Life is full of dilemmas. These are difficult choices to be made between seemingly opposing items or values. They require us to think and deliberate. Like all choices, they make us contemplate the gains and the losses of the choices.
Very often, a dilemma is not insurmountable. Thinking about dilemmas helps us to change our minds, see things in different ways and recalibrate our thinking and acting. Some dilemmas are innocent, others seem to be more existential, about life or death. In this series, I investigate the dilemmas that business leaders encounter. Consider these texts as thought exercises that sometimes meander towards the topic.
Should you have thoughts about these dilemmas, do not hesitate to get in touch. I love a débat fructueux. And if you have any suggestions for future dilemmas, don’t hesitate to inspire or challenge me.
1. Intro
In this next dilemma, I dive into the apparent contradiction between customized, individualized, and standardized, collective approaches in the workplace. It’s a topic that has fascinated me since 1996. In that year, I analyzed how HR executives thought to deal with the need for people to work longer and for organizations to integrate older people. At that time, the aging workforce was seen as a challenge or even a problem.
2. Towards a Flexible View on Work
2.1. The Great Breakthrough
The ruling view on work was, for a long time, mainly collective, and standardized: everybody needed to adapt to the systems and processes in place, and there was hardly any room for customization. But ever since, there have been developments in the world of work that have changed this mentality. The pandemic seems to have accelerated this trend like it has accelerated so many things that were already on the way to development.
The most important impact of the pandemic might be the massive introduction of remote work, a trend that finds its origins in the telecottages of the 70ies. Remote work allows people to be less dependent on place and/or time constraints through customization. Remote work before 2020 was quite common, and it only became more present during Covid. But maybe the enthusiasm about what experts wrongfully have called hybrid working is premature.
Let’s not forget that for many people, remote work is still not an option. So, hybrid work is available for a minority of working people. And also, for the organizations, the teams, and the leaders, flexible working arrangements remain challenging. Is it then realistic to expect there is a final breakthrough of remote work or flexible working arrangements for all?
Remote work is only one kind of customization of work, but bear with me, I will expand to other examples later in this article.
2.2. So what did we expect?
Elon Musk announced a while ago that Tesla employees should work physically at a Tesla office. They are no longer allowed to work remotely, not even in a remote satellite office. He is not the first to call employees back to the office. Before Tesla, companies like Google and Apple did something similar. And this, again, was not a new phenomenon. We might remember that Yahoo in 2013 and IBM in 2017 did something similar, long before the pandemic.
So, what did we expect? Did we expect that two years of a pandemic would have changed human nature fundamentally? Did we expect that leaders would have become trusting and trustworthy people with a very open mind towards flexibility at work? Did we really think that life would be different, let alone better, after the pandemic?
2.3. Human Behavior Does Not Change
Of course, the pandemic has influenced the way we think about work and how we organize work. More people than ever have enjoyed the benefits and the challenges of remote work. The pandemic has made collaboration and communication more flexible, supported by digital tools. But it hasn’t changed human nature, has it? It hasn’t changed the fact that people or torn between their need for affiliation and their competitive nature. It has not altered the implicit motives of achievement, power, and relationships.
We systematically ignore the fact that behavior is quite messy and, at the same time, predictable. People might call me cynical, but I refuse to believe there is a rapid evolution of human behavior. We always come back to our old patterns regardless of the technologies that we use, regardless of the changing contexts.
Contexts change; People don’t.
We need more historical references in business to avoid that we get carried away by what is the taste of the day. We need to accept that business is an (almost) infinite game (1). History repeats itself. But business memory seems to be short, and very often, we announce novelties that are old, or treat creeping trends as sudden discoveries. Remote work is not new. Hybrid working is not new. The need for the humanization of work is not new. The need to focus on well-being is not new. Digitalization is not new. What is new is the way we integrate existing trends into action. And for that, we use ancient recipes of dialogue, collaboration, learning, trust-building, and story-telling.
Back to remote work. A study by Randstad revealed that remote work was not insignificant and unimportant but was neither at the top of the list of important criteria that determine the attractiveness of organizations (2). This means that employers had better offer flexible work arrangements for various reasons, but it doesn’t imply that they have to be generous in terms of remote work. It does not imply that it is impossible to attract people without offering remote work. Although, those organizations who could offer but don’t, will have to have a good story on why, and go beyond the coffee corner platitudes. But with strong brand equity, people are willing to make sacrifices, even if that means earning less or having fewer possibilities to work remotely (3).
