Every five years since the early 90s, the UK government has tracked something called “work intensity” and what they’ve found is disturbing if not surprising: more people are saying they work harder to tighter deadlines under greater levels of tension. In 1992, 23 percent of workers who responded to surveys on this subject said they worked at high speed; 30 percent of respondents said they “worked very hard”; and 53 percent claimed to work under “tight deadlines.” Today those numbers stand at 45, 46, and 60 percent, respectively. Now…layer on top that a pandemic, rioting in the US Capitol, inflation, war in Ukraine, a looming recession. Workers are stressed – and they’re asking themselves questions like “Why the F$&# am I putting up with this?”
That is a challenge for any employer, one that our guest on today’s pod set out to solve with his own company. His name is Jason Fried, he’s a co-founder of the tech company Basecamp, and after twenty years of trial and error he put all his solution in a 2018 book called “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Crazy at Work”.
Jason joins us to talk about what he sees now in the wake of COVID, with a potential recession looming on the horizon.
