Why Does Work Suck? Challenging the Status Quo to Make Work Not Suck

Daniel: 00:12

Thanks for listening to the Make Work Not Suck podcast. My name is Daniel Steele. I’m here with my good friend Ryan Hodges, and this is our first episode. We’re just exploring why is it that work sucks so much for so many people. We’re going to look at a couple of the root causes of that, see if there’s anything we can do to fix it. Hope you enjoy Make Work Not Suck, our podcast that talks about exactly that—our process, vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real-world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck.

Ryan: 00:50

Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast. All right, Daniel, so I’m just going to come out and say what everybody’s thinking: “Make Work Not Suck” is a dumb name for a podcast. Uh, work just sucks—that’s just how it’s always been, it’s how it’s always going to be, and I’m not entirely sure why we are making a podcast called Make Work Not Suck. So, explain to me why we’re doing this.

Daniel: 01:18

Can I ask you a really profound question?

Ryan: 01:22

Sure, go ahead.

Daniel: 01:25

Why does work have to suck? If that’s…

Ryan: 01:27

I don’t know if it has to. I think it often does. I mean, most Americans spend most of their waking hours at work, and I don’t know what the stats are currently, but…

Daniel: 01:42

One-third of your life.

Ryan: 01:44

One-third of your life spent at work. Okay, one-third of your life at work, and it’s got to be over 50% of people are disengaged. I mean, that number could be closer to 70%, I don’t know the numbers recently, and for some of those people, it’s not just like they’re disengaged—for some of them, they actively hate their job. So, I think work sucks. I mean, it’s like a lyric in songs—“work sucks.”

Daniel: 02:06

Yeah, but you said it always has been and always will be—why does it always have to be? Can we change…challenge the paradigm, challenge the status quo, and make it not suck?

Ryan: 02:27

I would counter your counter with examples. I would love to see an example of where work has not sucked because I would say for most people, most of the time, work sucks.

Daniel: 02:41

Okay, well, there’s some good and bad examples, and we can go with the high-level ones. Why don’t we go with a couple of books? You know, there’s Delivering Happiness, everybody in…

Ryan: 03:04

People in some unique companies that actually like their jobs. But that’s not everybody, is it?

Daniel: 03:09

No, no, I would say it’s the exception, not the rule.

Ryan: 03:11

Yeah, well, and don’t pay attention to the founder and the history after the fact, you know, years after the book was written.

Daniel: 03:18

Yeah, all right, we won’t talk about that either, but you know, and Good to Great talks about some companies—Jim Collins’ book talks about good companies. I don’t remember the personal component of that, but I’m going to assume that the people who worked for those companies didn’t hate their jobs.

Ryan: 03:41

So, I think the thing we’re missing here is those are rare exceptions to some very big companies or companies that became big. I mean, right—Zappos was bought by Amazon for what, a billion dollars? A little over a billion dollars, so that’s big. But I think what you’re actually hitting on is the average American working at the average small business. What are there, two million small businesses in America?

Daniel: 04:02

Okay, we always talk about Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, Fortune 5000, right? There are two million small businesses in America, and I’m going to guess what you’re referring to is the average American that works in one of those two million small businesses.

Ryan: 04:16

Well, I’ve worked for two Fortune 500 companies, I’ve worked for multiple startups, a couple of companies in between. Most of my co—well, we’ll leave my personal opinion out of this for a second—I would say most of my co-workers felt like their work sucked more days than not. Like, we’ve all had the good day every now and then, but I would say work sucks is kind of the norm.

Daniel: 04:41

Well, then why did we start a podcast called Make Work Not Suck?

Ryan: 04:44

That’s literally what I asked you! That was my question to you—this was your idea!

Daniel: 04:48

Because we believe there’s a way to make work not suck. There is a method, there’s a belief that we can apply to all aspects of our life, and if we are applying that method, not only personally but professionally and as an organization, we can actually make work not suck.

