If twenty-somethings managed your company, what would your work culture be like?

Thanks to a leaked memo from YouTuber MrBeast, we now have a glimpse:

This week, the Mode/Switchers—joined by Gen Z Jake Aupperlee—critically examine MrBeast’s metrics-driven workplace manual and its impact on workplace culture. We take on questions like:

Jake schools the rest of us on what “beast mode” is in our Spell It Out Feature, and we propose a few mode/switches for your organizational community.

Happy Friday, friends and mode/switchers! Here’s a podcast with an indispensable, intergenerational conversation for the start of your weekend!

Hey, we want to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email and let us know how the Mode/Switch Pod’s working for you. What would you like to hear more of? Less of?

Don’t miss this week’s banter across gender and generational divides across the workscape of the American workplace and in the shadow of the MrBeast empire.

What do you--45 days before the election--think about the Politics-over-Business claim that "Customers want excellence not activism"?

This week, our intergenerational team discusses whether political neutrality is practicable in the workplace.

Maybe the three best words in this week's conversation:

“I would disagree…”

The writer Henri Nouwen made an important distinction between solitude and loneliness. The former's good. The latter's hard to bear, especially at work.

So this week, the Mode/Switchers cuss-and-discuss workplace loneliness from intergenerational perspectives.

Listen while you work to our research-based conversation, sharing stories (don’t miss Emily’s “cyclone of crazy” tale) and mode/switches in mindset and behavior. And we “spell it out” when it comes to that loneliest of contemporary phenomena: hotel-ing.

You’re a lucky person, maybe, if your job doesn’t ask a lot of you. But on top of all the reporting, meeting, messaging, measuring, marketing, and advocating, should your job also ask you to be resilient?

Wrong question. At least, that’s a conclusion we came to in this week’s podcast. The prior question is what does it mean to be resilient? 

Spoiler: our intergenerational team of Mode/Switchers identifies multiple ways to be resilient at work.

This week, David, LaShone, and I are joined by two Gen Z guests: Kate Witvliet and Alexis Delk. This conversation makes a cat’s cradle of feelings in common—and not.

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.