Indeed, Designing Better Work
- Year
- 2019
Leading the world to better work
Indeed is the largest job platform in the world, serving 350M jobseekers every month. Initially, they asked us to consider how to reinvent the ‘best place to work list’. That led us to deep discussions about what ‘good work’ means, and we redefined the challenge to: how could we lead people to good work that enables good lives? Today, most jobs are found from fairly simple signals: job title, description, pay and benefits; these are important, but don’t tell us whether it’s a place we might thrive. Exploring ‘good work’ led us to talk with philosophers, psychologists, economists, writers, workers, investors and leaders. That journey led us to Sonja Lyubomirsky, a pioneer of the science of happiness, and Jan Emmanuel De Neve who leads the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University. Together, we re-designed how employees review their current company, from an old 5-star rating (which doesn’t tell job seekers much), to evaluating 14 different dimensions of wellbeing, from pay to belonging, inclusion, support and growth.
What makes us thrive at work?
By analyzing who finds wellbeing at work, we can see more clearly than ever before what drives wellbeing. Pay and benefits are important, but much more important are the social dynamics: feeling belonging, included, supported. But leaders and workers often don’t prioritize the core drivers of wellbeing, so we set out to learn from the experts how we should think about good work.
The largest data set in the world
Rather than typical 5-star ratings, we redesigned how employees review their jobs. To date, over 20M people have scored their companies using the new wellbeing measures, making this the largest data set in the world on wellbeing at work. Now a jobseeker choosing between companies can see not just what pay they’re offering, but also whether people are thriving at that company. MIT analyzed the impact: people disproportionately apply to higher-wellbeing jobs, meaning we’ve meaningfully changed the market dynamics towards better work.
Inspiring and empowering talent leaders
Over the past years, talent leaders have needed to navigate incredibly complex situations, from responding to overt racism, to increasing work flexibility, the rise of AI and the need to retrain millions of workers. What was always a complex job became even more so, and the wellbeing of millions of workers depends upon the decisions they make.
Every year, Indeed brings together talent leaders to learn from experts and each other, and get re-energized about the journey ahead. We have guided the content and design of FutureWorks for the past 3 years.
Building community for talent leaders
In a rapidly evolving work culture, leaders today cannot rely on the old playbooks. When looking for guidance, leaders most respect peers tackling the same challenges they are.
We identified an opportunity for Indeed to serve senior talent leaders by acting as the convener, creating the community and spaces for peers to have honest conversations. This became Leadership Connect, which now serves talent leaders that collectively oversee over 3 million workers.
What about workers on the sidelines?
Millions of people are ready to work, but they face barriers to entry and are kept on the sidelines.
With our partners at Indeed, we designed Ready to Work, a learning experience to help thousands. From personal coaching to inspiring talks, from mock interviews to endless cups of coffee, we laid the groundwork for their journey to better work.
A shared mission
We assembled seventeen partners, from Lyft to Goodwill to the Chicago Bulls, who all contributed resources to scale and enhance the program, and invite their networks to participate, as it toured major cities around the U.S.
The future of good work
There are a couple of studies that we often refer to: Edelman’s Trust Barometer, the latest edition of which said only 53% of businesses are trusted in the US, and Gallup’s Global Employee Engagement index, which says only 23% of employees are engaged in their work.
In other words, as a category, businesses have a failing grade at articulating a future worth fighting for. This is one of the greatest conundrums we’ve come across: humanity’s most effective vehicle for the creation of prosperity and progress — capitalism — is so woefully bad at its most basic act: creating good work that creates wellbeing and enables companies to do well.
As Indeed says, The world can work better.
Realizing the potential in that ‘can’ is what energizes us.