Shownotes
What if we reimagined work as a product, something employees subscribe to, rather than simply a place they show up?
In this thought-provoking episode of the Happier at Work podcast, Aoife O'Brien sits down with Dart Lindsley, CEO and co-founder of 11fold and host of the Work for Humans podcast. Together, they explore the innovative concept of treating work as a product, challenging traditional management mindsets, and putting employees in the role of valued customers. Dart draws from decades of experience leading HR transformation at industry giants like Cisco and Google, explaining how “work as a product” unlocks more meaningful employee experiences and, ultimately, drives better business outcomes.
In This Episode, You’ll Discover:
- Why “employees as customers” is not just a metaphor. Employees actively exchange value and have choices, demanding a product approach to work design.
- The limits of treating employees as assets or inputs, and the powerful shift to seeing them as subscribers who daily choose their work.
- How to recognise the difference between universal needs (like pay and fairness) and unique, individual motivators that require localized, team-based solutions.
- How managers can transition from controllers of assets to designers and brokers of meaningful work experiences tailored to each team member.
Related Topics Covered:
Future of Work, Workplace Motivation & Drivers
Connect with Aoife O’Brien | Host of Happier at Work®:
Connect with Dart Lindsley | CEO of 11fold and host of Work for Humans Podcast:
Related Episodes You’ll Love:
- Episode 184: A Framework for Building Happier Work Cultures with Aoife O’Brien
- Episode 197: The Journey to Workplace Happiness with Rob Dubin
- Episode 272: Beyond Happiness at Work with Dr. Mark Fabian
About Happier at Work®
Happier at Work® is the podcast for business leaders who want to create meaningful, human-centric workplaces. Hosted by Aoife O’Brien, the show explores leadership, career clarity, imposter syndrome, workplace culture, and employee engagement — helping you and your team thrive.
If you enjoy podcasts like WorkLife with Adam Grant, The Happiness Lab, or Squiggly Careers, you’ll love Happier at Work®.
Join Aoife O’Brien for weekly insights on leadership, workplace culture, career clarity, imposter syndrome, and creating work that works for you.
Website: https://happieratwork.ie LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ
Mentioned in this episode:
Thriving Talent Book
Transcripts
What if we reimagined work to be a product rather than what it currently is and we have the opportunity to design what that means for us, how it benefits the business and how it can impact more positively on our own lives. That is the question that we tackle on today's episode of the Happier at Work Podcast, the award winning podcast for People First Leaders. I'm your host, Aoife o' Brien and I'm the career and culture strategist for People First Leaders. Dart Lindsley is my guest and we talk about work as a product and what do you hire work to do for you? So it could be something like solving puzzles, it could be something like giving you a stage or a platform to speak on. We have such a thought provoking conversation. I know that it's going to get your brain rattling a little bit and open your mind a little bit to a new way of thinking. As Dart says himself, it is quite a new area and it's ripe for exploration right at the precipice of where the known meets the unknown. So if you're into that kind of thing, this episode is absolutely for you.
Aoife O'Brien [:It will challenge the way you think about work. If we're not already connected, feel free to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn. It's where I'm most active and do get involved in the conversation. I share about the podcast on LinkedIn, so I'd love to know what you thought of today and if there's something that you're going to do differently as a result of listening. And also I would love to get a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to leave a comment below. Dart, you're so welcome to the Happier at Work Podcast. I stumbled upon your podcast when I was doing some research for one of my guests who was on recently, Robert Glaser, and I was just captivated by the ideas that you had, the ideas that you shared on it, and I really thought that it's so much value that you could bring to my own audience.
Aoife O'Brien [:So you're very welcome to the show. Do you want to let listeners know a little bit about your background, how you got into doing what you're doing today?
Dart Lindsley [:Sure. I'm currently the CEO and co founder of a work experience design firm called Elevenfold and I am the host of a podcast called Work for Humans. I got Here through about 25 years of leading transformation functions inside HR organizations, big ones like the kinds of organizations that you've worked for. So Cisco Systems And Google. So it was while I was working as the head of business architecture for Cisco Systems that I started to realize that we were as organizations missing something really important. And so just to say what business architecture is, because people use the word to mean different things, Business architecture is a planning function. My job was to make sure that the human resources department at Cisco Systems responded to business change in a coordinated way across all of its operations. So that's what business architecture does.
