_{One of BetterYou’s employees, Shannon, at work.}

FIVE MINUTES AFTER I walk into BetterYou, a company that packages spices and re-labels international food products, Rhonda shows me her production sheet. Yesterday, she tells me, she re-labelled more than 1,400 packets of mints. 

Sticking labels on packaged food sounds easy, but it is not. Rhonda lets me do two so I can try it. Not only do I nearly stick them upside down – twice – but I have great difficulty keeping out air bubbles. Also, the packet keeps rolling and I almost cover up the Best Before date.

Luckily for BetterYou, this isn’t my job. But Rhonda and her colleagues love this work.

That’s because in this company, everyone chooses the work tasks that best suit them. As a team, they make the key decisions about day-to-day business activities. Except for a couple of people who are trying BetterYou to see if it’s for them, all the workers here also own the company. Rhonda is keeping track of her productivity because it is her business. It also happens that Rhonda, like all the other people who own and work at BetterYou, has a disability. 

Christine, who is labelling jars, has a visual impairment. So does Shannon, who seals the jars. Both can do this precision work by feel and sound. Young Henry, who until recently was at school, has autism and is very good at counting. It is only his second day though, so he is starting out labelling mints. There are some support workers in the room. They are helping with the work and any issues that arise, but no one is closely supervised. They don’t need to be.

This is a warm, fun and inspiring place. I want to sit next to Rhonda and stick labels all day – or, maybe, find something that I am less clumsy about.

Work didn’t used to be like this. In their previous jobs, Rhonda, Shannon and their colleagues had every little activity monitored and controlled. And there were rules, so many rules. Of course, many were intended to keep people safe, but they also inhibited staff. And it was no fun. 

At BetterYou, everyone has an incentive to keep themselves safe. If Rhonda gets hurt at work, she might not get to watch her beloved football on the weekend; she’s a massive West Coast Eagles fan. If there are hazards, this group of owners do what is sensible: they talk about it. For example, some people at BetterYou cannot navigate a set of stairs to a mezzanine level. In order to keep those people safe, everyone agreed not to use the stairs. Unlike in other disability workplaces, there is no need to erect a physical barrier to keep everyone away from what inevitably becomes a forbidden attraction. Here, those affected made the decision, and as a result they can be trusted to stick to it. 

Other decisions are about productivity. Although some members of the group used to like eating their lunch in the quieter of the company’s two meeting rooms, this meant they had two rooms to clean up as well as their kitchen. This took them away from their work, so the team decided not to use the second meeting room anymore. Sometimes people do need a quiet place to settle their feelings – but there’s a chill-out room for that. 

I’ve been at BetterYou for an hour or so when Henry says he’d like some exercise. In fact, everyone could do with moving their body after a morning of labelling and packaging. Rhonda and Marie show me the exercises that they do together, such as high-knee walking on the spot. They’ll do some just before lunch, they tell me.

I’m not here because I’m an expert on disability. I am not. I’m a historian of work, education and capitalism. In recent decades a problem has arisen that’s remarkably similar to the one BetterYou is solving. My research has focused on white-collar professionals, traditionally among the most privileged in society, though it applies well beyond that occupation category too. I am visiting BetterYou to learn from them, for I suspect that they might have the solution for us all.

SINCE THE 1980s, professionals have lost considerable control over their work. Processes are prescribed with ever more detail every year; many people feel they are spending more time filling out forms to reassure bosses that the work is proceeding than actually doing the work. 

Until recently I was employed in academia. Nearly every task that could be turned into a form or checklist – sometimes pages long – was. These forms and checklists also paired over-complication with infantilising control. For example, one made sure every little sub-task, from uploading course material to setting assessment deadlines, was completed under close managerial scrutiny. 

Frequently, managers pitched these work processes as ways of improving quality, but in fact they were almost all about reducing cost. In all cases, managers behaved as if micro-control of every single step was the only way to protect whatever goals they claimed must be achieved.

This amounts to what I have called ‘moral de-skilling’, where what was once the ‘good character’ people brought to work is now broken into auditable tasks, controlled by management. And teaching is a moral job. I was teaching students, many from non-traditional backgrounds, hoping to bring knowledge from new communities to refresh my discipline: history. I hoped students would become inspiring teachers and that their education, and the students they would one day teach, would help reduce inequality in our society.