Ryan: 05:07

That sounds really nice in theory. Have you ever seen it actually happen?

Daniel: 05:11

Yes.

Ryan: 05:14

Okay, can you tell me a little bit about that?

Daniel: 05:16

No, no. [Laughs] You just have to believe. Just got to believe—if you build it, he will come; if you build it, they will come. Yeah, no, I think that’s what I’ve spent the past, uh, 15 years working to achieve. There are a lot of personal stories I can share and journeys along the way, but the reality of it is that work doesn’t have to suck. If an organization really wants to achieve something great, they can invest in their—it’s all stereotypical—if you invest in the people, the people invest in…you know, take care of the customers, customers pay their bills in return. And I think it was Richard Branson that says that if you take care of the people, the people take care of the customer—something along those lines. The thing is, is that’s true, but the problem is we don’t know how to get it. And we all want it, but we don’t know how to get it. And because we don’t know how to get it, we go with what we can see, touch, feel…you know, we get books, and we read the books, and we empathize with the book, but we don’t know how to apply the book. And then, you know, maybe we know how to do it for ourselves, but we don’t know how to do it within the organization and do it as a unit.

Ryan: 06:27

So I can make my job not suck, but I can’t help you?

Daniel: 06:30

Oh no, you—well, if you go get a self-help book off the shelf, yes.

Ryan: 06:35

Right. Yeah, no, that’s what I always thought you would have to do to make work not suck is you just go get a different job, go work for another company.

Daniel: 06:42

Well, then you just get—you know, work still sucks. It just sucks less until it sucks again or sucks more, I don’t know.

Ryan: 06:46

Yeah, yeah, it depends on if you make a good or a bad career move into the next company. You know, I was on a phone call earlier today, and it was—we were talking about employee success, and it was, you know, that journey of onboarding the employee. And the interesting one was the lady on the phone said, “You know, these people are new employees, and they have fears. You know, they just quit their job or whatever circumstance it was to work for this new company, and they come in, and there’s fears.” And then what we were talking about is, if you don’t make sure that onboarding is successful, then that doesn’t build success for the longevity. But then you’re instantly getting right into work sucking.

Daniel: 07:33

Mhmm.

Ryan: 07:35

So think about all the people that switch jobs, and this is the one—it’s going to work, it’s going to work. And then they just…right back into the same old bureaucracy, the same old paradigm. P&L, P&L, P&L.

Daniel: 07:45

Don’t get me wrong, P&L is important.

Ryan: 07:47

Sure.

Daniel: 07:48

But if the P&L is the only thing that drives results, then the company’s never going to be truly successful in a purpose-driven way that can actually achieve the vision, make the…uh, elevate the employee, elevate the customers, and achieve the vision for the visionary.

Ryan: 08:03

Is this just like an employee kumbaya podcast? Like, we’re going to coach people on how to give good hugs to all of their employees?

Daniel: 08:07

Totally. Just give everybody a hug. Just give more hugs.

Ryan: 08:12

Just send all the lawsuits. I’m gonna be great at this.

Daniel: 08:20

Um, all right, so hold on. Those things that you rattled off—you, I think, talked about purpose, you talked about employees, you talked about profits. Did I miss one?

Ryan: 08:32

Oh, pro—uh, processes.

Daniel: 08:37

Processes, yes. Okay, so are we talking about all of those?

Ryan: 08:40

We are.

Daniel: 08:42

Okay, because that’s a little different, because I hear people talk about purpose, purpose, purpose, which is great, um, people, people, people, which is great, profits, profits, profits—obviously, you got to have those.

Ryan: 08:52

You’re hitting on what drives me insane about the average consultant because one of them is good at one of those, and they say that’s the solution that’s going to solve all the problems. They come in, “If you just have the right KPIs, your business is going to be successful.” And you get some good KPIs, but then the customer experience falls apart, and then you’re like, “Well, now we got to hire another consultant, and we got to hire another consultant.” So you’re hitting on my distaste for consultants at the moment.