Dart Lindsley [:And to do that, we create these enormous abstract models of how the company connects to itself and how each part of the company serves other parts. And so my responsibility was to understand really how HR, and I'll say management in general, was serving the purpose of the company. And while I was working on that and my team was working on it, we started to realize that employees appeared in our models as inputs to production, which is sort of the way they are traditionally. We are all traditionally thought of and also as customers outside the company. And at first I thought it was a modeling glitch. I'm sort of like, you know, I'm going to ignore that because that's a little weird. But then I. More and more evidence started to stack up that in fact, employees really are customers.
Dart Lindsley [:They're not metaphorically customers, they're like, not like customers, they're actual customers, which is that they exchange value with our enterprises, which our enterprises cannot survive without and are free not to. And that's what a customer is.
Aoife O'Brien [:Because I think we often talk about, you know, treat your employees like your customers or put your employees ahead of customers because they're the ones who are dealing with your customers. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone explicitly say, you know, they actually are customers of the organization.
Dart Lindsley [:Well, and where you will hear it is you will hear it in organizations that have decided to have HR as a service, as a product for employees. And so the most unusual thing of this may not be that employees are customers. The most unusual step of where it led me is that what are employees customers of? And so I started researching that and realized that what employees really want from work is quality work. It's not HR services. Nobody comes to work for a more user friendly benefits portal. People come to work for good work. And so that's where the work as a product approach came from, which is how do we deliver extraordinary work as a product for employees, as customers.
Aoife O'Brien [:Did you have any sort of aha moments or maybe blockers that got in the way of this thinking? If you were like, still, you've, you're like, oh, hang on, I've never thought about this before and now suddenly there's this new way of thinking, like, what obstacles did you face?
Dart Lindsley [:Yeah, in my own brain. And it's so funny because I get objections to this and I'm sort of like, yes, I totally understand where that's coming from because I had many of the same concerns. So I come from a process background and in. And in my background there's one customer and that's the revenue generating customer, the person you meet at the cash register, that's the person you're optimizing for. So the idea of focusing too heavily internally at an internal person seems like a distraction from what you're really your real customer. Well, I realized a couple of different things. First of all, you have to go back to why we care about customers. It's because they exchange value with us.
Dart Lindsley [:It's not just revenue at the exchange. And second of all, they're free not to. And employees fit those criteria. And we only say that employees are inside the company by convention. There's no reason to think that employees are inside. And management thinks of employees that way because the management discipline that we inherited from the industrial age thinks of employees as resources that have been acquired, like raw materials or capital equipment that are inside the company and are owned and controlled.
Aoife O'Brien [:Hence the name resources.
Dart Lindsley [:Surely no resources, human capital, assets, these are all terms of ownership and thingness and lack of agency. But the truth is, as we are all actually subscribers to work, and we think every day whether or not we're going to subscribe to this product tomorrow. And we think every minute or we don't even think, but we do decide whether or not we're going to pay attention to the work in front of me this minute. And so employees are not inside the company in that respect. And I would argue that every person in a company is more complex than the whole company. The company can't hold employees inside. It's more accurate to think of employees as the company being inside employees. That's possible.
Dart Lindsley [:Breaking this idea of employees inside and getting into the idea that employees are subscribers outside the company, making decisions every day.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah, it's a hard one, I think, to wrap your head around if you've never heard of this concept before. But as you're saying it, it makes total sense. What are the kinds of things that people say to you in relation to this that like this couldn't work? Do they eventually come around and see that point of. Or are there people who still think, no, this is a bit too Far out there for me.
Dart Lindsley [:We get both. And the people who are most ready to hear the idea there's a handful of we don't have. We'll have to collect more data to really get a good statistical sample. But this is an anecdotal Founders. Founders understand customers. Founders are thinking about the whole system. They're not restricting their scope like many departments do, including HR departments. To say, no, this is the only thing we can be responsible for.