How I teach – the manner of person I am with students, the time I take with them, the scaffolding I provide, the classes and assessment I design – all have a material effect. When I started teaching, I designed first-year assessments that scaffolded learning to write – but the next year, managerial surveillance of ‘over-assessment’ put a stop to it. Two years later, students from that cohort were noticeably better third-year writers than those who came before – or, sadly, after. No managerial surveillance could prevent me making allowances for missed deadlines and extra support for the student taking a third-year core unit for the third time because she was financially supporting two elderly parents and a sibling with a disability – though I hear from colleagues at other universities that punitive and bureaucratised ‘special consideration’ systems would have prevented it elsewhere. With targeted help, that student, who dreamed of becoming a teacher, finally passed the unit that year, to our shared delight.

It is not just teaching that has moral goals. The law seeks justice, journalism underpins democracy, social workers give people access to help they need, engineers build the technology and infrastructure that help us and our food supply get around. Medical doctors and healthcare workers literally save lives.

When these occupations were professionalising in the late nineteenth century, these moral goals led teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers to insist that the work needed to be done by people of character. Bringing that inner character into conversation with colleagues committed to maintaining professional and ethical standards would ensure the work was moral and that society would profit.

It was far from perfect. The criteria these professions used to measure and reward their career goals were turned into social hierarchies that were sexist, racist and exploitative of the environment. Recognising this, in the 1970s each profession confronted a moral crisis. In the wake of the civil rights movement in the US, for example, teachers examined the ‘hidden curriculum’ that made schooling racist.

This crisis could have been productive, except that a rising managerial class turned it to their interests. By externalising what had been ‘character’, management controlled the virtues that professionals needed – and still need – to do their jobs. Engineers, for example, need to select materials and chemicals they know are safe, no matter what cost-cutting measures are in place. Healthcare professionals need to make decisions that are best for this specific patient, irrespective of hospital bed-occupancy limits. And accountants need to give an accurate report of company finances, even when it is not in the interests of the executives who hired them.

Risk and quality management systems, often producing audit cultures like the one I experienced, broke morality into tiny, auditable tasks. Having seen the damage, in the 1970s, that their hierarchical sense of achievement had engendered, often enough professionals helped managers catalogue ethics and outcomes.

Just as in factories, where complex artisanal work became ‘unskilled’ labour, for professionals this amounted to a de-skilling that applied instead to our moral work.

Ultimately, de-skilling the most important parts of a job actively reduces creativity and, with it, job satisfaction. It is no accident that this process has been enacted most firmly in industries dominated by women: teaching, nursing and social or care work, fields where there is now a labour shortage, understandably enough.

SELF-DETERMINATION IS a crucial goal for people with disability. It enables them to work in ways that express their aptitudes, develop new skills, have some say and control; it makes for a better life. It is also, as BetterYou shows, more productive.

This company, owned by people who all experience life according to abilities that present particular challenges, may well show us the way forward. 

First, people are listened to. It does not matter if they are sharing a new process they developed, like Rhonda’s production sheet, or if they are excited about an upcoming birthday. Ensuring everyone has an authentic voice, especially about work processes, would be a great place to start in all workplaces.

Second, human needs and the company’s needs are not separate. This moves in both directions, acknowledging and addressing emotional needs, as in in the chill-out room, while also prioritising work over some less important preferences, such as eating in the meeting room. There is every reason that what presently passes for ‘performance management’ in many organisations could also consider the ways enterprises are performing in supporting individual emotional needs and career goals.

Third, those doing the work are in control. The tasks they perform best suit their individual capabilities – and these are defined not by managerial criteria, but by each worker’s own confidently articulated preferences. Being in control also applies collectively: group members make decisions that affect the wellbeing of everyone. Imagine similarly democratic workplaces everywhere, where difference is valued and individuals are supported to succeed based on their unique skills and talents. We could achieve productivity and happiness, which ought surely to be our shared goal.

Last, it seems important to self-determination that the workers at BetterYou are also the company’s owners, materially aligning the needs of the business with those doing the work. 

Nourishing both self and work together might be key to better outcomes for everyone.

Image courtesy of BetterYou