Mattering in Times of AI
By Kirsten Penaloza - Former CX executive, coach, and Organizational Advisor working with leaders to create kick-butt teams and healthy work cultures.
When Growth Gets Shut Down
The first front-line role I ever had was at Squarespace, new to the country, zero tech-savvy, and completely foreign to the 9-to-5 tango of America’s corporate world. I needed a job, so I took whatever I got offered, and it happened to be as a “Customer Care Bear.” As a Gen-Xer, I grew up with Care Bears, so that’s about what I understood of the role. Beyond that, I was a blank page to be filled. Few things were burnt as memories from that time, and one of them was when the Director of Customer Support told us during a team meeting, roughly paraphrasing, "if you are here [in Customer Support, that is] because you believe you can move into a different department later, then you may as well leave now."
Well. Even if I didn’t know what other departments a tech company has, something about that statement didn’t sit with me. I recall in the movie “The Truman Show” how little Truman in school was sharing that he wanted to become an explorer, and the teacher shut him down, saying, “Too late, the world has already been explored.” If you’ve seen that movie, you remember his expression of disappointment, deflated and sad.
That’s what I saw in some faces around me and certainly felt it in the air.
I was not trying to move to another department, since I was still learning what people meant by “not having enough bandwidth." Or simply navigating the complex communication of small talk. But something in me deflated nonetheless. Having a desire to grow into another job or position is a very natural thing for me, if not most of us. And a leader killing that desire immediately, generally, and without any kindness was brutal. The kicker, though? 14 years later, many leaders still behave like growth is a privilege, not a given.
Growth, Burnout, and Mattering
Let’s be honest, very few people wake up one day and proclaim to dream about becoming a front-line customer support agent. No one goes to college to make a career in customer experience. At least, not that I know of.
People get into customer support positions, learn and master them, some leave eventually and pursue their passions, and others are told to stay in their lane. But I dare to say that any position without growth, especially a front-line role, can cause disengagement and eventually burnout if there’s no movement.
Christina Maslach, the Berkeley professor who invented the Maslach Burnout Inventory used in 99% of burnout research across the world, proved through decades of research that burnout is organizational and not personal. In her book The Burnout Challenge, co-authored with Michael Leiter, she lists six particular factors predicting burnout:
Work overload
Lack of control
Insufficient reward
Breakdown of community
Lack of fairness
Conflicting values.
Notice that the majority of these factors are related to respect and agency, not ticket numbers or metrics.
This idea correlates very well with the work done by Gordon Flett from York University on the concept of "mattering.” In his book The Psychology of Mattering, he describes dozens of studies showing a correlation between the lack of mattering and anxiety, depression, and disengagement, while significant mattering has a positive effect on mental health. He calls mattering "a core, universal human need" in his interview with the New York Times. It’s quite an alarming statement considering how much time people spend not feeling significant, thanks to leaders who shut down your growth aspirations and needs from the get-go.
Finding Meaning in the Work
Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale researched the concept of "job crafting" (watch her talk here). Her research shows that people in low-autonomy jobs, like janitors in a hospital, manage to make their work significant by changing the way they look at the job, not the job itself. People who view their work as caring for patients rather than simply mopping floors report more meaning and resilience in the job. The job does not change, but the story about the job does, and it either gets the support from leadership or gets stifled by it.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely conducted a number of experiments, ranging from Lego construction to origami and fundraising calls, and concluded in all of them that people work harder and ask for lower compensation when they feel that the work is meaningful and appreciated (watch his TED Talk here). In one of his experiments, participants whose Lego constructions got destroyed in front of them and then asked to recreate them lost motivation very fast. Ariely calls it the "Sisyphus condition", the exact sensation that a lot of front-line workers feel when they have to solve the same problem for the hundredth customer of the day with no visible result besides a closed ticket and their CSAT rating, don’t you think?
McKinsey's research on the purpose of employees also showed a similar trend on the corporate level. The difference between the level of fulfillment of executives and front-line workers is striking. Having made it from the front lines to VP of CX, I can relate to the statement that most executives feel fulfilled in their job, while only a few front-line workers feel the same way. The difference only narrows when leaders link daily task accomplishment with the results and outcomes that people can see and be proud of.
Ikigai, a Japanese concept usually described as "reason for being," exists at the intersection of these four questions: something you love, something you’re good at, something that is needed in the world, and something that others will be willing to pay money for. It’s meant to find one's reason for existence and can be applied within the context of a seemingly mundane activity. In the case of front-line roles, this intersection is hardly ever visible alone, so someone has to show people the relationship between a closed ticket and how it helps a client succeed, or how the company stays in business. Leading different teams within CX departments, I used this tool to go beyond KPI metrics and QA scores, which show people how good they were at their job, but not why it mattered.
Belonging in the Age of AI
In his book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen gives the term to this kind of practice: situation crafting. This technique implies minor alterations of people's perception of their surroundings that produce a disproportionate effect on people's feeling of belonging, very similar to cognitive reappraisal.
As AI slowly absorbs the entry-level and front-line tasks — the very positions that companies previously relied on to develop future leaders — the loyalty between employers and employees becomes one-sided. Devotion is expected but not returned. Telling a front-line team to know its place in this environment is a recipe for attrition and disengagement described in the research above.
Mattering and belonging shouldn’t be treated as soft skills that everyone rolls their eyes at in the leadership workshops; they are the reason that makes a person stay, grow, and care about the result beyond a paycheck, or quit silently and eventually leave to get the growth elsewhere.
