The E Corp

What if a business's most important metric was: "Did you have a good day?"

Hi! My name is Bree, and I write about how to make work more joyful and less everything. Subscribe for weekly essays on everything from rewiring organizations to cozy teams to living a Portfolio Life.

FYI, I don’t always dress in money suits. I wore this for an internal SYP meeting I facilitated in the format of an old fashioned telethon. Via some mental gymnastics I decided the photo was relevant to this post.

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Sometimes I find myself super passionate about tiny ideas for tweaking daily work, like starting meetings :05 past the hour. And then sometimes I just want to say fuck it and shake the entire etch-a-sketch of business as we know it.

Because I firmly believe that we have no shot of creating a better world of work if we can’t even imagine one.

So here is one such ‘fuck it’ idea…

For a long time shareholder capitalism reigned alone: businesses exist to make money!

Then one day came the benefit corporation (B corp): businesses exist to make impact!

BUT WHAT IF... companies weren’t primarily vehicles to make money or vehicles for customers to receive value. WHAT IF... companies were vehicles for people to contribute vibrantly, joyfully, impactfully to the world? What if they were for us?

WHAT IF we ran businesses according to the Howard Thurman quote:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

WHAT IF: businesses exist to make employees come alive!

I believe working is a nice way to spend our finite days… coming together and doing things that make our collective experience on Earth a bit better. Spending time with people we like. Getting good at new things. Having ideas and then making the ideas. If business and work is NOT a nice way to spend our days (and employee engagement surveys indicate that’s the case), then I’d argue we’re not doing it right.

Certainly these Employee Corporations (E Corps) would still make money and impact, just like most traditional corporations still make impact and still make employees happy… sometimes. It’s just that those things aren’t the ultimate goal.

To make an E Corp work, we’d have to be really comfortable believing that employees aren’t lazy; that they want to grow and engage and be proud to see the fruits of their labor; that seeing their impact in the world is joyful; that all of that is part of having really good days. I am 1000% comfortable with this.

Want to make up some of the details with me? Of course none of this is how it has to be, this is me playing with “provisional specificity” to see if we can even imagine how something like this might work. Come play!

• First, I’m imagining a privately held company. Could be a single owner or a worker collective. But def no shareholders.

• It could be in any industry, just like a B Corp can be in any industry.

• The main metric of business success would be employee engagement. But NOT measured in the extractive way we think “employee engagement means going above and beyond” because in that case maybe people are happy but they’re also super tired. We’d measure at the daily level by asking “Did you have a good day?” with a simple one question survey sort of like those buttons you push in airport bathrooms. And then we’d measure at the more global level, maybe quarterly with questions like “Do you feel pride in the work you’ve created?” and “Do you feel creatively alive?”

• If we have profits we’d invest them in our own experience. That could look like handing out Time Bonuses or maybe hiring more people to make sure nobody is overloaded.

• The M-F 9-5 workweek is convenient for coordination, but we could also collectively decide to do a 4 day workweek, or maybe work seasonally! Like we all go part time in the summer. Or maybe an extended hibernation break in the winter. Maybe the spring feels like new growth and creativity and we double down on creative work and in-person making. Maybe we rent an airbnb castle and do it there!

• Anyone who’s run a business (I’ve been a CEO myself) is probably thinking “BREE: We have a hard time staying afloat with everyone working 60+ hours a week… how do you propose keeping a business afloat with all of this flouncing around?” Well first, I truly, truly believe a company that worked like this would produce incredible work. So the product/service would be solid. But also, we’re probably looking at a very low-overhead business model. No permanent office real estate. Very light/fractional internal functions. And we’d probably have some pretty strong values around constantly decluttering the business from things like crappy recurring meetings and those internal projects no one wants to “sunset” but also no one really wants to do.

• We’d also have to decide that the company is not trying to become our whole lives. No on-site gyms and maybe not even meals. You get paid plenty to buy your own meals, and even better you have plenty of time to stop work and go out for lunch.

• I don’t know what to do about health insurance which is wildly expensive. Not my area of expertise. And it’s super important. Maybe everyone buys their own health insurance? And the savings goes into salaries and/or having enough headcount to reduce workload. Healthcare is super important, but so too is having time and energy to exercise and cook and maintain our mental health. Nothing makes my health go to shit faster than a week I’m overworking. Cut the exercise. Cue the takeout. Add the stress. Forget the sleep. I could be wildly off on this one and it would be crazy to forego the economy of scale with employer-based healthcare.

• We’d have to hire REAL GOOD. I’m imagining a whole company of high-achievers who feel over-worked and under-inspired in their current gigs, who just want to be trusted to do brilliant work and enjoy themselves doing it. In this model I would imagine having the pick of the litter is the easier part.

• Speed… now that’s a doozie. Some industries have greater “speed to market” requirements like some tech companies with close competitors and no competitive advantage moat. Can’t have the E Corp going out of business. Or we’d just really have to believe the ability to get the best talent and create the conditions for brilliance are enough to outcompete the overworking competition…

• What else??

Once again, this is not THE proposal, this is A proposal… we’re doing some world-building so we can walk around our imaginary company and see what would work, what would break, and most importantly, if we would like it!

Because certainly some more intelligent alien race is looking down on us wondering why so many people are miserable at work if we, the humans, have invented work as we know it.

Seems to me, we should just… reinvent it.

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P.S. I don’t know if the photo did anything besides perhaps catch some attention. To me it said something along the lines of “money is not the end—it’s the means to the end of supporting (clothing?) people”. Who knows :)