2.4. Consistency is required
Organizations that offer possibilities to work remotely should make sure that there is consistency. Sending out mixed signals about remote work makes the situation worse. Some organizations offer flexibility, but their leaders make it clear that using it is career-limiting. The quality of remote work relies on trust. And if managers are not willing or able to give trust, organizations should not offer remote work.
The lack of trust is often compensated by obtrusive or less obtrusive mechanisms of control, like surveillance software. We know that when there is no trust, everything becomes difficult. The lack of trust leads to demotivation and possibly even a decline in mental health. So what did we win then? I guess that a flexible work environment with excessive control mechanisms is worse than a work environment where people have to come to work but enjoy trust.
There are indeed arguments to invite people back to the office. The way Mr Musk is doing this it’s not elegant and might backfire. He might wish to read this HBR article (4).
Of course, Mr Musk assumes that the brand equity of Tesla as an employer is so strong that people will prefer coming back rather than leaving that very hyped organization. Employee-based brand equity allows organizations to pay their people less (3); it also might allow those organizations to give fewer perks, less flexibility, and lesser treatment. He could be right, or he could be wrong. But only the future will tell.
So I repeat my question. What did we expect?
We have launched a term hybrid work and thought that the future was bright. I guess we are today in a worse situation and that the pandemic, the subsequent problems with the supply chains, the sudden and predictable war in Ukraine, the instability of the economic system, the slowing down of the Chinese economy, the soaring energy prices, and the accelerating climate crisis are much more important than Mr Musk’s behavior. If anything, we see now how fragile human systems are.
If anything, we see now how fragile human systems are.
When I introduced a major remote working program in 2010, there was a lot of resistance. Leaders could not believe that people are capable of being productive when they were out of sight. The focus then was totally on presence and time spent at the office instead of on contribution and results. Leaders had difficulties establishing agreements and defining contribution and output requirements and wanted to go back to the obliged presence in the office. I even had one leader who asked to position the desks of all their employees in her team in such a way that she could see the screens at all times.
So far, I have focused on remote work. The personalization of work is about much more than flexible work arrangements.
3. Some Personal History
3.1. Working longer
In 1996 I wrote a paper for a small journal in social sciences (5). In that paper, I gave the account of qualitative research that I did about how we could make sure that people worked longer. At that time, people stopped working very early in Belgium. There were even books about solving the problem of the aging workforce as of the age of 40 (6). Now, I find that both hilarious and outrageous.
The answer to the question of how we can make sure that people work longer was very simple: we had to look for individual solutions. The HR directors that I had talked to back then added that we should not talk too openly about this. The reason for not disclosing individual solutions to individual problems was that these were precedents that could smell like favoritism. Also, unions would never accept that exceptions to the rule would be applied to individual people without extending the same right to others. Moreover, individual solutions are not very efficient. That was the idea back then.
3.2. Expulsion of the Elderly
10 years later, I was working for a major industrial organization. I remember that I was contacted by someone from the Belgian Federation of Employers in the metal industry to review that article from 1996. I said that I could not because I was very ashamed that I did not apply anything that I had described 10 years earlier. I was only applying collective methods and was using early retirement to get rid of elderly employees. At that time, there was a collective bargaining agreement that stipulated that people with certain seniority could leave the organization at the age of 55 or 58. For many people, this had become a target age, and the unions demanded that the collective bargaining agreement be applied to everybody who fulfilled the criteria. And so I did because employers saw a benefit in this arrangement as well as it enabled them to remove older people from the workforce without a major redundancy cost. And management saw this as a tool for rejuvenation. How I hated that word.
3.3. Individualised HR
In 2011 I gave a speech for HR square, introducing the concept of I-sureHR, individualized HR (7). I stated that organizations should stop thinking in terms of collective, standardized ways of working. Instead, they should develop more flexible work arrangements that helped employees to make choices. Every organization should develop an architecture of choice that takes both organizational and individual needs into consideration. Leaving standardized approaches to work and going for customized or personalized work is a solution to many issues organizations are facing, such as recruitment, retention, inclusion, engagement, and so on.
The speech was a response to Lynda Graton’s (15) Book “The Shift” that had just been published. In the book, Linda described the impact of certain changes on human behavior at work. She used personas to describe the different ways of dealing with the challenges ahead. The book she wrote together with Andrew Scott in 2015 on the “hundred-year life” can be seen as the successor to the the Shift (16). The idea of an individual approach also resonates in this book.
