A conversation with Jennifer Moss, author of Why Are We Here? Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants, on simple ways leaders can promote wellbeing, improve connection and make the office a place people want to be.
Jennifer Moss, noted workplace expert, journalist, speaker and author, thinks great workplace culture doesn’t mean huge overhauls or massive investments into workplace programs. Leaders can promote connection, wellbeing and happiness at work by going back to the basics and embracing ideas that require as little as five to 30 minutes a week.
Here’s what leaders should know, according to Moss:
What’s the secret people are missing in the new work world?
Moss: We need kind of a broad, going back to basics, and we need to remember that we used to be kind to each other. And these are human traits, but these instincts have somehow been jaded, and we have a lot of cynicism. We must try to make it less complicated and return to the fundamentals of just being human beings and maybe 5% kinder. That’s what the book ends up concluding is, just be 5% kinder.
Why has work changed?
Moss: I try not to talk about the pandemic too much in the book, because we all want to move on, but the pandemic was just an exacerbation of all the things that were already bubbling. It highlighted so many things we were already unsettled about, but we were accepting, because that was just how you know how life went. You just went to work, did the grind, and you accepted that that was life.
When you face your mortality in such a big collective way over and over, we developed this neural adaptation to this new way of living. It made it so that we can’t go back like the habits we built, the sense of freedom that we felt, a sense of understanding that we could be doing what we were doing in a productive way. When leaders just say, ‘Let’s just bifurcate that experience and pretend it never happened,’ it is really tone deaf and very naive. Fundamentally, humans have changed, and so work is no longer where we necessarily base our identity. It’s about how we live. What do we care about? How do we want to leave a legacy? Work has become a bit secondary to that.
Your book suggests that hope is crucial. Is that the recipe for creating the workplace of the future?
Moss: People are feeling hopeless about the future of work and their place in it. Young people do not want to bring children into this world. We need to increase hopefulness so that people can see themselves in their future at work and in the future for this world.
Hope feels like a nebulous strategy, but it is actually very actionable. It’s based on goal setting and focusing on small goals. There are organizations that have weekly goals and monthly goals and celebrate small wins. Autonomy can also offer hope. Google is a great example in the way they lead their OKRs (objectives and key results). People are very autonomous and choose them. There’s a lot of transparency. Everyone’s in on it with you, helping you achieve your goals. And it creates a lot of innovation and creativity, because people feel part of the future in their organization.
You’ve also suggested that autonomy affects the implementation of artificial intelligence at work? How so?
Moss: When you look at the six root causes of burnout, lack of autonomy is really big. The promise of generative artificial intelligence is supposed to give us our time back. But we’re finding that people are lying about finishing early or not letting people know exactly what they’ve accomplished, because they are worried that a manager will come in and give them more work.
That promise of AI isn’t being delivered because we’re not rewarding people for doing better, faster, more effective and efficient work. If we want to blend AI into our workforce and have people adopt it, we need to reward people for effectively using it. And that autonomy piece is being able to choose your goals and get to your goals. Managers shouldn’t care how you do it.
How we measure GDP and how we measure productivity must completely change, because right now, it’s still hours-focused instead of goals-focused. Because it’s based on hours, we’re seeing productivity decline. Leaders and managers that are micro-managing the process and making sure you’re fitting in all your hours are actually decreasing the output, potential output, and the level of productivity.
Community is one of the chapters of your book. Can you talk about how a company culture can be changed simply by having lunch?
Moss: In the past, we used to bump into people and then start a conversation and then go grab lunch. After being remote for so long and now hybrid, it’s not happening. Add to that, Gen Z’s don’t necessarily know how to network. Sixty-two percent of American office workers usually eat lunch “al desko,” meaning they eat in the same spot where they work all day.
A Cornell study, however, found that firefighters who had lunch together 20 minutes a week had better life satisfaction, job satisfaction, retention and avoided errors on the job. Other studies of office settings found that if you walked away from your desk and just connected with someone for a half an hour once a week, it completely changed morale and improved relational energy.
You’re more likely to be empathetic to what other people are going through in their lives. There’s much more grace that you give other people for mistakes, but there were also fewer mistakes in their work. When you have really good relational energy, you are far more productive as a team. You generate better business outcomes, and just having lunch together can create that. A lot of these problems can be solved with simple solutions.
People have pushed against the status quo lately with the Great Resignation and quiet quitting. Do you feel like that’s going to continue this year?
Moss: I keep saying that wellbeing is not antithetical to work ethic. Organizations with really strong cultures may have times of compressed workloads and really long hours for a period of time, but people understand that when they need rest, they’re allowed to have it like. There’s no penalization.
I think that people are pushing back on this idea that the only way that we can work is to work at an unsustainable level. We had the Great Breakup in 2022, where more women left the workplace, but it’s still happening. Women don’t necessarily show their disengagement through quiet quitting. Women will work and work and work and work as hard as they can. Then they just quit and they either go to another company or move to part time, reducing hours. Organizations should have been paying attention long before they got to that point. So we have the narrowest executive pipeline we’ve seen, for the first time, and now in a decade, the number of female CEOs has declined globally. That’s really problematic.
So you’re seeing women push back in a different kind of way. We’re seeing younger cohorts just opting out of the typical role, like the corporate roles. They’re doing other things, they’re willing to take less pay, they’re freelancing, and pushing off having a family until later. They are saying they’ll put off all those big things that used to be the golden handcuffs that tied them to work.
2025 is also the start of the Silver Tsunami, or a time when massive numbers of people hit age 65 at exponential rates. Many of them will be competing with robots and AI and they’re not as interested in training up. They also feel completely disconnected from the younger generation in their kind of work ethics and their behaviors, and there’s a lot of ageism between both groups. And so boomers are deciding to leave the workforce.
How do Return to Office mandates affect the future of work and culture?
Moss: When an employer makes an arbitrary decision that feels like it doesn’t follow the data or follow the typical kind of social construct that’s been created in the culture, it makes people very upset and very angry, and it feels like a loss of freedom. That’s what we’re seeing with the return to office mandates.
People may go in the office and think ‘I was more productive at home’ or ‘I’m productive in a hybrid environment where I could be in the office a couple days a week, but now here I am, and I’m on Zoom meetings with people halfway around the world because my whole team isn’t still here.’ It just makes people angry.
Being in person still matters, but it does not need to be five days a week. When people are in the office, we need to make those experiences better, because we don’t have friendships and we don’t have any rituals. We need to bring back rituals in the office space. We need to look at the office as the third place, a place of discourse and conversations and discord, where you have conflict resolution. It needs to be the place where we go to collaborate. It’s the place you can go and be aligned with the culture and get stuff done, but also feel like you’re not working from home.
What was the biggest takeaway from your research?
Moss: It’s simpler than we think. It’s being human again. It’s going to take effort. We can’t blame ourselves for what happened, and we can’t as leaders, blame employees for not meeting us where we’re at, or doing what we want them to do. We have become disconnected from each other, and we have to come together to solve the problems.
