Coronavirus

Poor decision making doesn’t get better in time

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Five years ago in the UK, on 16 March, the Prime Minister of the UK uttered the following words, “…now is the time for everyone to stop non-essential contact with others and to stop all unnecessary travel. We need people to start working from home where they possibly can. And you should avoid pubs, clubs theatres and other such social venues”. It was a call for the country to support the Government in facing into the global pandemic and many organisations duly followed that advice. Five years on, whilst the majority of us are happily frequenting pubs, clubs, theatres and other social venues, we are still getting ourselves in a pickle over working from home. So what went on?

I’ve written so many times about this topic and I always feel I need to make the following caveat clear – I am not making a value judgment about where people work or the decisions that organisations take. Where I get a little grumpy around the edges is the inference that “everyone is working from home” – this is just plain wrong – or that not allowing people to work from home is somehow “old fashioned” or “lacking in trust” – again this is factually wrong and as intellectually limited as saying that anyone who works from home is skiving.

But I don’t want to talk about the pros and the cons, those have been well debated to the point of exhaustion. I want to talk about how decisions are made, and how we get them wrong.

In every day up to 16 March 2020, most organisations had a pretty stable work pattern. Lots had flexibility built in to that in different ways, others didn’t. Organisations were based in different locations around the country and the globe and job seekers made decisions about where they’d work depending on where they lived, how they could travel and where they were willing to move to. It was by no means perfect, but it was understood by all involved.

Then the world got complicated for a period of about a year and we had to make changes, show flexibility, behave in different ways in order to support the collective need. Roll forward five years and most of those aspects of our lives have pretty much returned to the “normality” of pre pandemic operations and whilst I’d love people to continue ton socially distance (but that’s just me being anti social) that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

Where people work, however, is still a bone of contention for lots of organisations. So what happened in this debate that made it so different to all the other temporary changes? Lots of organisations announced very quickly that they’d were making permanent changes. Why?

  • HR leaders advocated for policies that suited their own working preferences rather than business need and suggested this was a market trend (“the future of work”) as more announced the change that became a self fulfilling prophecy.
  • Finance leaders saw an opportunity to reduce the cost of property on their businesses by either disposing of real estate or exiting leases. Meaning that there was less space in their premises even if people wanted to work there.
  • Employees, at least the vocal ones, announced they were more productive and generally happier. Let’s not forget that the weather in the summer of 2020 was particularly nice too. Dissenting voices or those that questioned the direction were judged to be modern luddites.

And after a turbulent period of time, it felt like a win-win-win. What was lacking was any real strategy, any data or evidence, any proper business case or evaluation of alternative outcomes. Whether you agree with the outcome or not, the decision making process was woefully poor and counter to the way that organisations would make any other major change.

Five years on and some organisations are rowing back on their positions and with it there is more grief, more upset and hurt, more conflict with parts of the workforce. Understandably, employees feel they were told one thing, promised one future, and are now being delivered another. One day, becomes, two days, becomes three or four – even Sainsbury’s are noticing the change and signalling the return to the “weekly shop”. All of this could have been avoided by more thought, better decision making processes, and a little bit more sangfroid. Poor decision making happens, no one is immune, but the one thing we can almost guarantee is that when they do, they never get better with time – no matter how long you leave them.

It’s probably more complicated than that

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My mum used to have a t-shirt that read, “it’s probably more complicated than that”. As a guiding mantra when entering into a debate on anything in life we could all do worse than adopt this, yet at the same time there is an alluring pressure to make things simple. Above my desk, as I write this, I have a schematic of the cognitive bias codex as a reminder to myself of the complexity of the human brain. Of course it doesn’t stop me from falling into the traps, it just reminds me that I probably have.

We know that in times of stress and pressure we can rely more on our unconscious brain and that it can also be the place where some of the biases are held, to help make sense of information quickly and simply. And of course, most of us have lived through a period of sustained stress and pressure, so it is perhaps unexpected when we are so tired, so consumed with the pressures of life, so run down as a society that we want to make other things simpler.

Right. Wrong.

Good. Bad.

With. Against.

Fair. Unfair.

Politicians, media and campaigners understand this well. They’ve learnt the tricks of manipulation and use them freely. We call them out on it when they are suggesting something we disagree with, yet we lap it up when used on something that we agree with – the bandwagon effect. And at the same time our confirmation bias allows us to label “facts” as misinformation when they disagree with our argument, but accept “misinformation” as facts when they prove our case. And the funny thing is that most of us, if we take a little time to reflect, know this and can probably recognise when we have done this.

There was a lovely example of this recently with the launch of Threads in the battle between Facebook and Twitter. I watched as people moved across to the new platform and proclaimed how wonderful it was to find a platform where there was none of the hate or noise, a pure place like back in the early days. And then I watched as the same people, started to exhibit the same behaviours as they denounced on Twitter, sharing misinformation and biased political commentary. Of course, it isn’t the platform that makes the culture it is the people, what they were celebrating was the temporary loss of “the other lot”.

