Nobody’s crazier than your company. Nothing’s better than your team.

In the endless weirdness of institutions, you will find amazing teammates. But you’ll also see companies act like zombies seeking nothing but their own survival. 

Good thing that, even when you hate your company, you can still love your team—right? Well, we Mode/Switchers feel that tension with special intensity. Google our workplace, Calvin University, and look at the last half a year of history. You’ll see why. 

The question is, how do you find a good relationship between the team and the org?

Answering that question might just take a mode/switch or two. Not that a shift in your mindset or behavior will transform your company. But try out one of the mode/switches we recommend this week, and you can convert the weird intensity you full in your company’s macro-culture into a vocational posture that’s livable and sustainable. And shareable with your team.

Recent social science says we’re holding roughly three times the meetings we used to. Derek Thompson writes that “The meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work.”

But wait whut? We’re being too communicative at work? Too relational? Too connected? Too interactive?

Does that track?

We Mode/Switchers take Thompson’s point. Cal Newport’s made similar arguments in the world of email, calling it “communication overload.” But these minimalist approaches to human interaction—Slash the meetings, burn the inboxes!—neglect the ways that meetings could be so much better than they are.

The problem at work isn't that we have too many meetings. The problem's that we don't do meetings like the humans we are. Or should be.

Post-pandemic, is there an office dress code?

A funny thing happens on the way through this week’s podcast on workplace fashion.

Our chatty little intergenerational convo makes it sound like we’re agreeing with each other. But you’ll notice our proposed mode/switches are in definite tension.

What else would you expect when intergenerational Mode/Switchers sit down to chat about dressing for the day you have and the matching sock you don’t?

Pull up an earbud or two and tuck into a conversation at the Mode/Switch Table.

This week, we discuss big news from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)—their decision to focus on diversity and inclusion but not to talk about equity.

We Mode/Switchers—David, LaShone, Ken, Emily, and I—are not on the same page on this one.

If you’re anxious about how the larger American political situation shapes workplace life, or if you’re just curious about why equity has become such a flashpoint today, you should join this conversation!

Reply to this email with your own take on the role of equity in workplace structures and HR policy. Or you can send a note to [email protected].

We’re also trying a new feature this week: Spell It Out! We take a workplace trend and tease out its meanings and implications in organizational culture. This week we’re spelling out “employer wellness.”

Heads-up: we use explicit language in this episode.

But more importantly, we discuss what “bad words” do at work and why…

Boomer, Xer, Millennial, and Gen Zer have their place around our table: Ken, David, Craig, Emily, LaShone, and Hannah. We don’t have representatives from the Silent Generation. (Still, we’re pretty sure they used explicit language at work, too, but—silently?)

This week, we’re exploring what today’s intensifications of swearing might say about “stuckness” in our workplaces.

What in the world could change the Cocaine Bear Status of your break room fridge? Throwing everything out? Scrubbing the shelves with acid? That won’t help. The shelves will fill right back up in a week or two.

No, you’ll have to address people’s choices about where they go for lunch, how much they eat, how they package leftovers—and why a stack of Wendy’s napkins does not actually require refrigeration.

This little parable has a widespread application: what’s happening within is nearly always related to what’s happening beyond.

This week on the Mode/Switch Pod, special guest Debra Rienstra, a climate writer and activist, talks about what’s happening within and beyond your company. It’s a conversation, in other words, about businesses and their neighborhoods.

For us Mode/Switchers—David, LaShone, Emily, Craig, and Haley—the biggest surprise was this insight:

If you want to care for your company’s culture, you gotta care for your company’s place.

I have a good friend who’s a hazmat responder in a UPS warehouse. He inspects the weird and dangerous things people ship to each other:

Dead cats. Draino. Deer heads. White powder of indefinite origins. That sort of thing.

Working at UPS gives him a clear view of the invisible processes that move or constrict the global economy. Working at UPS also shows the double-binds that choke many workplaces today—like when his managers yell, Hurry the eff up! and then add desperately, And—be safe!

So it might seem strange for us Mode/Switchers to talk with a couple of supply chain experts, Professors Phil Johnson (Calvin University) and Hannah Stolze (Baylor University). But the processes they analyze help the rest of us analyze what’s going wrong in workplace culture today.

Call these processes logistics. Call them fulfillment services. Call them supply chains. Whatever you call them, they’re integral to doing workplaces better.

In order to rehumanize organizations, we have to rethink our relationship with the more-than-human. That means developing a richer attention to systems, technology, infrastructure—not to mention a lot of planes, ships, and trucks.

This podcast conversation seeks openings in the stuck places of organizational culture.Better attention to supply chains creates more generous attention to, and care for, working communities.

Using words well in the workplace is hard. It’s easy to gaslight. It’s easy to lie. It’s easy to exclude. It’s easy to forget what you’re trying to say or who you’re saying it to.

This week, the Mode/Switchers engage two poets, Jane Zwart and Lew Klatt, who have thought a lot about the role of language in labor. They have advice to share about inattention, bullshit, power, and joy. (They’ll make you laugh, too.)

The podcast, you’ll notice, is longer than usual. There’s bonus content at the end from Jane and Lew’s life stories.

A podcast convo about practicing authenticity and restraint--and what both have to do with happiness in working community.

Arthur Brooks’s recent article, “Why a Bit of Restraint Can Do You a Lot of Good,” argues, Don’t let it all hang out—you’ll be happier longer. In other words, practice a little self control about what you say, what you wear, how you behave, what tats you get, how you do your hair, and you’re likelier to experience long-term happiness than if you’re only goal is to just “keep it real.”

The Mode/Switchers—LaShone, Emily, David, & I—think this claim has some problems in the workplace, so we discuss a tricky set of questions: 

And, maybe most importantly, how you can practice authenticity without shutting down other people’s wellbeing?

Last year, a friend of mine dove into the shallow end of a swimming pool and very nearly drowned. Today, he navigates his job in a wheelchair and relies on a coworker to chauffeur him from job site to job site.

That story invites reflection on the turns that life takes. But is that all the story invites?

Kevin Timpe doesn’t think so. This heavy-coffee-drinkin’ Calvin University philosophy professor makes disability central to his research and advocacy, and he believes disability is not so much an occasion for sporadic reflection as it is an integral element of the human condition.

Talking with Professor Timpe about able-ism in the workplace—that is, the belief that certain ways of being a body are normal and superior—pressed me to see realities that matter but that are hard to talk about.

Here’s my advice about this podcast’s deep dive into workplace disability: Don’t listen to rejuvenate your compassion. Don’t press “play” to pay out sympathy for the unfortunates on the edge of your life.

But do listen if you want to attend better to the latent capital that’s circulating right next to you, all around you, thanks to the differently abled people in your workplace.