Brave New Workplace: Designing Productive, Healthy, and Safe Organizations

by Julian Barling

After a period of tremendous upheaval, it is necessary for organizations to transform alongside their employees and welcome new ways of working. While it is impossible to predict which changes will be successful, it is crucial for leaders to now what should work look like to achieve productive, healthy, and safe organizations?

In Brave New Workplace , Julian Barling argues that we should focus on creating environments in which employees can flourish, rather than relying on the resiliency of workers to withstand difficult working conditions. Synthesizing centuries of research from scholars such as Abraham Maslow, Fred Herzberg, and Richard Hackman, among others, Barling identifies seven elements that are key to building an exceptional high quality leadership, autonomy, belonging, fairness, growth, meaning, and safety. Throughout the book, chapters touch on pressing issues affecting today's organizations such as working through crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact of gender differences on people's experiences in the workplace. Barling illustrates that small changes make a big difference in the long term--perhaps especially during the most trying times--and that effective, evidenced-based interventions are needed to achieve productive, healthy, and safe, work.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 31, 2023

Reviews

[Dimitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

📕 Why (Not) to read this book (Target Audience)

A great research based book that details an approach to productive, healthy and safe workplaces.

👀 How this book changed my daily live (Takeaways)

A view on High Quality Leadership
1. Personality is not the only and surely not the dominant indicator for leadership, No single personality trait is a predictor for good leadership
2. Bad leadership can be Abbusive leadership and/or Passive leadership
3. Why heal people to send them back to a toxic/destuctive workplace

The truth about Pay
1. Emotional quitting employees cost more than physical quitting employees
2. Unfairness leads to employee teft
3. Pay increase is Paying the price for not having fun


⁉ Spoiler Alerts (Highlights)

7 distinct but interrelated work characteristics trigger productive, healthy, and safe work.
1. High quality leadership
2. Job autonomy
3. Sense of belonging
4. Fairness
5. Growth, and development.
6. Meaningful work
7. Safe work

Two assumptions are fundamental to this approach to productive, healthy and safe workplaces.
1. Productive, healthy and safe work is realized by creating optimal work environments in which people can flourish, not by making people more resilient so that they can withstand damaging. And destructive workplaces.
2. High quality leadership, autonomy, a sense of belonging, fairness, opportunities for growth and development, meaningful work, and safe.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not sure this is necessarily a book targeted at leaders, though I would recommend it to anyone in a leadership position. As in Barling’s previous book, this is a comprehensive walk through the relevant literature as per the time of writing. You can certainly develop some practical applications from this.

If you are a stickler for good editing be warned: this book has, in my opinion, an unusual number of editorial errors, including some very bizarre ones.