3.4. Customised Work
In 2013, Frank Vander Sijpe and myself (8) developed the idea of i-HR further in the book on customized work. This book led to the creation of a Research Center at the University of Ghent, financed by my then employer Securex. This, in turn, resulted in research that is now being published in the academic press (9) (10). It also led to the publication of a second book on personalized work together with professor Anseel, Frank Vander Sijpe, and Lien Vossaert (11).
3.5. Inclusive Job Design
Today I am still working on the topic. I am an expert in the VIONA research project (12) about rethinking work, and in my consultancy practice, I am using this dilemma quite a lot. It helps leaders to think about how they want to organize their teams. Personalization versus standardization gives them a framework to think about work organisation, leadership and effectiveness and experience design.
Talking to leaders, I still see the reluctance they have when dealing with individual demands. They fear that organizations become unmanageable when individual needs are taken into consideration too much. One of the reasons for this is that people often think in extremes. But there is a world of opportunities between zero and 100%. Another reason is that people think that they might implicitly apply favoritism which leads to questions about justice and ethics. And finally, the old adage of efficiency still rules our thinking. But, like I explained in a previous dilemma, sometimes we need to be less efficient to be more effective and more robust.
Inclusive job design is a way to make jobs structurally more accessible to more people. It gets rid of limiting barriers that exclude people.
In my work, I come across people who try to lower those barriers. One of the main obstacles they see is leadership that is not open to this. This was one of the conclusions after writing the book on customization of work in 2013: if leaders are not willing or able to see opportunities for customization, there will be no customization. In that case, leaders will return to the traditional organization, which is as much standardized as possible and as much customized as needed. But I turn it around: we should customize as much as possible and standardize as much as needed.
3.6 sustainable leadership
In 2016, I published a book on sustainable leadership (17). The subtitle of the book was “how to read in a VUCA world”. The essence of the book was that leaders should not use unsustainable sources like power, position, pressure, or popularity but should use their character as the most sustainable source of leadership. The concept of character was operationalised using four human qualities: empathy, fairness, kindness, and reciprocity. To date, six years later, I am still and even more convinced that these are the foundations of leadership as they inspire trust.
3.7. Behavioural strategy
Customization of work is an example of how organizations and leaders can apply insights in behavior to define and execute strategies. Behavioral strategy takes into consideration how people function and what they need, and builds strategies around that. Very often, strategies are too rational and inspired by financial targets. But when strategies fail, it is because they’re not relevant to people, because people are not willing or able to execute them, because the context doesn’t support the desired behavior, and because leadership is not able to support and build those contexts.
In the 25 years between my first encounter with the topic of customization and the application of that insight to strategy, I have also seen many examples of how personalization and standardization are in conflict. And so, the Dragon fight rages on. But here are some ways to solve it.
The Dragon fight
Dragon 1: Personalization
Let me introduce the first dragon.
Flexiblization, customization, or personalization of work holds a promise. It can make work more accessible for people who find regular jobs difficult to handle, or who do not have fair access to the job market. It helps to lower the barriers that exclude people for whatever reason. It offers solutions for people who are struggling with the balance between their private life and work. The sense of autonomy that can arise from the possibility of organizing work according to personal needs and strengths can contribute to a positive mental health situation for many. And all of this goes beyond hybrid or remote work. It is about adapting work to the strengths and the needs of people, without neglecting the needs of the customers, the organization, and all its stakeholders.
Personalization of work does not solve all the problems workers are facing. But it creates tremendous opportunities to humanize work. I know that the phrase humanizing work can sound over the top. Work becomes dehumanized when the people who are doing the jobs are denied certain human characteristics. Work becomes depersonalized. This means that personalizing work is almost existential. It tells someone that an organization or a leader is willing to listen to them and to take their needs and strengths into consideration when crafting a work organization or when making decisions about the execution of strategies. It ultimately confirms that people exist and that they are important. And this is acknowledged by the people who have the power.
Personalization can take many forms and cover many topics ranging from job design, career, learning, ergonomic adaptations, salary package etc. Customization can be very individualised, using i-deals to craft unique solutions (13) for unique challenges. But it can also be a standardized; menu-like approach through mass customization. Both approaches offer opportunities, but there are also pitfalls attached to both them.
Dragon 2: Standardization, Collective
The second dragon is the dragon of standardization or adopting a collective approach. The idea is that the most efficient work organization is to have everybody working in the same place, at the same time, in the same manner. Standardization has its origins in scientific management, inspired by the work of Taylor (14). A work-centric approach requires people to adapt to the work as it is defined by some central entity. Workers do not get a say in how the work is organized, and the prime directive is the efficiency of the work.
