You Can Do More With Less When People Feel Good About ItYou Can Do More With Less When People Feel Good About It
This is the dilemma that workforce managers are going to face: How to bring workers back on board and boost their sense of mission so your company can, indeed, do more with fewer people.
February 8, 2024
Has the phrase "we're going to do more with less" ever made any employee feel good about their workplace?
When I read the New York Times' January 30, 2024, article, "Focused Cuts and Fewer Layers: Tech Layoffs Enter a New Phase," an iteration of that phrase appeared early on:
After last year’s widespread layoffs, the largest firms — including Amazon, Google and Microsoft — have in recent weeks made smaller, targeted job trims while focusing on fewer projects and shifting resources to key products such as artificial intelligence. Some tech start-ups — such as Flexport, Bolt and Brex — have slashed more deeply to stave off potential extinction. The mandate from the top is the same: Do more with less.
"Doing more with less" is a polite, albeit ungrammatical, way of saying that remaining employees' job duties are about to expand -- without an accompanying expansion of paychecks. And it is the other side of the coin to the tech industry's chatter about using artificial intelligence to boost productivity. After all, if workers' productivity is improved, fewer workers will be needed to maintain (or even improve) a business unit's outcomes.
However, productivity may not be the right metric by which to assess whether doing more with less is working. Deloitte just released its 2024 Global Human Capital Report and its article, "As human performance takes center stage, are traditional productivity metrics enough?" opens by reporting on what happened when Hitachi began tracking only one metric -- worker happiness -- and gave workers AI-based suggestions on how to boost that happiness. The results are notable:
Hitachi offered participating workers artificial intelligence–based suggestions for increasing feelings of happiness throughout the day by boosting psychological capital (self-confidence and motivation), psychological safety, and alignment with management objectives.
The early results were stunning. Workers’ psychological capital rose by 33%—a particularly meaningful improvement, given that increased psychological capital results in increased worker engagement, greater job satisfaction, and lower turnover intention and burnout. Profits increased 10%. Sales per hour at call centers increased 34%, and retail sales increased 15%. What’s more, the majority of participants said they were “happy.”
In the first paragraph of the excerpt above, one of the factors that boosted employee happiness was when a worker felt aligned with management objectives. This is something that WorkSpace Connect contributor Beth Schultz has written about as part of employee engagement. And another factor boosting employee happiness is psychological safety. In workplace management terms, psychological safety is a team phenomenon -- everyone shares the belief that it's okay to take risks, make mistakes, offer critiques or introduce new ideas, because there are no negative repercussions for doing so. One of the benefits of feeling psychologically safe at work is that workers feel more engaged and motivated.
When layoffs are happening, nobody feels safe. And if you're a remaining worker being told your job is about to get harder and your company still might lay you off anyway, it's hard to feel engaged. So this is the dilemma that workforce managers are going to face: How to bring workers back on board and boost their sense of mission so your company can, indeed, do more with fewer people.
