When Melissa Swift published Work Here Now: Think Like a Human and Build a Powerhouse Workplace, her goal was to expose the ways the everyday experience of work was failing people, and by extension, failing organizations. She argued that the workplace had become dangerous, boring, frustrating, and confusing. Several years later, her message is even more relevant as AI and new technologies accelerate how we work, often without clear limits or human-centered design.
I sat down with Swift on the Transform Your Workplace podcast to explore her ideas and discuss how leaders can bridge economics and empathy, moving away from outdated myths about work and toward sustainable, human-centered strategies for productivity and growth.
The “Silly Stuff Era”
Swift describes today’s workplace as another turning point in history, reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution. Then, factories routinely caught fire, machines mangled workers, and inefficiencies abounded. Today’s version is subtler but no less harmful: endless meetings, poorly designed systems, and constant overload.
“We’re in a silly stuff era again,” she told me. “Your shareholders don’t want people sitting around in annoying meetings either. That doesn’t help the bottom line.”
Her point is that frustration and boredom aren’t trivial employee experience issues. They actively drain productivity and engagement. Leaders who dismiss complaints about boring or confusing work as “soft” concerns miss the fact that they’re costing the business time, energy, and focus.
Technology on Steroids
The rise of AI has supercharged what Swift observed years ago during the digital transformation wave. While entrepreneurs may use AI to speed up creativity or design tasks, corporate environments often add AI on top of already bloated workflows.
“It’s not like you take half the day off now because of AI,” Swift explained. “You’re just doing more stuff.”
That mentality creates a dangerous paradox: technology accelerates the pace of tasks, but organizations fail to remove or streamline anything else. The result is simply “more.”
Her metaphor is striking: humans are treated like machines running at 100 percent capacity forever. No responsible operator would run physical equipment this way because it would burn out and break. Yet, companies are willing to run their workforce at maximum speed without relief, and then wonder why engagement craters or turnover spikes.
The Cognitive Cost of Work
The Industrial Revolution brought visible, physical dangers: lost limbs, fires, and exhaustion. Today’s workplace hazards are largely invisible: overstimulated brains, fractured attention, and burnout. Swift argued that this, too, is a form of danger.
“When senior executives are so loaded down by tasks that they can’t make sensible decisions, it’s not just about their well-being,” she said. “Your shareholders don’t want your CEO to make a bad business decision because they haven’t slept properly in three days.”
This is a modern version of Maslow’s hierarchy. Before employees can perform creatively or strategically, organizations must ensure they’re not drowning in noise, fatigue, or cognitive overload.
Tech Fatigue as Data
Swift is unapologetically data-driven. Her book cites research showing that 97% of office workers are frustrated with workplace tech, while 42-43% of the time spent using it is wasted. Those numbers should alarm any leader.
Yet the typical response is to brand complainers as whiners. Swift suggests a different approach: “When somebody says, ‘This system is driving me crazy,’ treat it as data and go talk to your CIO.”
She pointed out that CIOs want to design human-centered systems, but they rarely hear unfiltered feedback. Instead, leaders silence complaints or rationalize wasted time, resulting in staggering inefficiency.
She also cited Gartner data showing that half of employees want the old system back after a new rollout, a warning sign that billions are wasted on poorly designed or poorly implemented systems. In fact, Swift estimates that $900 billion annually is squandered on tech that doesn’t work for people.
The Work Anxiety Monster
A theme running throughout Work Here Now is what Swift calls the “work anxiety monster.” It’s built on two flawed assumptions: people are lazy, and people are slow.
These beliefs push managers to accelerate work endlessly, regardless of whether constraints, roadblocks, or complexity make it feasible. “Ask yourself, what evidence leads me to hold the beliefs that I hold?” Swift advised. Leaders who interrogate their assumptions often find that their teams are blocked by poor systems or overloaded processes, not slacking.
The same monster attacks leaders internally. Swift admitted she sometimes catches herself wondering why she didn’t finish every task on her list, even though she’s her own boss. It’s a deeply ingrained narrative in our culture: faster, more, better. But as she put it, no therapist would recommend thinking this way.
The Customer Isn’t Always Right
Swift also pointed to what she calls the “Boss Baby customer,” or clients who are simultaneously helpless and demanding. The problem stems from decades of organizations pushing customer centricity to the extreme. What began as a push to treat customers as human beings has sometimes turned into granting them unreasonable power.