And what is there to say against that? Making work more efficient has a direct impact on the P&L. Productivity increases, and all kinds of waste are scrapped. It is easy for leaders to manage because there are clear rules to which people must comply. People know exactly what they need to do, and there is less time spent (or wasted) in discussions on how to organize work. The one best way, as Taylor’s biographer calls it, does not leave room for alternative ways.
The problem with this approach is that it might work well in standardized contexts where everything goes well. And it requires people to adapt and accept what is imposed. It does not take into consideration individual human needs. This is the kind of work organization that asks people to leave their personal issues behind at the factory gate. People need to integrate into a system and act as plugged-in components.
It reminds me of the Borg, the half-organic half-machine species from Star Trek. They conquered the universe with the motto: we will assimilate you; all resistance is futile.
I know I am exaggerating with this grim image. But I want to make a point. Being efficient has many advantages, but the main disadvantage it has is that it neglects the people experience.
Reconciliation of the Dragons
The mentioned research on customization of work illustrates very well how the two Dragons can be reconciled. Individualized work encompasses both possibilities and risks. We can say that personalization of work is beneficial when that personalization takes place in a framework that is maintained at all levels. Doing whatever for whoever is not a good idea. The dragon of personalization needs the dragon of standardization. If not, personalization becomes favoritism and will contribute to an atmosphere of distrust and jealousy.
And this is also clear from the literature about ideals (11). ideals should not be shady deals. ideals should be constructed, designed, crafted around a very specific situation that requires a very specific solution. They can only be successful when there is a clear win-win-win: the individual, the team, and the organization should all benefit from an ideal which is a constructed arrangement between the organization and an individual employee.
Extreme standardization leads to many dysfunctions. The same goes for extreme customization.
There are 5 steps to think about dilemmas:
Step 1 is to consider the importance of each dragon. Any organisation needs efficiency through standardization. Lacking standardization can be very costly because every situation becomes a problem that needs to be resolved even if the problem is not new. But when an organization exaggerates in terms of efficiency and wants to become extremely lean, it reduces the experience the people have. In other words, sometimes organizations need to allow for less efficiency in order to become more effective. Allowing inefficient exchanges reinforces relationships, enhances trusts, and could even be beneficial to innovation as it allows processes of serendipity.
In order to solve dilemmas, we need to appreciate the choices.
Step 2 is to divide the continuum of each value into three (or more) levels: not enough, the right level, and too much. I believe that we never should strive for the extremes. Extreme customization is as bad as extreme standardization. And the same goes for the extreme lack of them. Every organization needs to assess the needs and possibilities for both of them. You could compare this to the Olympic Minimum: as long as an organization does not meet the threshold, it won’t perform.
And this can be different for every industry. If the automotive industry would not have standardized they would still be facing tremendous quality problems. Only when some of the approaches that the Japanese car manufacturers had adopted, US manufacturers were able to manage the quality.
Opportunities for customization are bigger in knowledge-intensive industries like advertising or marketing. But let’s not forget that even in the service industry, standardization has many benefits in terms of costs and quality. But if there are 1000 procedures to follow at any time, one might understand that someone somehow exaggerated. In banking, many procedures have been introduced after scandals and the financial crisis in order to reduce risks and detect meltdowns earlier. In healthcare, Systems like JCI have introduced the notion of quality control which is, of course, very meaningful. However, many healthcare professionals feel that their professionalism is not recognized when everything they do has to be documented. It’s always about finding the right level.
Step 3 is to put the conflicting values in conjunction. It helps to put them on two axes and discuss the various positions. Very often, we think that two items of the dilemma are contradictory or they are on the extremes or a continuum. By putting them on different axes, you get more insights into how they can interact.
Being very high on standardization but low on personalization has tremendous effects on the engagement of people. But being very high and personalization without having the Olympic minimum of standardization has very high effects on quality, costs, efficiency, and the bottom line. And this will also lead to a deterioration of people outcomes.