Dart Lindsley [:We can't be responsible for the experience of work. Founders are in a position where they see the whole company and they already know what it's like to serve one customer and to say, oh, there's another customer in the room. They're in a position to think that way. And this is especially true of founders whose companies are exceeding a thousand, where they are starting to realize that they can no longer, longer be the source of how the company operates and its culture and that they need to scale that Product managers get it. They're like, oh, this really hard thing. Work that and employment that I've been dealing with, it's just another product. And so they're like, I get products. Let's do that.
Dart Lindsley [:CX people. So people who are close to customer experience understand it in part because customer experience has known for a long time and has had great data to show that employee experience affects customer experience and vice versa. And so they're already thinking about it.
Aoife O'Brien [:So there's some people who just inherently, yeah, makes it easier for them to buy into the concept.
Dart Lindsley [:But there are others who believe in, I'm going to say a more authoritarian approach to management. And I, and I will say this, that, that if you look at. Manage the discipline of management as it's expressed in universities, as it's positioned as universities, management is a control activity and, and uses tools of control because most of what it's trying to do is it's trying to optimize assets and, and it categorizes employees as assets. And so if you're very steeped in that approach to management, this is unusual. What we do when we say work is a product is we break work and employment out of the asset category and we expose it to disciplines in other departments and universities. Engineering recognized that it didn't have control over customers and so it needed to develop tools of persuasion, not control. And that's what design thinking is. Design thinking is that let's create products that people really want and that's going to be how we are successful as a business.
Dart Lindsley [:Marketing also recognized as a discipline that it needed tools of persuasion, not of control. And so it developed tools like job to be done theory and other tools for really understanding customers so that it could help to market and design products better. So that's the big switch. It's a switch from control to persuasion and a switch from traditional management practices to marketing and engineering practices.
Aoife O'Brien [:Is there a reason you think that these other disciplines have evolved somewhat and management leadership, HR hasn't really caught up?
Dart Lindsley [:I've always been very impressed by how durable sociology is. Like, we adopt a mental model and that mental model limits what we can perceive. And the management mental model frames employees as assets and frames it as a control problem. And in fact, it turns to tools that are appropriate for that, for that, for those assumptions. If you're an input to production, this is what I tell people when I speak on stage. I say, you know, y'. All, as inputs to production, you're kind of a pain in the ass because inconsistent. I can't read your product specifications.
Dart Lindsley [:You're crabby. Sometimes you up and leave. I buy this table. I know how much it weighs, I know its dimensions. I own it, I control it. I get to do what I want. But when I buy you. And so we've turned to tools from psychology and we've said, if I could just understand what's in you, I'm going to classify you, I'm going to categorize you, I'm going to put you in job roles.
Dart Lindsley [:I'm then going to tell you that you need to become more like your job role. I'm going to say, here's the skills and capabilities that you need to express in this job role. Now I want you to get more inside that box. I want everybody in that job role to look more the same. Because we're looking. We want as inputs to production, we want assets to be uniform and we want to be able to do math on you. And so there's just all these tools that are brought to bear. And I know, I know this, I know this because that's how I was raised in business.
Dart Lindsley [:And for the first decade and a half of my career, I was the person to implement that for you.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah, I need to check my website, but I certainly have in the past said employees are your best assets and how to get the best from your employees. And I definitely use a psychology approach to try and understand. I won't aim to make people uniform, but it's really about understanding the differences, the unique differences that people have. So this is all very intriguing to me.
Dart Lindsley [:So let's talk about job to be done, because this really disrupts the traditional ways of looking.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:Ready to talk about that?
Aoife O'Brien [:Love us.
Dart Lindsley [:So one of the most powerful tools from marketing is job to be done theory. It was popularized by Clayton Christensen and Bob Mesta at Harvard. I have asked. Now, one of the first things I started doing 15 years ago when I first started down this path, was I started asking people product questions about work. One of the main tools is asking, what job do you hire your job to do for you? And whenever I ask that question, people at first they pause and say, what? I say, yeah, your job hires you to do something for it. What do you hire it to do for you? I have gotten now about 35 to 40 different answers to that question. And they're quite diverse. Some of them you'd expect.
