Cheers!

Reshaping work for a better life.

Joe Atkinson
Lineup Ninja
Published in
5 min readOct 13, 2017

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At 33.5 million views and counting, Simon Sinek’s “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” is one of the most-watched TED talks to date. In it, he encourages entrepreneurs to think — and talk — about why we do what we do, before talking about what we do or how we do it.

I suspect that this may be a factor in Kasper Kubica’s frustration that companies no longer tell us what they actually do.

You can skip to the end for our what if you like, but at Lineup Ninja, our why is that we want to help make people’s work lives healthier, more fulfilling and more dignified.

Fans of the comedy show Silicon Valley could be forgiven for thinking that we’re just parroting the kind of empty “making the world a better place” bullshit you’d expect from a tech startup. But please bear with me: my co-founder, Gordon Johnston and I have direct experience of not-so healthy, fulfilling or dignified workplaces…

The private sector tech world

We met while working as engineers at an ISP in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble. We sat in the same office for eight years and worked for four different companies as the sector consolidated, and tech firms and telcos devoured each other in a corporate feeding frenzy.

As each new leadership team came in and decided that they needed to restructure the business, an endless round of lay-offs began.

Because the staff weren’t unionised, we had to elect representatives to engage in a collective consultation exercise. This involved going to meetings where the executive team told us what was going to happen, and that we effectively had no power to influence it. It also involved representing at-risk employees at meetings with and HR.

As one of these elected representatives, I attended several such meetings. It was not uncommon for at-risk employees to break down in tears. In one case, an employee literally begged an HR manager not to let them go. This was met with an impassive gaze and a quietly mumbled “I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do”.

After some of these meetings, HR managers admitted that they’d found the experience traumatic too. As had the line managers who had spent years building and nurturing their teams, only to be given headcount reduction targets, and forced to decide where the axe would fall.

So, the people who didn’t quite meet arbitrarily imposed targets (or who did, but just not quite as much as others) got laid off or ‘performance managed’ out of the business.

Meanwhile, the people who remained had the constant background stress of worrying whether they’d be next, and were placed under enormous pressure to pick up the slack. Elsewhere, whole departments got outsourced to teams in “low friction labour markets” in other countries.

Quality customer service and employee wellbeing were sacrificed on the alter of cost control.

While rank-and-file employees — the people directly delivering value to customers — struggled to build secure careers, C-suite executives waltzed through revolving doors between companies, taking enormous salaries, bonuses and settlements when they left, while investors raked in fat dividends.

This is not a formula for happy workers. Adding insult to injury, the system commodifies people, reducing them to terms like “resource”, “headcount” and “cost centre”. Like the term ‘collateral damage’, this dehumanising language allows those at the top to insulate themselves from the human impacts of their decisions. And it strips the people affected by those decisions of their dignity in the process.

Sticking it to The Man

Feeling exploited and disillusioned with tech and the private sector, I had quite a big reaction: I left to set up a gardening business and took a part-time job for a small environmental charity, coordinating their education activities and events.

For the first time in my work life, I experienced true fulfilment: the work was so congruent with my values that the boundaries between work, activism and leisure blurred. I felt immensely privileged to get paid to work for an organisation I’d gladly volunteer for.

The organisation had some extremely progressive workplace practices: the CEO and employees were on equal pay; part time working was strongly encouraged to promote work-life balance etc. But they also had a culture where it was normal to work beyond one’s contracted hours, and they were obviously grateful to receive the extra help when people did this.

While I don’t blame the charity for my own choices, my excitement to have meaningful work coupled with my rather naive understanding of the dynamics at play, allowed me to develop a sort of ‘voluntary exploitation’ work ethic. “Oh, I’ve clocked up 100 hours of unplanned overtime? Call it a donation.”

Friends and family started asking if I thought I might be a workaholic. Dismissing their concerns, I carried on regardless: “I love what I do”, I’d tell them, “It doesn’t really feel like work”…

But it wasn’t long until I started experiencing chest pains and heart palpitations in the run-up to big events I was coordinating. I came face to face with major burnout twice and was fortunate to step back from the brink of crisis on both occasions.

So, while I’d found the dignity, sense of worth and congruence between my work and values that I’d been looking for. But I was stressed, exhausted, and I had even less job security than before as my job lurched from one grant-funded project to the next.

Meanwhile, Gord stayed in IT and worked his way up to a senior technical position at another tech company. You can hear the story of how that resulted in burnout for him here.

Going forward

And this was the experience of two well educated, middle class white guys. We’ve had it easy compared to pretty much everyone else. Across the broader economy, many workers face much more hostile working environments. The world is in the middle of a workplace mental health crisis where three quarters of workers experiencing symptoms of poor mental health.

This is clearly a problem in its own right. But we also think it’s bad business. We don’t believe that unhappy, unhealthy workers make great products or deliver great customer service. So we want to build a psychologically safe and healthy workplace, to create fulfilling work that affords our team dignity and to help our customers do the same.

Our how? By remaining independent and bootstrapping the business. We want to avoid dependence on VC investors who can call the shots and impose an unhealthy culture on us and our team as it grows. We aim to establish a business culture that is collegiate, cooperative and consensual; that gives our team dignity, fulfilment and control over their work lives. Part of this will be by adopting employers’ best practice to support good mental health.

So what are we actually doing? Having experienced one of the most stressful occupations myself, and identified a specific problem that contributed to my own stress in that role, we’re setting out to build a technical solution.

We’re making a tool to help event coordinators reduce stress, save time and avoid mistakes when scheduling complex event programmes. You can see our 1-minute explainer video here:

If you’re interested, get in touch via the comments below, Twitter, Facebook or our website.

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Co-founder @LineupNinja | Helping conference producers save time, money and stress | Speaker management software | Exhibitions | Conferences