| This week: How happiness at work translates into broader well-being, and what the digital frontier looks like 25 years after the commercial internet began. Plus, Rima Assi, a senior partner in Abu Dhabi, on the importance of empowering women. |
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| If you’re happy and you know it … make a graph? It’s actually not a silly idea, says Lord Richard Layard, program director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. “We’ve got to get away from happiness being thought to be a fluffy concept, or slightly frivolous, or a curiosity, to taking it seriously,” he told McKinsey recently. “This is what people want for their lives. Let us measure it.” |
| In his book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Lord Layard writes that when we do track happiness, we discover that, sadly, people don’t appear to have become happier in the past five decades, even as incomes have risen. |
| How does that apply to our work lives? |
| Three factors strongly affect happiness and well-being—belonging, social connection, and a sense of purpose. If we don’t have these in our work, then we don’t have them in our life. Speaking to bosses out there: if you don’t have a moral incentive to improve the happiness of your workers (you should), then at least consider the financial one; decades of stock-market data confirm the link between employee satisfaction and long-term value. |
| This question of happiness or well-being at work isn’t new—see this classic, “How leaders kill meaning at work,” from 2012—but it has become increasingly urgent as executives oversee the eventual automation and certain disruption of their workforces. By 2030, 375 million workers will need to find new jobs or learn new skills to keep the jobs they have. |
| Four factors will contribute to how successfully bosses manage this anxiety-provoking transition. An imperative for the C-suite is to augment rather than replace jobs. When it comes to deploying artificial intelligence (AI), one question is a decisive predictor for whether employers are creating better instead of fewer jobs: Are you using AI because you want to cut costs or to innovate? Good work if you picked “innovate.” |
| Another important and tough question for CEOs who are serious about increasing workplace satisfaction: How much am I contributing to dysfunction and disharmony? And here’s one final stumper from Jon Garcia, founder and president of McKinsey RTS, that’s especially relevant during workplace transformations: How happy am I? |
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| OFF THE CHARTS |
| 25 years of digitization: A status report |
| The world has been radically transformed since the commercial internet emerged in the 1990s. But the pace of adopting established digital technologies into organizational practices is still slow, according to this executive briefing from the McKinsey Global Institute. Across industries, the digital frontier remains at a distance: on average, digital adoption represents only about 25 percent of the total potential in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. |
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| MORE ON MCKINSEY.COM |
| The EV battery outlook for Europe | The market for electric vehicle batteries represents a substantial—but untapped—opportunity for European battery makers and carmakers, as well as for the European economy in general. Here’s how stakeholders can capture it. |
| How Gulf companies can go all-in on digital | Few companies in the Persian Gulf have moved aggressively enough to digitize their businesses. To do so, they must attract strong, experienced digital leaders and allow that new culture to permeate their organizations. |
| A step change for construction? | Modular construction, while not new, could give the industry a huge productivity boost, help housing crises in many markets, and significantly reshape the way we build today. |
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| SPOTLIGHT ON |
| Rima Assi |
| Growing up in Lebanon in the 1980s, Rima Assi lived in a war-torn country rife with tension. “There was very little acceptance of people’s differences,” she recalls. Today, she works to combat such intolerance, especially in the workplace. |
| A senior partner in McKinsey’s Abu Dhabi office, Rima has emerged as a trusted advisor to Middle Eastern governments on public finance, and as a steadfast champion for gender parity. Earlier this year, she gained a new way to shape the region’s future and push boundaries when she was elected to the Forum of Young Global Leaders (YGL), the World Economic Forum’s organization of professionals under the age of 40 working to improve the state of the world. |
| Founded more than 15 years ago, YGL now includes more than 1,300 alumni composed of public officials, business innovators, artists, educators, technology developers, journalists, and activists of more than 100 nationalities. |
| Since joining McKinsey, Rima has focused on improving the everyday experiences and opportunities of residents in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. That means working with finance ministries on reallocating resources and funding for programs and processes, like loan approvals, that will help change the lives of citizens for the better. “I’m looking forward to using the YGL platform to continue making this region a great place for all kinds of people to live,” she says. |
| Rima believes that finding ways to attract and retain women in the workforce are critical issues in GCC countries, where the workforce is predominately male. “Women matter in companies and in society,” she once argued in Newsweek Middle East. “They constitute half the world’s working-age population but generate only 37 percent of GDP and undertake 75 percent of unpaid work. Enabling women to be equal partners in society and the workforce will not only be equitable in the broadest sense but unambiguously good for business.” |
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| BACKTALK |
| Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
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