Dart Lindsley [:I hire my job to help me learn. I hire my job to pay the bills, to give me money to support my family, to give me money to buy other experiences and support my lifestyle, to give me benefits, so those are less surprising. But then I hire my job to give me interesting puzzles to solve. I hire my job to give me a stage and an audience. I hire my job to provide me with tools and a tool shop so I can just build things. I hire my job to invent, to discover the unknown, to work with teams, meet new people, to structure my life, to get me out of the house. Maybe I want to get out of the house, but a lot of times it's, my spouse needs me to get out of the house, you know, five hours a day to pay my debts. And the first person who said that to me, I thought they, they meant their school debts or something like that.
Dart Lindsley [:And they said, no, my debts to my family, who got me here to make me independent. And the first person who said that to me, I thought they meant financially independent. And she said, no, look, I come from a country where women are daughters or wives, and I don't want to be either of those things. I want to be my own thing. And my job is what gives me that. I hire my job to give me worthy opponents, to provide me with worthy opponents. And this list goes on. And let me see.
Dart Lindsley [:I hire my job to help me live where I want to live. Sometimes that can be sponsored my visa. Sometimes that's, you know, just give me remote work, be in my area. What's interesting about this, the fact that there's 35 of these things, there's several interesting things. First of all, when you read the books on what people want from work, almost all Books say people want three things. It's a different three things. But let's just take autonomy, mastery and purpose as three things. Every book has three five things that they say everybody wants.
Dart Lindsley [:Why do we get those things? Well, first of all, psychology's purpose is to generate generalizable frameworks of what everybody wants. The second reason is that the whole management approach, the sort of engineering approach to people is, I want the E equals MC squared. Give me the answer to the formula so that I can optimize. Psychologists went out and they conducted a million interviews and they heard everything that I just described, but rolled them up well, that's created a gap, which is if I want to create work that people love, I have to start from scratch. Because if the word purpose means 30 different things, it doesn't mean anything for me as a designer. Okay, your purpose and my purpose may be so different that I can't generate one purpose for you. And for me, that works almost like.
Aoife O'Brien [:So it has to be consistent across the board.
Dart Lindsley [:Imagine that we were manufactured shoes and we went out and we interviewed everybody about what they want from shoes, and we found out that the average person has a size 8 foot, and the average person likes sneakers. And the average person, well, it's split between white and black shoes as the most popular. So we're going to say brown. So all we're going to produce is brown size 8 sneakers, period. You're going to love them.
Aoife O'Brien [:They're too big for some people, too small for other people.
Dart Lindsley [:Probably everybody's going to hate them. There's probably like practically nobody. And so what happens when you start asking people what they want from work is you start to realize that there's enormous diversity in what people want from work. Especially. There's two more reasons why there's a lot of diversity. The first is that people want those things that I described in combination. I want to discover the unknown. I want to invent, I want to leave legacy, and I want to take care of my family.
Dart Lindsley [:On average, of the 35 things people want between 8 and 10, and the younger they are, the more they want.
Aoife O'Brien [:Does that mean as we progress our career, we've maybe attained some of those things that we want from work, or we've resigned ourselves to the fact that it's not going to happen.
Dart Lindsley [:This is unknown? I don't know. I will say that, though, that people are happier with work the older they are. And so it may be that they've narrowed it and focused it and there's.
Aoife O'Brien [:Or made better choices based on what they know about themselves or reached a.
Dart Lindsley [:Position of power where they can actually control the structure of their work. And in fact, people who are entrepreneurs will talk about all the stresses of that, but they are also going to tell you that they've created a structure of work that they care about a lot. So people want these things in combinations. And already you're at the place where almost no two people have the same combination of wants. But there's a second question that's important to ask, which is not just what job do you hire your job to do for you? We all want products. We want to buy products that do the job for us.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:We also want to buy them at a reasonable cost. And so asking people, what does your job cost you? Produces another 20 things. And everybody experiences the cost differently. And in fact, you might want your job to give you a stage and an audience that to me, might be pure cost because of social anxiety. I might love solving puzzles. That to you might be pure drudgery. And so what you find is that everybody wants something different. Now this is a huge product problem, which is how on earth do I as a company deliver a product that everybody wants something different from? There are some things that everybody wants.
