Fixing Work: A Tale About Designing Jobs Employees Love

In this awkward program, management consultants Henkin (Who Am I?) and Bertels offer guidance on how to “improve employee engagement and motivation, organizational effectiveness and productivity, and customer experience and satisfaction.” The advice is delivered in the form of a fictional narrative about middle manager Jerry Crawford, an overworked corporate schlub at Consolidated Insurance, who loses his best employee to a better job, struggles to please his mercurial leadership, and disappoints his wife by working long hours. While getting coffee, he runs into a former college classmate, now an entrepreneur, who over the course of numerous conversations imparts tips for Jerry on how he can better serve his employees, including granting them autonomy over their work, providing consistent feedback to help them improve, and conducting an audit of the duties his department performs with an eye toward weeding out unnecessary tasks and streamlining workflow. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how to extrapolate general advice from the narrative’s specifics (over a dozen pages are devoted to Jerry’s quest to convince the sales department to let his team interface directly with clients), and there’s a surfeit of superfluous detail (after Jerry’s wife says she’s going to watch Sex and the City reruns, “Jerry grimaces. He dislikes that show”). Bizarre and unwieldy, this doesn’t come together. (Sept.)