Coronavirus

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.

HR needs the workplace more than most

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Over the last few weeks I’ve written about the need to bring people back into the workplace and to find a new balance of flexibility. There are countless reasons why this makes sense, which I won’t repeat again, but you can read some of them here and here. Last week the same calls were made first by the CBI and then by the UK Government. Cue outrage from the normal quarters within the people profession, busy munching on their homemade granola.

Whilst the arguments for a gradual return to the workplace span all job types, for those in the HR profession there are particular concerns, which makes it doubly ironic that many in the ranks are championing their own demise. Once again, we have drunk the proverbial Kool Aid and not stopped to think through the implications of the arguments that we make.

Lets start with the administration that forms part of every HR function, no matter how we try to streamline it or remove it altogether. People need to get paid have changes made, get issued contracts, have records kept and a whole host of other activities. The arguments for systematization will only become stronger with teams absent from sight and if people are really necessary, why pay the higher wages of the UK when the work can be outsourced to other parts of the world? What difference does it make if the process is standardised and the only connection is digital?

Then we have the other aspects of the work that we do. If we are learning remotely, then why not buy the content in, we can digitalise the whole process allowing subject matter expects to buy directly in from providers, no need for costly intermediaries who only interact with the business online. Delivery can be recorded by and consumed at the time and need of the individual regardless of the business that they’re in. What value does the internal recruiter have, when interviews are scheduled by Zoom, following an advert automatically placed on a job board and they’ve never met the hiring manager?

The argument around widespread homeworking assumes that the value that we perceive we can add in this way is matched by the value of those that employ us. That’s a dangerous assumption to make and one that has, over the years, consistently shown to be mismatched. Our job now is to build on the fantastic work that HR professionals have delivered over the last six months, to demonstrate our knowledge of the broader societal and economic impact of organisations and work and to articulate the importance of culture and shared values. The overwhelming evidence is that this prospers better in person than online, we can choose to champion that agenda or to slip backwards at our peril.

Our debate needs less noise and more thought

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In “normal” times, any discussion about the future of work is fraught with danger, the impact of coronavirus on workplaces has added a multiplying factor of one hundred. Disproportionate time and space is given to the voices on the extreme who declare a new dawn, glossing over the inconvenience of the details of the working population and their day to day experience, to outline a dream based on the experience of a tiny minority.

Work has never and will never operate in isolation of society. It is one of the most fundamental factors in both our individual psychology and the communities and societies that we operate within. Like it or not, it is part of who we are. That’s why good work matters and why creating good jobs is of fundamental importance.

The last four or five months have shown us that there are certain industries, professions and sectors that we simply cannot live without. Our emergency services, our carers, our utilities, our farmers and food warehouses, our delivery drivers and distribution and supermarket networks. These are the very workers that have helped us to navigate through the darkest days in many of our living memories.

In any consideration of the future of work, these are the very people and industries that we should be looking to in order to understand how to create a better normal. And yet, the voices that we so often hear are small, inessential technology businesses, employing only a handful of people and with the economic and societal impact of a dried up stain from an over priced mug of chai latte. Naive and oversimplified statements like “knowledge workers can work anywhere and at any time”, are bandied around. Surgeons? Engineers? Physicians? Academics? These are the real knowledge workers.

At the heart of the challenge we face is societal fairness. I’ve long argued that our direction of travel on workplace flexibility has in fact been a polarising and damaging journey. Where flexibility for the privileged means being able to work at home on a Friday and for large parts of our workforce means uncertainty of hours, invasive uses of technology and instability of employment. This has played a significant, contributing factor to many of the problems that we see across our country.

Whatever we do we must not use this inflection point, and I think we can rightly use that term in this context, to focus on one very small group of employees because their voices are the loudest and perhaps most attractive. If we do, we risk further damage to the fabric of society. We should focus the debate with the people that matter most, that make the biggest difference and who we simply cannot do without. We should build our future of work around and in service to them

At this time of year, many of us would normally be heading to find some sun and relaxation by the sea. A familiar sight at beaches across the world, our attention is drawn to the (normally male) holidaymaker sitting at the front of a banana boat, screaming at the top of their voice with the adrenaline and rush of a child high on Skittles. Yet ahead is where the action really is, the speedboat that pulls it along without which the ride would not exist, calmly and diligently going about its business. Less exciting maybe, but undeniably more important.