Dart Lindsley [:Everybody wants their payroll to be accurate, their paycheck to be accurate. Everybody wants to be paid fairly. Everybody wants benefits in the United States where we need to get those from our companies. So there's a lot of things that people want in common, and there's some costs that everybody experiences in common. But the values, the things that people want from work in common, those should be served from the center. And many of them can be solved with process tools, which is what I was raised with. Because you're trying to reduce variation. Let's make sure that everybody.
Dart Lindsley [:That there's no variation in pay, in other words, that the pay is payroll is accurate. Let's do that from the center. But as you get into the more and more distinct needs, you have to push the design from the center of the company to the edge. The only people who are close enough to employees to be able to see their unique needs are managers and the team members themselves. So line managers and team members. And so many of the methods of work as a product is about equipping managers and teams to co create the experience of work that they want to have.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:And a lot of that has to do with the allocation of work. So the role of a manager changes fundamentally, which is that in traditional management, the manager is a controller of an asset. And a part of the reason why managers are so often unhappy is because they are given tools of control of an asset to interact with human beings who they can see right there in front of them are whole human beings. And so you change the role of the manager from a, from a controller of an asset to a couple of different things. One is a broker. Well let's talk about designer first. One is a designer which is a part of what a manager's job is, is to understand the unique needs of each team member wants and needs and to co create an experience of work. And the reason I say co create is, is that many of the things that people want from work are transformational offerings.
Dart Lindsley [:Which is I want to become something new. I'm the thing that's changing when I consume this product and experience products. It's also true that active participation is required for the co design of experiences and processes creating the ability to understand what each person wants. And two guide or coach or co create that experience. Once that's understood or at least as a part of understanding that, the second role is as a broker. When employees are customers, the business model changes. All companies are now multi sided businesses. So it's not a new model, it's very old.
Dart Lindsley [:The Grand Bazaar is 500 years old in Istanbul and it's multi sided. It's got shop keepers and customers who come to those shops. But the Bazaar is owned by somebody else. And so those two customers are brought together and the Grand Bazaar is a platform for bringing them together. So it's not a new business model, it's just we haven't really thought of employees this way. So there's the traditional customer of your company and now there's the employee customer. The employee customer is providing value that's ultimately going to flow to the traditional customer. But the traditional customer is a supply chain of work that's going to flow toward the employee customer.
Dart Lindsley [:And the most powerful tool in the company's toolbox is allocating work mindfully to people based upon what they find most rewarding. Yeah, and so that's the job. One of the big jobs of a manager is to a win the kind of work that your team really wants to subscribe to and then allocate that work mindfully with an understanding of what each person wants. Good managers already do this, but not because they've been equipped to do it. Good managers already do this because they've just figured it out.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah, they've seen some sort of a gap. There's a few areas I'd like to explore. Needs is something that I speak an Awful lot about in this kind of work context and understanding our needs on a unique basis. And I think one of the challenges is that we as individuals sometimes don't know what our needs are. We know when our needs are not being met because we feel really frustrated. Any thoughts on how managers and employees can work together to co create or to uncover what those missing needs might be or the fundamental needs that someone has through their work?
Dart Lindsley [:Yes, people say what they want, they're often mistaken or they, they, they. It's unlikely that they've described everything that they want. And in fact, this is what my company teaches. My companies teach other companies how to do this. There's an ongoing discovery process. So when a manager and a team are working multi sided, which is what we call this structure, a multi sided team, it's an ongoing path of discovery and an ongoing path of resolution. First of all, on a monthly basis, I don't have to talk about all the dimensions that are tracked, but you, you, you track each category of work that the team does. Could be projects, might be the category, it could be different categories of run the business.
Dart Lindsley [:It depends on what kind of a team it is. And for each category you ask how much of our attention has gone to that category of work.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah, yeah. So a category could be admin, for.
Dart Lindsley [:Example, could be, could be bug fixes.
Aoife O'Brien [:And if that kind of backend admin stuff doesn't light you up at work and actually what you find is 50% of your day is spent doing this stuff, then you're going to feel really frustrated.