Daniel: 09:15

Okay, but that’s okay, that’s a different rant for another day. I happen to be a consultant, so we’re going to try to work through that together.

Ryan: 09:22

All right, you’ve said you’ve done this. How about share a little bit about your background, where you’re coming from? Because that might be helpful for people to understand who it is that’s actually on this podcast.

Daniel: 09:36

I always hate the background question. I always hate talking about myself. I’m just a guy, just a guy that likes doing business things.

Ryan: 09:45

You know, like what kind of business things?

Daniel: 09:46

I love going into organizations and helping them get to that next level. I love going in and helping them connect their people to purpose, uh, the mission, you know, how they serve the customers, help the visionary or the owner-founders, etc., get into hitting those results they’re trying to hit and building that legacy.

Ryan: 10:00

So you’re a consultant.

Daniel: 10:07

No, see, the thing is, is I don’t just go in and tell people what to do. I actually put myself in the organization and turn it around or elevate it or whatever we’re trying to do. And I’ve done it a handful of times now—in some cases, I bought the company, and in some cases, I was brought in as the hired gun and worked with the organization. Other cases, I started the business and built it from the ground up. So, um, I think all in all, this is probably about, you know, rodeo number 30 for me, and so, but that’s probably, indirectly, uh, indirectly, directly probably 150 different companies overall, but, uh, around 30 that I’ve had direct, uh, fingerprints on. Uh, but I mean, I’ve either as a, as a founder, as a, uh, acquirer, executive…

Ryan: 10:59

Right, okay. All right, so you’ve—it sounds like you’ve sat in a lot of different seats.

Daniel: 11:02

Well, and what was fun in all those various ventures is we were in transportation, distribution, software, technology, healthcare, childcare. Uh, in each one of those…

Ryan: 11:12

You also held a—you started an acting company.

Daniel: 11:15

Yeah, there was an acting company.

Ryan: 11:17

We don’t talk about that.

Daniel: 11:18

We don’t talk about the acting company.

Ryan: 11:19

No, no, we’re going to talk about that at some point. It doesn’t have to be right now, but we’re going to talk about the acting company.

Daniel: 11:22

The worst, uh, the worst—never buy a company for your wife. Um, it doesn’t—it…

Ryan: 11:27

Nice, that’s your first takeaway from today’s podcast: never buy a company for your wife.

Daniel: 11:31

Never buy a company for your wife. It’s all well-intended until you have to run it. Um, that’s, again, another story for another day. But the thing is that we learned with all of those is the same paradigm was between it. But it wasn’t just what we did as an organization. We also—we take the same methodology, we applied it into some, uh, some of our customers and how we onboarded. And there’s, you know, we’ve done this with, with small companies of a few million in revenue, you know, 20, 30 people, all the way up to multi-billion with, you know, thousands of people, and have had great successes, uh, all in between.

Ryan: 12:00

Interesting. All right, so I’ll tell a little bit about my story.

Daniel: 12:13

Yeah, what about you?

Ryan: 12:15

Um, so I have kind of played on opposite ends of the continuum. So early in my career, worked for a Fortune 500 as a kind of individual contributor and, uh, up into a management role, then worked for a midsize company that got bought by Fortune 500, so I kind of went through the acquisition experience. Um, and that was more of kind of a mid-level manager, and then went to startups and was, uh, executive at a couple of different tech startups, and then launched out on my own as—yes, you guessed it—a consultant. Uh, also have done a little bit of executive coaching along the way as well. So I have seen work suck from the inside and from the outside, right? I’ve been part of the machine—companies with tens of thousands, one of them hundreds of thousands of employees, um, all the way down to, you know, employee number five at a venture-funded or bootstrapped startup. And some of those were great experiences, and some of them were miserable experiences, and some of them were different in between. Uh, and now I get the privilege of working with a lot of clients, uh, some of whom are business owners who…

Daniel: 13:00

Want work to not suck for their people, but don’t know how.