One company experimented with delivering packages between 4 and 8 a.m. On gun owners’ forums, customers worried they might mistake delivery drivers for intruders. Swift’s conclusion was simple: “Maybe we just deliver after 9 a.m. because we do not want our employees to be shot.”
The lesson is that customer service can’t come at the expense of employee safety or sanity. Leaders must reset boundaries and design policies that balance customer expectations with practical, humane limits.
HR’s Limited Authority
Despite more than a century of existence, HR remains stuck managing payroll, compliance, and “check-the-box” tasks while having little real authority over the employee experience.
“Workforces are a wicked problem,” Swift said. “Nobody owns the workforce problem. HR gets blamed for it, but they may have 10 percent of the decision rights.”
Unlike finance or marketing, HR lacks clear levers. A manager can mistreat employees and drive away top performers, and HR has little recourse. This mismatch leaves many HR professionals disillusioned and burned out, despite entering the field with the goal of helping people.
Swift’s solution is to reinvent HR on the organization’s terms. Too many companies chase cookie-cutter best practices, piling on tech stacks and frameworks without asking what the business truly needs. Instead, HR should be designed like any other function: tailored to strategy, resourced appropriately, and empowered to act.
Recruiting at the Expense of Retention
One of the most startling statistics in Swift’s book is that HR spends about three times more effort recruiting than developing current talent. She finds this backward.
“There’s a lot of great research that says your greatest asset is the people you already employ,” she told me. But many organizations don’t actually know their workforce well.
She shared the example of a ball-bearing manufacturer that wanted to expand into robotics. Instead of hiring externally, leaders asked employees if anyone had robotics experience. To their surprise, they discovered a group of hobbyists who had been building robots for years. These employees were skilled, loyal, and embedded in the community, an internal talent pool hidden in plain sight.
Ultimately, organizations that treat retention and development as strategic priorities can avoid expensive recruiting cycles and build stronger cultures.
Rediscovering the Human Voice
Complexity often drives leaders to hide behind jargon and euphemism. Layoffs become “RIFs,” and confusing jargon masks difficult truths. Swift said this creates distance and mistrust.
She advocates practicing plain speech with peers and offering outlets for emotional processing after hard decisions. She recalled an ER doctor she interviewed who explained why she tells families their loved one “died,” not “passed away.” The latter feels gentler but creates confusion. Clarity with compassion is the right balance.
“Sometimes we speak in inhuman ways because it’s really hard to talk about what we’re doing,” Swift said. Leaders who want to connect must practice human communication, not corporate scripts.
The Hidden Hippos of Talent
Swift highlights three hidden levers of workforce strategy: immigration, migration, and incarceration. These pools of talent often go untapped because organizations erect unnecessary barriers.
“Don’t list 39 things in a job description,” she said. “List the four things that actually matter for the job.” She also challenged leaders to rethink rigid location requirements or blanket bans on formerly incarcerated individuals. Companies can expand their candidate pool and find overlooked talent by simplifying and widening access.
Designing Tech for Human Speed
Swift uses the “I Love Lucy” conveyor belt metaphor to describe what happens when technology runs faster than people can process. Just because Zoom can host 50 people doesn’t mean it should. Human limits are well understood: attention spans fade, memory caps at about seven chunks, and back-to-back video calls fry the brain.
Her advice is to reintroduce limits that match human capacity. Tech should be designed around neuroscience, not around what’s technically possible. If systems outpace people, performance suffers.
Three Moves Leaders Can Make Monday
At the end of our discussion, I asked Swift what a CEO should do first to better align economics and empathy.
Her first recommendation is to redefine productivity around outcomes, not activity. “A pile of meetings and messages is not output,” she said. Second, she encouraged myth-busting: letting go of the tired phrase that “it’s work, it’s not supposed to be fun.” Work can be both constructive and enjoyable, and some of the most successful companies prove it.
Her third recommendation is to treat employee feedback as data. She pointed to Google’s decision to ask employees how to improve efficiency instead of hiring consultants. It cost little, generated goodwill, and produced actionable ideas. Leaders who listen can find similar wins.
Closing Thoughts
Swift’s work is centered on the idea that being humane is just good business. As technology accelerates and organizations wrestle with complexity, Swift’s message is both timely and timeless. Leaders who subtract as often as they add, speak plainly, and open doors for more kinds of talent will build workplaces that are not only healthier but also more productive and resilient.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.