Dart Lindsley [:Yes, exactly. And the way we display it visually and if the way listeners can find the best visualization of this is to look at the Harvard Business Review article that we published last November, which is called Reimagining Work as a Product. And if you scroll down in there, you'll find this visual. Because it's hard to describe visuals in podcasts. It's a bubble chart. And so the X axis is. Each bubble is a category of work. The size of the bubble is how much of our attention went to that work over the last period.
Dart Lindsley [:Big bubbles, lots of attention. The X axis is how important is it to the business? The purpose of the business?
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:So the farther to the right it is, and that's really the alignment with the traditional customer, which is are we delivering the most value possible to the traditional customer?
Aoife O'Brien [:So something like admin, not that valuable to the customer you would imagine, Correct?
Dart Lindsley [:Correct. It may be something we have to do, but is it really making the difference to the customer? It would drift over to the left. And it's risk adjusted. So we think this is good, but we aren't sure. And so it's risk adjusted value to the, to the business. The vertical axis is, is our team doing its highest margin work? Are we uniquely qualified to do this? This is the Y axis. And so the higher it is, the more your team should do it, the lower it is. Maybe it should be given to another team or outsourced or automated.
Dart Lindsley [:Because especially like with the teams that I've led and many of the teams that we've trained on this, they might be expensive experts in something if they start doing generalist work, that's not the highest margin use of their time. And so but then the color of the bubble is how rewarding is the work. Oh, to the least rewarded person. And so if any of these dimensions go out of spec, the team collectively solves it. And so give you a couple of examples. Some of them are so easy. And to your question of do people know? No, they're often surprised. You might never thought of this thing.
Dart Lindsley [:But like one of them is, somebody in the team said, look, their bubble went yellow for their project. And we said, what's going on? And by the way, managers don't even necessarily lead this. It's often a team member who leads the exercise because this is not a management tool, it's a team tool. And the person said, look, it's not the worst thing in the world. It's just that this particular project is in a time zone that takes me through breakfast with my children and I'm the person who does breakfast. And he said, it's not the worst thing, but it's not my favorite thing either. So he was saying the cost of this work is too high or higher than it could be. And so a team member in Singapore said, well, look, let's switch projects.
Dart Lindsley [:That fits with my time zone. And the bubble went green. Everybody's bubble was green. Simple, simple thing. More complicated thing was somebody said, and I pull a lot of these from my own stories, not managers we've trained just because I know them better. I have a lot long history of doing it too. This was about 10 years ago. Somebody said to me, the client's bullying me.
Dart Lindsley [:And so their bubble went red. I went and spoke to the client and I said, look, these behaviors are harming the person on our team. And I attended meetings for a while to make sure that it stopped. And I'll tell you the end of that story, the surprising end of that story. A few months ago, I spoke in Stockholm, and somebody came up to me in the crowd afterwards and said, and it was the bully. And I had forgotten exactly what I said to that person. But she said, you know what? I just wanted to thank you. I was going through a really hard time at work at the time, and I was new to the company, and you were the only person in the first year who was kind to me.
Dart Lindsley [:And it just. Honestly, it brings tears to my eyes now because I did not know that healing one end of the relationship might heal the other.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:And I don't remember the interaction. The fact that it was remembered that way and that it made both sides of that relationship better is huge.
Aoife O'Brien [:But that person remembers it. Talk about being human at work, you know, and this is how we show up when. When our needs are not being met. And so they were taking their frustrations out on your team member, and they were feeling bullied, so their needs were not being met. You stepped in, you said something that you can't even really remember the interaction, but certainly I would say both sides of that equation, too. And as you know, you know, 10 years later, the bully comes up and. And says about their experience.
Dart Lindsley [:I know. And. And just imagine a company where all of those relationships are being healed, where everybody's having an open conversation about. About when their work is going into the red and not even their whole job is going into the red. One category of work in their world is going into the red.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:How do you solve it? And so another example, this is from almost 15 years ago. My team was a team of analysts, and there were two creatives on the team. They said, look, we'd like to do something more creative. So the way I heard you can hear that is this team's scope is never going to win the kind of work that those two people want. And so we asked ourselves, what is our adjacent services that we might provide that there might be a market for inside the company? And so we came up with a couple that had a creative component, and we tested the market for those by just putting up a sign that said, we do this even though we didn't even know how to do this and to see if anybody ever showed up. And employee experience research was something that was adjacent to what our team did. And it turned out there was a market. And so we established that as a new service line.