Ryan: 13:21

Um, and I actually find it really interesting how many executives, business owners, CEOs—like they—they want their people to enjoy coming to work. They want their people to contribute the best that they have to give. They want people to like working there. I mean, it’s work, right? You—they pay you to be there for a reason, right? If it was just fun all the time, you would pay to go—you would pay to get in, right? It would be Disneyland. But I think most of the executives I’ve worked with, like, they want their people to enjoy what they’re doing, but how? And I think that’s one of the problems that I’ve really enjoyed working with people on is how do you make a company an enjoyable place to work for everyone, right? Not just for the C-suite, not just for the entry-level employees because they’ve got, you know, Mountain Dew fountain drinks, but how do you really give them purpose, give them, um, a good culture? How do you give them good career advancement opportunities? How do you help them know that they’re winning? Like, that’s hard. And even the people who want to do it and want to do it well oftentimes struggle to actually achieve what they want to do.

Daniel: 13:56

Yeah, well, let’s hit on a few—let’s rabbit trail for a second—hit on a few cruxes of a business, right? So you’ve got typically visionary, you know, guys got a lot of thousand ideas a minute, uh, you know, very results-driven typically, uh, you know, high drive, etc., right? And then, you know, no organization will survive without just—you know, you’ve got to have doers. You’ve got to have people that do the work. You know, sometimes it’s mundane work if it’s working in a warehouse or, you know, just doing repetitive tasks. Uh, you’ve got to have people to do that, and there’s a gap there. Then you—let’s talk about with, uh, IBM, you know, years ago they—they kind of created the corporate ladder, but they also had the—you have the engineering route, and you have the management route, right? Well, small business still sucks at doing that, but, you know, at least they recognized that there was a path for people that were good at managing resources and there were people that were good at influencing change, you know, basically the engineers. Most organizations suck at that, and most—most organizations, especially in the small business space, they—they find the best performer that can perform a task very well, and they elevate them into management because they’re the number one sales rep, they’re the best customer success person, they’re the best…

Ryan: 16:06

The best is when they do this with developers, right? The best developer becomes the development manager.

Daniel: 16:10

Yes. I’ve never seen it work.

Ryan: 16:12

No, it does not work because they don’t know how to manage a group of people. Managing people—management—is a special skill trait, just like sales. A lot of people think sales is, “Ah, anybody can do it,” but why is it a degreed field? Why can you go get a degree in sales, but everybody can do it? It doesn’t make sense.

Daniel: 16:33

Not as easy as it looks because it’s actually a skill set. And so one thing that in the small business space—but I think this is not just in small business, I think this is all the way up and down the chain, from Fortune 500 all the way down. Just in Fortune 500, there’s such big machines, you can just throw bodies at it, and it kind of produces results. You know, there’s a lot of waste and a lot of overhead, etc. But in the small business space, you don’t have the luxury of that.

Ryan: 16:54

Yeah.

Daniel: 16:56

And so there’s a lot of chaos and crazy that goes on because we don’t have good management structures, we don’t have the right fluent people in the right places, and then they get into the level of time span. The visionary can see that vision out there, but they don’t know how to achieve it. They can see the top of the mountain, but they need people to climb the mountain. And I’m stealing this quote from Roy Spence—he says, “You’ve got doers and dreamers. You’ve got to marry the doers and the dreamers together because the doers will climb the wrong damn mountain every time unless you put them with the dreamers that know which mountain to climb.”

Ryan: 17:30

Mhmm.

Daniel: 17:32

And that is one of the cruxes of organizations, is we’ve got people that—we have wrong people in management, we have this time span gap where we have expectations for people to self-perform. Small businesses—companies that start get started, you know, you start out with three, five people—communication, right?

Ryan: 17:47

Yep.

