and owned by a woman, but specifically focused on empowering women. Can you talk a bit about that?
I believe that the confidence, leadership, and teamwork that comes from girls and women in sport is beneficial throughout our lives, not to mention the benefits for mental and physical health! We really look at the shoe as a vehicle to support women in sport, through community-building, education, research, and give-back programming.
SB: How do you define success for Hettas?
LH: I get e-mails from athletes that tell me how the shoes have helped them. Maybe they thought they weren’t going to be able to run the Boston Marathon because they were developing an injury, but we’ve been able to provide a product that provided them relief. Success to me is knowing that the work that we’re doing is making a difference.
If Hettas has strong financials but we were not making an impact in the world of sports and athletics, I would not see that as a success. Of course, we need financial success to survive, but it’s the impact on women in sport that gets me most excited.
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