Dart Lindsley [:Those two people went into it, and we could now win the kind of work that they found most rewarding. There are people who have learned this, who have applied this method, who do something I Don't do. I don't know what percentage of the people we've trained actually get into this. A category of your work goes red and you say, look, this project's really political. I hate political stuff. You know what I'd like to move off of the project potentially. What some managers do is they say, look, do you want to develop the ability to deal with politics? Is this a growth area for you? Are you being triggered by something that maybe if you could defuse that trigger, you might have a broader range of the kind of work you can do? Especially considering that so much of the work in a company has a political component. They turn some red work, some red work, into opportunities for development and, and deep development because into.
Dart Lindsley [:Into why people feel that way.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah, learning how to navigate politics, I think is really important. And I, when I'm dealing with that stuff, I prefer to shift the language and talk about relationships because relationships are how work gets done.
Dart Lindsley [:Yes, I completely agree. I completely agree.
Aoife O'Brien [:My curious mind is now thinking, what are the blockers? What gets in the way of this stuff is kind of the broader question. But also more specifically, if someone is in a position now and they feel like I don't really have control to be able to make these kinds of changes.
Dart Lindsley [:Yeah, there's, I'm going to say there's two risk areas that people bring up. One is what if your team doesn't trust enough to say when they don't like a project? Isn't there psychological safety, a fundamental level of psychological safety necessary for a team to function this way? Yeah, well, the answer is to function really well this way. The answer is yes, that psychological safety needs to be established by practicing these behaviors until everyone becomes accustomed to them. But what we say about, especially about the, the 11 fold bubble chart is it's a communication platform. It looks like math, but it's conversation. And so employees opt in to communicate their experience of work. They don't have to say what their experience of work is, but if they want to communicate it, if they want to seek resolution to it, they can bring it forward. The second question is the question of degrees of freedom.
Dart Lindsley [:So how many degrees of freedom does a team really have to improve work? Well, the answer is more than we usually expect, more than many of us think. There are times, however, when a team really does not have degrees of freedom. We found this once in a small manufacturing organization. Everyone had a specialty, an expertise related to a single machine in the production line. It's hard to move them around. And so there you have to work on the experience of their interface with that machine, their step in the process, how do we make that better? Over time, we might be able to create some cross training so that people can do different things. But. But there may be true constraints.
Dart Lindsley [:But I will tell you that we've also had people say, I can't possibly. I don't have the degrees of freedom in roles that we know that they have freedom because their peer right next to them is expressing all of the degrees of freedom. Switching projects between people when there's a time zone conflict, it's feasible. Going out and talking to somebody who's bullying a member of your team, that's absolutely your job. And so part of the reason people feel that they don't have those degrees of freedom is because they're thinking whole job sometimes, as opposed to categories of work within the job.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah. Like components. The component parts.
Dart Lindsley [:Or sometimes they're thinking, look, we pay these people and we pay them to do what we need and they just have to do it. And so there, there is that sort of also attitude sometimes. Well, the truth is they don't have to do it for you, do it for another company.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:And so, and so, yeah, there's. There's some, some philosophical, cultural.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:Nuance around what you, whether or not you can command people to do things.
Aoife O'Brien [:That, that brings up a couple of things for me. And the first thing I was thinking is the, the sheer disillusionment with work. And I was on, I think it was Instagram earlier and I was reading comments about, someone was talking about the performance reviews and I was reading all the comments saying I'm just going to make stuff up or I don't really care about work or nothing's ever going to change. So there's that level of disillusionment, but then on the other side, this kind of command and control. And maybe as an individual, you're feeling stuck and that you don't have an option, you don't have a choice, you are being paid there and you feel like you have to stay where you are because you don't have any options. So those kind of two things as an individual that might be coming up.
Dart Lindsley [:For people, sometimes they're right. On average, each year in the United States, 45 million quit volunteers. It's close to 1 in 5, 1 in 3.
Aoife O'Brien [:Okay.
