Today I heard a message from a successful VC – no one is interested in investing in or paying for anything that is related to Workplace Culture or Workplace Wellness any more; the Product boom-times seen during the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic as organisations tried to figure out how to keep working and keep growing are over.
And shaaazam, hard pivot. I am sure that the VC concerned is, in many senses, correct, but it made my brain go a little sideways.
I thought, potentially what they meant is that the investment into Product’s marketing themselves in such a way is dead, rather than the death of culture or wellness initiatives within organisations large and small…
…and yet, how many of those initiatives are simple box ticking exercises, and how many of them actually benefit the end user, or in this case, the employee?
What Was it Anyway?
What is wellness anyway? HBR can be paraphrased by a helpful AI friend as saying:
The goal is to create a supportive environment that not only helps prevent stress and burnout but also fosters a culture where individuals and organisations can thrive. Effective workplace wellness programs can lead to improved employee engagement, productivity and even reduce healthcare costs.
7 Strategies to Improve Your Employees’ Health and Well-Being (hbr.org)
Unless maybe you’re Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, or or or, you probably want that.
And, having been around for a while, I am pretty sure that the problem is yet to be solved. So I guess that the gentleman was saying that the market is saturated with products targeting this problem and that there needs to be something tangible that your new entrant can use to differentiate from, and generate traction despite of the competitive landscape. Under whatever name you are bringing it, most organisations want to see the return on their efforts, but more so on their investment. Much more so than when they just wanted to be able to tick some boxes and list some common benefits via their Chief People Officer, intranet, and company blog.
As anyone who has tried to build a culture top down you learn fast that you get the culture you deserve, the one that you embody, the one that you hire for and not the one that you want. Employees have known for a long time that these Culture and Wellness initiatives are rarely worth the PowerPoint decks that they are printed on. Rather than death, maybe what we could be experiencing is not just an optic shift but a real movement towards employee led initiatives, or even better to tools that give the employees agency in looking after their own and their teammates wellbeing and proving empirically the value that they provide to the employer? That sounds awesome.
Building for Who?
90% of investors add no value. I say that 70% add negative value.
I am lucky to work and have worked with several seasoned investors and to have been around fundraises at different scales in different sectors for several years, and the first thing that I should point out is that investors are pressed for time (duh!) and investors like to speak in hyperbole.
If you seek investment half your job is to sell your product perfectly to the audience and the other half is to digest and work out how to react to their opinion. A gut reaction when someone who knows the market speaks confidently and suggests that you have got something wrong, may be to freak out a little and consider going back to the drawing board; but maybe what you wanted to say is somehow lost in the messaging and what they wanted to say got lost in the hubris and hyperbole. Maybe what they meant was, boring, heard it before, invested before.
Firstly remeber that this is one person’s opinion (and whilst some would have it that investors are herd animals, it is not always the case), to be considered and maybe assimilated, but that also, it is a lot cheaper to pivot your messaging than your product. Secondly, you’re here to love the problem and iterate the solution. You’re going to get knocked back and knocked back and eventually, you will learn to love the taste of your own blood… (then get your corporate Mindfulness application out and touch some grass to get you well grounded and remind you that it is all going to be ok).
Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.
Sean Parker
But is it Dead?
The oft-unearned (soz) power that VCs wield aside… Are the generations coming up behind me or those starting their careers now or in the next few years and likely to be impacted by the rise of AI technologies far more motivated by Culture and Wellness than even we were in the world-shifting throws of a sudden shift to remote work? Right now, I can hear my 12 year old son listening to meditation soundscapes to help him relax off into sleep. When he enters the workplace, what will he expect from a wellness initiative?
In the very near future we will see a tug of war emerging as employers try to pivot back to more office based hours and employees fight to retain the flexibility of remote work; as well as an increase in the proportion of the working population favouring portfolio working and digital nomadic lifestyles. Both employers and employees will have one and a half eyes on what AI can do for them, or as will be the case for many of us, against them. I suspect that if Wellness or Culture are dead, it will only be because they have become so embedded in the modern organisation or that initiatives have failed so hard (the initiatives, the execution, not the Products themselves) that the words and catchphrases of the consultants and marketeers will have gone out of fashion to be replaced with something new.
To really muddy the swamp we can throw the current backlash against both DEI initiatives in the workplace and a growth in anti-woke rhetoric in public forums and on social media platforms. How can the workplace, and the tools we use support truly equitable opportunities at all levels, and how do they play into a culture where shouts of merit and discrimination (the backwards kind) are used to rock the boat?
Kapow. Then there are the regulatory changes, at least in the UK. Increasing the rights of employees when it comes to flexibility in their employment. As government policymakers catch up with what employers have been grappling with since 2020, what is the shift from cultural buzzwords or values of transparency and trust?
Is the combination of all of this a shift towards empiricism and equity based meritocracy all ensconced within an emerging regulatory landscape that is just catching up with the corporate war rooms of 2020 and will soon have to cope with the huge implications of AI in all workplaces. Is an equity based meritocratic environment even possible? Or are meritocratic systems doomed to be intrinsically biassed because of the simple naivety of the model?
Wellness may have moved on, and Culture should probably never have been purloined by the consultants and transformation specialists. Bringing me and my circuitous meandering full squiggly circle. Both terms have evolved in meaning, but without anything new coming to fill the void that they haven’t left behind; they just sit there stagnating.
All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision
Eric Reis
So where am I now? Back at the beginning, everything you ever read about Culture is still true, live it, don’t create it, and the workplace still needs tools to make it a great place to be for it’s employees – which will make it a great place within which they will do effective work for the employers. Your values still make sense, and your benefits will still benefit you.
Our awareness of our human impact on each other and the planet is increasing, the benefits of embracing cultural and language differences and the new ways of understanding that brings to our existence are being felt and creating richer experiences, the rise of the right is being met with stronger opposition from the left, the students are revolting, and most ironically the evolution of AGI will lead to the end of blue/white collar working lines leading, most likely, to new economic systems for us all to operate with and within.
I wonder if the future looks something more like universal basic compute than universal basic income.
Sam Altman – Darth Vadar – Karl Marx
If you are building, then I think you should still fall in love with your problem, and you should still do your competitor analysis and validate the space before you go out to raise money and you should still speak to those for whom you are meeting an unmet need. There is clear and present turmoil in the world and the rapid rise of AI – even if it does not disrupt as many industries as the investors think it will – will add to the stress and anxiety felt by an already stressed and anxious population. So file your solution under Compliance, or Equitable Employment, or Life Assurance, or Productivity, or Human Intelligence because we still need it.