Daniel: 17:48

Me and you talking, easy, one way here, boom, we’re great at it, killing it. We add a third person right here—now I’ve got to keep two people in check right there, boom. We add a fourth person, the complexity starts increasing.

Ryan: 17:57

I like that guy.

Daniel: 18:00

You get to six people, right? The amount of communication flowing is on an exponential level, and you’ve got to put in systems. But we don’t know how to implement systems because we’re really good at doing the jobs we did there. And then we elevate people that shouldn’t—that aren’t managers, and then we expect them to put in systems. And you can see how this starts compounding into why work sucks.

Ryan: 18:21

Sucks.

Daniel: 18:23

So, that’s why work sucks.

Ryan: 18:25

Yes, that’s one of the many reasons. But okay, you can see how it compounds.

Daniel: 18:29

Yeah, yeah, it gets a little out of hand a little quickly. All right, so why the podcast? Why do we want to have this conversation?

Ryan: 18:38

Because there’s a better way. It’s not the only way; there are multiple ways, but I think we’re stuck. We’re still stuck in the paradigm of the past. We’re still operating a lot like Gantt charts—Gantt charts are World War I technology we invented to move troops. Our own militaries do not use Gantt charts anymore to move our militaries around.

Daniel: 19:01

All right, I’m highly offended because my undergrad is in industrial engineering, and I love me some Gantt charts.

Ryan: 19:05

Oh, I love Gantt charts too, don’t get me wrong, they have their purpose. But we’re still using ancient technology; we’re still using things that existed back in the ’60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s to run business today. We’ve evolved—we have more technology, we have more…we’ve evolved technologically more in the past 10 years than we have almost in the past 100 years.

Daniel: 19:28

Yep.

Ryan: 19:29

And we’re…we’re said we’re going to evolve 100 years between 2020 and 2030. We’ve got to start elevating how we operate organizations, especially those that are, you know, in the small business space because they don’t have the technology, the tools, and the resources. And the tools that are coming out today just don’t fit the bill—they’re still in the old paradigm.

Daniel: 19:51

Yeah, it’s kind of crazy how much of our corporate lingo is driven by military jargon from 100 years ago.

Ryan: 19:57

Yes.

Daniel: 19:59

And it’s kind of crazy when you go back and you read the manuals that so much of what, particularly in Fortune 500, particularly in large organizations, so much of their framework, even just their way of thinking about work, is very hierarchical, very top-down, and very command-and-control structure. And our military today, at least in the U.S., our military is much more of an agile shop than it is kind of a command-and-control shop, and yet most of corporate America hasn’t caught up to the fact that the military has evolved over the last 100 years, and we’re still…

Ryan: 20:32

Some are trying to catch up; many don’t even know they should.

Daniel: 20:36

Well, and there’s a great book, and I’m totally going to—I don’t remember the author’s name, shame on me, but I remember the book, it’s called Turn the Ship Around, and it introduced a concept called leader-leader. And it talks about teaching or leading up the chain of command and empowering people to make decisions. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about, where we’ve decentralized decision-making into…to…we elevate people to make decisions in a way that is within a safe environment that is autonomy, right? We build autonomy. But the thing is, we confuse autonomy and anarchy. We think we have…because we all agree in this clumping of culture, social-emotional gatherings, we have autonomy. But autonomy really is where everybody knows the rule of the game, everybody knows what’s at stake, everybody knows what’s inbounds, what’s out of bounds, what position you’re playing, and how to pass the ball. And when you have that, then you can empower leader-leader—the leader-leader mindset, and you can empower people to lead up the chain of command. When they know the bounds of what they can do, what they can’t do, then they can find a solution, pass it up the chain of command, allow a decision to be made that can come back down. It doesn’t have to go six steps up to…six steps back down; it can go one hop up. And if it needs to, it can keep going up as appropriate, but each person in the chain is doing their appropriate amount of work. And what you end up with is you end up with a more autonomous team that makes more decisions in the field. Let’s be honest, our frontline workers—whether you’re an actual nurse, doctor, or, sorry, nurse, restaurant employee, something like that, someone that’s out in the field in your organization—those people are the ones doing a lot of the work. They’re the ones interfacing with the customers, they’re the ones moving the products around, and if they have to wait around and just push everything up a chain and wait for decisions, it’s too late.

