Melissa Swift, combatting the great resignation

Melissa Swift is North American Transformation Leader at Mercer and author of Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace.

Melissa says that most of her career has been occupied by work that no-one understands. That’s been a consequence of a preference for working with diverse groups of people to solve complex problems. She currently works at Mercer which is a consultancy that helps with making work better, rewards systems, and wellness.

Melissa believes that one of the aspects of work that is rarely considered is the everyday experience of the employee and how they feel about the work they are doing. In particular, often they can’t relate what they are doing to the goals of the business. Sometimes this is because the relationship is tenuous at best.

Over the years Melissa has tested and learnt what makes a job fun for her. Her current job at Mercer combines intellectual challenge, working in diverse teams, and solving real world problems.

Performative work appears in her book as a major problem area. A lot of the time what we are doing at work is artistic performance - we’re doing it just to show off. If we eliminated this we’d have fewer meetings, time for other things, and a better understanding of who was doing the work that contributes to the outcomes.

She believes that companies could do better by addressing “immigration, migration and incarceration”: recruiting for technical skills and training for language skills rather than vice versa, moving to locations where the talent is, eliminating the biases that militate against hiring formerly incarcerated workers.

She says “data tells us that HR is starving, misdirected, and overloaded.” It is understaffed compared to other functions such as finance, and that means that it is squeezed between ever-increasing demands of the centre and the grass roots. At the same time it is still undertaking a lot of transactional work manually.

Melissa believes that there is a need for candour about the effectiveness of information technology in many businesses. There’s a reluctance on the part of management to go there even though they suspect the truth.

Melissa believes that in order to combat ‘the great resignation’, corporate America needs to manage work populations more thoughtfully. Whilst organisations look to create a consistency of experience for their workers, doing so fails to take into account the differences in prior experience of individuals. In particular organisations are not forging a high quality relationship with under-represented groups.

Melissa contends that most companies could vastly improve their performance by doing less, and performing the high priority tasks better: so much activity doesn’t translate to the bottom line. Much of what we do is driven by what Melissa calls the ‘work anxiety monster.’ This not an employee problem, or even a management problem, it is systemic.

Melissa’s proudest achievement is the impact she has had on other people’s careers. Her biggest mistake was to chose certain roles where she was under-employed when her daughter was younger: she under-estimated the psychological impact of being neither challenged nor valued.

She was inspired on her own journey by Mary Cianni at Korn Ferry, who combines an academically inflected perspective on transformation consultancy with practical wisdom born of experience.

Melissa would recommend Bob Sutton’s ‘The No Asshole Rule’ to aspiring leaders. “No toxicity is non-negotiable” she says.

Her self-care regime consists of getting up at 6:30 for a two-mile run. She has done this every day for over 800 consecutive days now.

Her advice to her 20-year-old self is “Don’t put so much weight on every decision… take the pressure off, you have underlying values and they’re going to come through.”