Dart Lindsley [:It's a lot.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:So the evidence suggests. And by the way, it traditionally anyway, has fluctuated with confidence in the economy. So when the economy is not doing great, people are trapped. They feel that they don't have that freedom. When the economy, when they feel like the economy is doing great, they. They feel free to move.
Aoife O'Brien [:The employer's market versus the employees market, as they say. Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:As an employer, let me just say, do you want a bunch of trapped people in your company? I don't. You know, so there are people who feel that way, who feel like they don't have choice. There seem to be a very large proportion who feel that they do that.
Aoife O'Brien [:I can take my skills, I can take my product elsewhere.
Dart Lindsley [:That's right. I mean, there are, There are certain roles where that's a lot harder. Yeah, I think so. For instance, in the United States, teachers benefits, retirement benefits ramp, as with their number of years.
Aoife O'Brien [:Okay, so in. In a specific place.
Dart Lindsley [:Yeah, exactly. In that. With the school district. Well, or at least in the same state. But also your, Your. If you switch school districts, your. Your pay goes down to 7 years of experience or 11 years of experience or something like that. So there's.
Dart Lindsley [:There are structural things that actually trap people into their position. There's still choice. There may not be choice to switch job. In that case, there's still choice to design the work. If you look at variation across teachers and how they actually do the work. My wife's a teacher. There's a lot of variation in terms of the kind of work that they design for themselves.
Aoife O'Brien [:I love it. I think it's such an interesting concept. It's such a shift in mindset to think about these things. And if people want to find out more about 11 fold, if they want to find out more about you and connect with you, listen to your podcast, what is the best way they can do that?
Dart Lindsley [:Yeah. There's one thing I want to say before I share that. The one thing I want to say is this is an emerging discipline, the design of the experience of work. There are some companies who are doing it very well. I think Patagonia is. I think Dropbox is. I know Ikea has it as a. As a goal.
Dart Lindsley [:And so there are companies are doing it well, but they are in an absolute creative force. And out of Amsterdam. They're really. These are companies who, who are doing it. But there's an incredible amount to discover here. This is a greenfield. I talked about things that are known as sort of a splainer today. But this is not a.
Dart Lindsley [:This is not a splained field.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yeah.
Dart Lindsley [:This is an emergent field that everybody can participate in creating.
Aoife O'Brien [:But dare I say, it's why it lights you up so much, because you're uncovering the unknown.
Dart Lindsley [:I hire my job to discover the unknown. That's absolutely right. So I say that as an invite to everybody, as an opportunity. If you want to listen in on the conversation that we're having on my podcast, it's work for humans and you're welcome to come over there. It's a weird show. We interview political scientists and Disney immersive experience designers and artists. We just had a playwright on and we're all looking at the design of experience of work in different ways. And then 11 fold, that's the numeral11fold.com is where to find the company.
Dart Lindsley [:I recommend taking a look at the HBR article. HBR article Redesigning Work as a Product. And two years from now, the book More to come on that tbc.
Aoife O'Brien [:Tbc. And the question I ask everyone who comes on the show. What does being happier at work mean to you?
Dart Lindsley [:When I'm standing on the edge of the known and my toes are hanging off the edge of the precipice of the unknown, something emerges from that darkness of the unknown as an aha moment. Which writing the book right now. I am getting those constantly and I shared some today. That's what I hire my job to do for me.
Aoife O'Brien [:Love it. I so enjoyed this conversation. It's been really fascinating. Eye opening for me. Definitely will be watching this space to see how things emerge. Like you say, invite people to get involved in the conversation in that discovery process as well.
Dart Lindsley [:Thank you so much for inviting me on the show. I really appreciate it and I enjoyed our conversations leading up to it.
Aoife O'Brien [:Yes, likewise. Likewise. Thank you. That was Dart Lindsley talking all about work as a product. I really hope you enjoyed the show today and it gave you a lot of food for thought. It certainly has for me. If you'd like to get involved in the conversation, feel free to join me over on LinkedIn. Share.
Aoife O'Brien [:What's one thing that you're going to do differently? Something maybe that surprised you? As always, don't forget to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. You'd be surprised how few people actually take the time to do that and it really helps people to find out about the show.
