The trust deficit that leads to workplace dysfunction

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To research her latest novel, Adelle Waldman took a part-time job unloading and shelving merchandise for a big-box US retailer in the early hours. In the book, Help Wanted, the team is called “Movement”, the outcome of an all-too-plausible, consultant-led internal rebrand from the team’s old title of “Logistics”.

Barack Obama featured her novel on his summer reading list, so Waldman is probably a little further from seeking a temporary job in retail to make ends meet, as many of her characters have to. But as she pointed out in a New York Times essay in February, precarious part-time work is not a choice for most. It “has become ubiquitous in certain predominantly low-wage sectors of the economy [and] many workers are unable to find full-time alternatives”. 

Help Wanted, which Waldman dedicates “to all retail workers”, should be read in its own right as a funny, poignant work of fiction (and if you haven’t yet read it, expect spoilers here). But at the risk of offsetting the Obama effect by dubbing it a management book, I recommend it, too, for its insights into leadership, motivation, the hidden world of work and the disintegration of some of the certainties of the US economy. 

It reads at times like a fictional blend of Janesville, Amy Goldstein’s excellent reported account of the knock-on effect of the closure of a General Motors plant on a Wisconsin community, and MIT professor Zeynep Ton’s research (most recently in her book The Case for Good Jobs) into how to improve worker happiness and productivity.

Help Wanted opens with popular store manager, Big Will, poised for promotion. Movement’s hated boss, Meredith, could replace him, if she weren’t so terrible at her job. The team members hatch a plan to sing her praises, on the basis that the higher she rises, the less trouble she can make for them. The conspiracy unleashes a chain reaction of unintended consequences.

As an anatomy of chaotic corporate decision-making, Help Wanted is highly believable. In almost every workplace, the true motives of individual staff members are rarely visible, rumour and gossip are rife, and the bosses are largely in the dark. 

How might managers better navigate such chaos?

“Radical candour” was once touted as a solution, but even where it once took hold it has proved hard to maintain. For instance, hedge fund Bridgewater Associates has admitted that frank feedback used to flow mainly from the top down. Netflix has recently qualified its own transparency edict, which had become harder to live up to as it grew bigger. The streaming company has also championed “dispersed decision-making”, when everyone has the judgment and ability to take responsibility.

A similar suggestion underpins Zeynep Ton’s “good jobs” system, developed through her work with retailers such as Costco, Spain’s Mercadona, and, latterly, Walmart. One part of the approach she advocates is to encourage staff to come up with ideas for improvement. 

Waldman’s novel carries a faint, but positive message about the power of purpose at work. Her epigraph comes from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: “What makes life dreary is the want of motive.” In small ways, all Movement’s workers seek out some intrinsic motivation in their ill-paid jobs, whether by turning the unpacking of the truck into a performance or folding clothes “as precisely as origami”. But they are no more in control of their fate than the fearful ad agency employees awaiting the axe in Joshua Ferris’s excellent 2007 office novel Then We Came To The End.

In many real-life workplaces — as in Help Wanted — managers do not know enough about the abilities and knowledge of their underlings to have the confidence to delegate decision-making. Lack of trust and wilful blindness stop them from spotting, let alone taking advantage of, the latent potential of their team.

The Movement crew are sporadically excited by finding workarounds for shop-floor problems that only they can see. Their commitment to the twisted plot to have Meredith promoted makes them come alive. But when one of the store group’s senior leaders suddenly guesses what the workers have been planning, she dismisses the thought: “Her eyes narrowed: ‘Are they capable of thinking that far ahead?’” 

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