Allowing for personalization is a source of inspiration. When many customers ask for a certain feature, you might see this as customization. But maybe you’d better add this to the standard features. When many employees are asking for flexibility, you might start off by giving ideals to them, but maybe it’s better to standardize the choices that you offer to people. Allowing for personalization without the framework is, as I already wrote, a recipe for failure. So maybe you cannot do the one without doing the other
Step 4 is to look for a third value that could be overarching both values. In this case, it could be inclusion. But it could also be attraction and retention of people. You choose. By introducing the third value, you change the dilemma. Instead of having conflicting values, you start looking for the checks and balances between both of them in order to make something possible. If the value is inclusion, you know that standardization can jeopardize that value. Offering standard jobs for standard people is a great way to exclude people. As you start thinking about customization versus standardization to make inclusion possible, many opportunities arise.
Step 5 is to find ways how both values can reinforce one another in order to become more effective. There are two words that are important here: necessity and opportunity. How much do you need and how much could you have? And the answer depends on the over-arching value that you want to achieve. As much personalization as possible versus as much personalization as needed, are two different statements. But it’s up to you to decide what you want to achieve and how you are going to solve the dilemma.
Customization of Work as a Standard HR-Tool
Customization is one of the tools that HR professionals have in their backpacks to find solutions for individual problems. Those individual solutions can be an inspiration to HR approaches. Individual practices can become a broader offer to people. Ideals become ways to mass customize work.
And this is what I call an architecture of choice.
In the end, it’s all about being fair and balanced. Personalization of work provides many opportunities for organizations and leaders that want to provide a balanced work environment that supports or even enables sustainable employability of people. It does not mean that possibilities have to be endless and that organizational needs are less important than individual needs.
The most important thing is that organizations engage in a dialogue to find ways to organize work. And it’s perfectly OK that an organization states that there are not many possibilities for personalization. But I would challenge organizations and leaders who say that there are no possibilities at all. There is always something possible, even when that possibility might seem insignificant. It might seem insignificant to the organization, but it might be very important for the individual employee.
The Empathic Organization
As you can see personalization of work needs empathy. Empathic organizations listen to what people want and need but also make sure that expectations are clear. When there are clear agreements on the why, the what, and the how of work we don’t need surveillance software. we don’t need to ask people to keep their zoom open when they are at work, and we don’t need to count the keystrokes people have. By finding the right balance between rights and duties, limitations and opportunities, trust and control, standardization and customization we can create work environments that are healthy, safe, productive, and sustainable.
What Mr Musk is doing he’s not very sensible. He might get away with it, but he misses an opportunity to engage in a dialogue about what people need versus what the organization needs.
Some practical ideas to Take Home
- Personalization is not a target. It is a lever to solve many challenges organizations are currently facing.
- Personalization does not exclude collective elements. On the contrary, if you want to make personalization a success, organizations need to invest in a clear and collective framework.
- Personalization does not have to be extreme. By adding (or removing) some elements in the work context, a considerable effect can be generated.
- Collective measures have to be meaningful and fair just like individual measures. Don’t do something to keep someone on board, but at the same time treat many people unfairly.
- Organizations that do not want to invest in individualized approaches, must have a clear story. In a labor market that is short of supply of talent, personalization of work is one of the levers to attract and retain people.
- Investing in empathic processes is a way to generate personalized experiences. Listening deeply to people, trying to understand them, showing that you understand them, and acting upon that understanding shows that you are interested. And that this is the first step. You don’t need to say yes to every demand, but you need to acknowledge the fact that someone makes the demand. There’s nothing worse than being neglected.
- Do not reduce personalization to a flexible reward program or a perks shop. If you give bread to someone who is thirsty, you might end up far away from where you want to be. The mismatch between collective offerings and individual needs is an important problem when designing job contexts and employee packages. Value does not lie in the offering itself but in its uptake.
- There are ways to make standardized work environments more playful.
- When opting for a standardized approach, please think of adverse consequences. How does this affect the motivation and well-being of the people, and what can we do to mitigate the consequences?
- By leaving space for people to decide on how they execute their work, without prescribing all the details, people will personalize their jobs by themselves. This is a normal and natural process in which leaders should not intervene.
- Be aware of the adverse consequences of both the personalization and the standardization option and look for ways to neutralize them. An example of this is to stress the meaningfulness of standard ways of doing things. People accept the lack of choice when it is meaningful. Underline the positive consequences that standardization has for people: less stress, more clarity, more time to do interesting stuff, higher reliability of operations, and so on. It helps when the overarching criterion is used as the red thread through all the stories.
- When you decline demands for customization, make sure that the person who was asking understands the reasons. This is quite difficult because every question is important to the person that asks it. Nevertheless, it must be done;
Sources
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- Read the Biography of Taylor, written by Robert Kanigel that has the ominous subtitle “The enigma of Efficiency”. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/one-best-way
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