Ryan: 22:22

They also have all the information about what’s going on in the field.

Daniel: 22:25

Now, what we’ve also done with our antiquated technologies is we try to figure out how to put tangible measurables on every single one of those. If we over-measure everybody, then we can control the situation. And if we push that all the way up to a dashboard—you know, call this business more—more data has got to be more better, more data, we’re going to make data-driven decisions. But what we do is we turn our people into automatons, and we put too many KPIs on them because we’re trying to drive a result because we don’t have everything in balance.

Ryan: 22:51

Mhmm.

Daniel: 22:54

So work sucks because we’re out of balance.

Ryan: 22:56

Work sucks because we use outdated, antiquated methods and technologies.

Daniel: 22:58

Work sucks because we don’t have harmony into this balance that we’re going to be talking about.

Ryan: 23:06

I look forward to hearing how you’re going to fix that.

Daniel: 23:08

By challenging the status quo. I like it.

Ryan: 23:10

See, how we make work not suck is by challenging the status quo, looking at the current paradigm, and understanding that there’s a better way to do it. It’s the same way when you look at cell phones.

Daniel: 23:20

Okay.

Ryan: 23:22

What does everybody think the modern cell phone is today?

Daniel: 23:24

iPhone.

Ryan: 23:25

iPhone. Who invented the iPhone?

Daniel: 23:29

Steve Jobs and team at Apple.

Ryan: 23:30

What did they just set out to do? You know, there’s actually a clip from him—see, the first iPhone came out in 2007?

Daniel: 23:34

Yes.

Ryan: 23:36

There’s a clip from him somewhere in the mid-90s—I don’t remember the exact date—but he talked about, he says, “There’s going to be a day where people have this handheld computer in their hand and it’s going to be able to do all these great things.” And then, all these years later, boom, the iPhone appears and it changes everything, right? They challenged the status quo. They knew there was a better way to do it. So we’re going to take the same thing in how you operate and run a business. We’re going to do—we’re basically inventing the iPhone for how you run a business.

Daniel: 24:01

Changing the paradigm.

Ryan: 24:02

Changing the paradigm. How much easier is everybody’s life now? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things that—some good and bad from the iPhone and the evolution of technology—every paradigm has pros and cons.

Daniel: 24:12

Yep.

Ryan: 24:13

But that doesn’t mean we don’t evolve how we’re doing it. And if we can improve, if we can improve society—this is my theory, back to what you said earlier—one-third, or we said one-third of our lives are spent working, right?

Daniel: 24:24

Yep.

Ryan: 24:25

If work sucks, we’re stressed, we’re tired, we’re overrun. The other third of our life is spent sleeping. The last third of our life is everything else—family, kids, time off, vacations, etc.

Daniel: 24:36

Hobbies.

Ryan: 24:37

Hobbies, right, friends, exactly. So if one-third—if we can impact that one-third, wouldn’t you think people would have better sleep?

Daniel: 24:45

Oh yeah.

Ryan: 24:46

Wouldn’t you think they have better relationships with their family and their friends?

Daniel: 24:49

Not kick their dog when they come home from work.

Ryan: 24:50

Exactly. Yeah, it’d be better. So let’s change the paradigm. Let’s fix the one-third and make the world a better place.

Daniel: 24:57

I love it.

Ryan: 24:58

What do you think—does work suck?

Daniel: 25:00

It does for a lot of people, and when work sucks, it has an impact on your personal life as well. In this podcast, we’re going to explore how to make work not suck.