What will actually help make work better?

23 July

Playgrounded is still in the very early stages of developing what our company will be. Wise, witty, leaders we respect love what we’re trying to do, but wisely and wittily point out that it’s not clear what problem we’re solving, and for whom?… and, what it is you can buy from us! (minor detail, AMIRIGHT?! 🫠)

We started in February 2024 with a big mission - make work better.

Work isn’t working, and we think know we can help.

The problem we’re facing as a business is that there are TOO many ways we think we can help.

We believe everyone deserves to have a good experience at work, and that if everyone does, business is better. So, can’t the answer to the question what problem and for whom just be - ‘work’ for ‘everyone’?

That sounds great in theory, but no one will buy that 🫠

We have to figure out what will help organisations get shit done.

So, we started a Playgrounded competition to mobilise our data collection strategy and truly understand the experience of work so we can offer solutions to specific problems. We asked witty, smart, wise people about their experiences of work and leadership - how do people think about leadership, collaboration, delivery and enjoyment of work? What problems do they face? How do they go about solving those issues now? What doesn’t help?

The person who had the most conversations in a 2 week period shall call themself the CEO 🏆 (until the next competition kicks off). And the winner is…. G 🎉 with 18 conversations👩‍💼💪🏼

While that is wonderful for girl-bosses everywhere, we are the true winners because the data itself is magic. Here’s what we found:

Leadership is difficult. While leaders have the power to make changes, effectiveness and what’s valued depends heavily on markets, board pressure, resources, company structure and leadership of leaders. And right now, everything is hard.
Planning is tricky and leaders are fighting fires every day to stay above water (what a mixed metaphor that is?!) A big time and energy drain is managing the experience of work for teams trying to work together.
Leadership and management are different skills, but management challenges are very time consuming and front of mind for many leaders
Leadership training is time consuming and often not applicable to the problems faced day to day. Leaders end up with an shopping list of microskills to remember that overwhelm and are not useful
Leaders spend lots of time and energy on people individually. They want people in their teams to be able to work well, and for work to be easy
Everyone is time-poor, and leaders particularly spend a lot of time in meetings
Organisations where lay-offs were made have had major culture hits, and aren’t seeing productivity increases
Onboarding is a vital part of the employee experience journey and time to productivity is a real issue for companies.
With advances in AI and automation technologies, the value of knowledge-workers is changing rapidly. Machines can’t innovate or collaborate, but humans can. We need to lean into what makes us human for businesses to get the most out of talent, and for individuals to feel purpose in work.
Hybrid work policies are widespread and varied, but haven’t solved collaboration concerns. Connecting with people is harder and different to the days of everyone in the office and in the pub on a Friday night
Play is either ignored or approached as separate from work. Lots of cringe at the word Play.
Engagement surveys are wide-spread but leaders wondering how to use the data to improve team effectiveness. There’s a tendency to hypothesise about individual grievances rather than group or team level data that you can use as a leader.

we road tested some ideas…

Leadership training

Leadership roles have the most power to make work better. Big companies have L&D teams who organise training. Through our research, we heard those training days are often not useful or easily applicable to day to day work. Our thinking is leadership is like a muscle - it’s a practice we continually have to work on so it’s no wonder 1 day workshops or courses are not helpful. So, what if we built a leadership gym? Support leaders in their every day work through group work, content and 1:1 coaching like gyms do. That sounds awesome and way more practically applicable to leadership life than 1 day ‘how to lead good’ course.

But, who has time for that?! Leaders are time-poor and have big problems to work through. Coaching is awesome for that and great coaches have content you can work through.

Most leaders talked about the most useful leadership upskilling moments came through experience. What if we could build something that trained leaders while working on a day to day tasks that leaders are responsible for anyway. That way, the leadership learning would be based in the reality of doing, rather than the theory of microskills.

Systemic change

Engagement is about collaboration in the group. However, engagement data is often used to look at individual performance and how to improve that to make them work more. What if the answer is to use engagement data to understand the system of work in teams and how to build practices that support collaboration in the group rather than solving for individual outliers?

We heard that our Play State Peach framework is great for this thinking.

What if we combine the two insights above?

We have! We’ve designed products that help create collaboration systemically that also allow leaders to up-skill while working on the delivery of process improvements they’re responsible for anyway.

Where we’ll start

The challenges of collaborating in a hybrid world and remote world kept coming up in our data collecting chats.

Disengagement with work is a symptom of ineffective collaboration. There are software solutions for documentation and communicating how you’re working on the same thing. But, there’s still a uniquely human element to working with others - feelings. And feelings impact how we act. If we feel connected to the human we’re working with, and understand why they do their job, relationships are stronger, feedback is easier, friction is reduced and we can play with work.

We’re developed a human process supported by technology that embeds connection into your team and existing processes that is authentic, efficient and scalable and designed for remote and hybrid teams.

So, in answer to ‘what problem’ and ‘for whom’

The problem: collaboration

For whom: hybrid & remote teams

Our solution: Authentic, human connection embedded via story-telling

Stop team building,
start telling stories.

Thank you to all our wise, witty, smart leader friends who share their thoughts, experiences, opinions and time with us to help us make work better. We are very lucky to have you in our corner 💗