What Do People Do All Day?
And what makes the number go up?
My favorite book as a kid was What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry. The copy that six-year-old me would vanish into for hours on end is sitting next to me now, and bears the marks of heavy youthful use: one page held together by tape, a few of the others entirely loose from their bindings.
What Do People Do All Day? takes the curious reader step-by-step through the lives of the residents of Busytown and shows him or her how they spend their time. There is a story about building a house; one about a voyage on a ship; one about harvesting crops; another about how electricity is made. My favorite of all was one about how a road is built, from grading to paving to striping.
I was captivated by the descriptions of all these wonderful things humming along to produce a world well-paved, well-fed, and well-powered. Today, we might call these things processes or systems, but those words seem dry compared to the enchanting reality of what the pages revealed to young Ashley.
What’s also depicted in these pages is, of course, work. Not skills, not competencies, not goals, not objectives, but work. Because while all those other things are work-adjacent, none of them is the thing itself.
Today, the HR profession finds itself at a crossroads. Its traditional focus has been the supply of talent. It has concerned itself with hiring, compensation, promotion, and learning, all in service of ensuring that an organization has the right people in the right roles for as much of the time as possible. Where it has moved beyond this remit, it has tended to retain the perspective of the C-suite. So its work on culture has typically focused more on describing what a culture should be than on figuring out how one is made, or changed. And its work on performance has typically focused more on how to judge it than on how to generate it.
But much of this work is being automated. For better or worse, AI is now screening applicants, recommending salaries, suggesting e-learning, and writing performance reviews—and even where humans remain in the loop, much of the traditional work of HR is being hollowed out.
Meanwhile, many organizations appear increasingly indifferent to the idea that they owe anything to their employees. Layoffs abound once again. My former employer, Deloitte, is cutting PTO and parental leave for some part of its workforce. Workers are being summoned back to the office in ever sterner terms.
So the technical elements of HR are being done more and more by the machines, even as the human elements are devalued. I heard recently about an HR leader who asked his CEO if he could invest in a leadership development program. The CEO told him his job was to keep HR issues off the CEO’s desk—and that if he succeeded at this, he could invest in whatever programs he wished.
This is the prescription for a support function. HR leaders bristle at this description, but this is where the tracks are heading unless the function can demonstrate value in some other area. Where might that be?
A few weeks ago, I visited a road construction site and saw the real-life version of the story in my Richard Scarry book. I watched an on-ramp being graded; I saw concrete being poured. In the site office, I saw a large whiteboard covered in numbers. I asked what they were. My host explained that each number tracked the output of a construction crew for a given day, and captured the relationship between what the project plan thought they would get done and what they had actually accomplished.
I was immediately curious: what made the difference between a good number day and a bad number day? Was it a question of how long the cement truck took to show up, or whether the best driver for the grading machine was available? Was it a leadership question—were there some foremen whose numbers were consistently better than others, and if so, what was different about those foremen? Or was it about something else entirely?
Even in well-run companies, there are very few HR initiatives that engage with these sorts of on-the-ground questions of performance, or which are directly tied to improving numbers like these. Granted, HR advises leaders on who to put on their teams and how to manage them, encourages performance feedback and ratings, makes sure people are fairly paid and properly trained—and all of these orbit around the idea of human performance. But none of them engages with it directly. None of them asks what it takes for the performance number for a given crew to go up on a given day.
Which is a shame, because these numbers are measuring human performance, and human performance is where HR needs to go.
The opportunity is clear: we know an awful lot about the ingredients of human performance—but much of what we know doesn’t make it into our management or HR practices, with the result that too many workplaces actually impair human productivity. This is in large part because human performance isn’t considered an HR problem, and so the accumulated knowledge of how to help people do their best work has no place to land inside a typical organization.
If, however, HR were to take this on—if we were to define our purpose as leading the way in elevating human performance at work—then here are some of the things we would do. We’d return to the site office at the road construction site, and find a bunch of teams who get really good performance numbers and ask them about what they do. We’d do the same for teams who get bad numbers, and we’d figure out what will help create more of the first and fewer of the second.
Or we’d look at information flows in a large project, and figure out where intelligence flows smoothly and where it gets gummed up. Or we’d look at leadership teams and figure out where they struggle and what can help them.
In all these cases and more, we’d figure out what makes the difference between good performance and bad, and then we’d build systems to make things better. And these systems wouldn’t look like old-school performance management, or nine-box grids, or the stuff being automated, or the stuff being devalued. They would look like new approaches to the essential business of the enterprise: better ways to manage work, and select leaders, and set direction, and course correct; better ways to share information; better ways to empower front-line workers; better ways to unleash human expertise.
To do any of this, however, we would have to get really good at understanding the work on the ground, and the experience of working in an organization on any given day. Human systems improve when we understand how success already happens. But we arrive at this understanding not by reading the results of the engagement survey or scanning the comments on Glassdoor, but by showing up in the field, asking questions, and listening, and thereby building performance intelligence: a real-world understanding of what makes things tick.
HR should be about human performance. But what this means in practice is that we have to get really good at understanding what people do all day.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership, performance, and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.