So what do we take from this? I don’t know. People are tired, we’ve been through (and are going through) a really difficult period in society. We all have a need to make things easier for ourselves and that might mean more judgment and less curiosity. We can’t stop that in society, but we can observe it in ourselves and our behaviour. And at the end of the day, it probably is more complicated than that – so maybe we don’t have to have an opinion right now or at all. Maybe that’s a start.

What’s going on?

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It’s fair to say that the last year and a half have been pretty rubbish for everyone. Whatever your circumstances, you’ll have had some aspect of your life changed and, as is the nature of time, you’ll never be able to get it back. But of course the “rubbishness” of the last year has also been different for different people, some of us will have been seriously ill, some of us will have lost loved ones, some of us will have experienced extreme financial pressures and other will have lost their homes and/or their jobs.

From an intellectual, rational perspective we can make comparative assessments of the impact. It is probably something we can all agree on that losing your life partner is more impactful than having to work from home for a year. From an emotional and psychological perspective though, it is harder to start to make relative assessments of the impact on one person compared to another.

When we go through a collective moment like this, the danger is that we apply that rational assessment to belittle the emotional impact, it manifests itself when we say, “at least you’re healthy and well” or, “well you still have a lot to be grateful for”. By applying our logical assessment of others emotional impact we are effectively negating their reality, we are choosing not to listen to how that person is feeling and instead telling them how they should feel.

There’s a brilliant explanation of this in the wonderful book, “It’s ok that you’re not ok” by Megan Devine which was recommended to me when I was going through my own grief a few years ago. Devine wonderfully articulates the impact of people rationalising away other people’s feelings during bereavement by drawing from their own experience, “you’re still young” and, “you’ll move on eventually”. Our awkwardness or unwillingness to exist in the moment of someone else’s emotions and our desire to fix it with rationality.

Whilst bereavement and the pandemic are at the more extreme end of human experiences, the same thing happens each and every day as we go about our work,

“Everyone’s busy, that’s just how it is”

“Well at least you’ve got a job”

“There’s millions of people without a job”

I’m not, of course, saying that sometimes some relativity and structure can’t help people when they’re distressed, but it starts by taking time to understand what’s going on for them, what’s happening in their life and what support, or help (if any) they need, rather than trying to fix or rationalise their situation for them without their permission.

When there is so much pain, anxiety and fear going on, we can all become a little tired and even desensitised to the world around us – that’s part of our own self protection. But to get out the other side of this, in our homes, workplaces and communities, we’re going to have to start by acknowledging how those that are around us really feel. That’s the work that needs to be done.

If you’ve got three minutes to spare, I’d recommend you take time to watch this.

The folly of individual choice

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It is very rare that I recommend a book, I did enough of that when I worked at Penguin Random House so I figure I’m due a break. And, to be honest, I’m baffled why my ex-colleagues didn’t acquire “The Lonely Century” by Noreena Hertz, because, quite frankly, it is brilliant. If ever there was a book for our current times, then this feels like it. But I’ll allow you to explore that for yourselves and instead move on to a few reflections that come from it.

If I think back to my early studies and career, I recognise now the relentless push towards individual focus in the workplace. Often driven by research from the US, we were encouraged to look at performance related pay, individual rather than collective bargaining and concepts such as engagement and discretionary effort. After decades of frustration caused by industrial disputes and fuddled business thinking, a new doctrine was emerging – singular choice.

I think most of us would conclude now that the push on performance related pay based on granular performance reviews is folly which failed to deliver on its one stated aim and of course we’ve seen the impact the individual bargaining has had on the gender pay gap, not to mention the inherent discrimination in many organisations against black, asian and other ethnic employees. And yet, the direction of travel continues through other elements such as pension choices, extreme flexible benefits and individual learning accounts.

And now, perhaps the biggest threat to collective organisational culture and support. The “choice” about where you work.

If anything, our workplaces and organisations should be a driver of societal cohesion. They should be places that bring people together to deliver collective outcomes and goals, they should be places in which we identify and feel we belong. They should be places that celebrate and welcome difference, through unity. They should be places that literally bring people together.

And in many cases they haven’t been anything like this.

The answer, however, cannot be to further fragment our organisations to allow people to choose when and if they come together with their colleagues. It cannot be to allow the behaviour of the majority to leave others feeling left out or to create organisations where only one “type” feels that they can truly fit in, or to create two or three tier organisations where only certain rules apply to certain groups.

The answer instead is to recreate our organisations around our communities, to be truly inclusive, cohesive and welcoming. Recognising that sometimes we all have to make individual sacrifices in the pursuit of a higher collective goal. Where we sign up (explicitly or implicitly) to support one another first and to think of ourselves thereafter, where the sum of the whole is greater than the individual parts. The answer has to be to try harder, not to give up.

If I think back to March this year, there was genuine hope that we would emerge from the pandemic having rediscovered concepts around community, collective identity, selflessness and the recognition of previously unsung heroes. As we go into the autumn and winter (and another lockdown) I worry this was more of a temporary blip, I sincerely hope I’m wrong.