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Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

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There’s no doubt that the pandemic taught as a lot about how we can organise ourselves differently at speed to continue to deliver for our stakeholders – whoever they may be. The pace at which organisations, especially the likes of essential services, retail, distribution and warehousing, adapted to the circumstances was a real lesson in agility. And of course, more widely across business and society changes were made to accommodate the restrictions and risks that were at large.

But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should and one of the overhangs from the pandemic are a whole range of practices that might have been appropriate at the time, but now just look like organisations, teams and individuals trying to have an easier life. A great example last week was the non-story that KPMG and Deloitte would once again be recruiting in person. It goes without saying that this is a good move for them and for the candidates, however, the fact that it is a story and that it has taken them this long to get there is a bit of a head scratch. I’m not proposing that technology has no part to play in the selection process, but as someone who has interviewed and been interviewed via video, it really isn’t the answer.

Similarly, organisations that moved to “virtual work experience” need to start complementing these with their previous in person work experience programmes to ensure that those people that benefit the most get real and proper access to those opportunities. Easy to deliver, yes. As beneficial to the participants? I’m not convinced in the slightest. And at the end of the day, something being easy was never a measure of success no matter how many happy sheet, participant outcomes you use to defend it.

It would be remiss of me to write a post like this and not mention remote working. How does that one play out? Well it is probably the biggest workplace experiment of our time and the reality is no-one knows. But clinging on to practices as a point of principle is never a good look and those people that have got themselves so dug into the “future of work” rhetoric are already starting to detune and those that don’t are going to look pretty silly if the experiment has a different outcome. That doesn’t make it right or wrong, one of the joys about having a hypothesis is you always have a null hypothesis too, it only makes it stupid if you don’t follow the data.

Don’t bring your whole self to work

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I’ve always taken issue with the idea of “bringing your whole self to work”. It’s a pretty meaningless statement that is normally espoused by the kind of sugar addicted character who will also bounce into a room and start a sentence with, “I know this is probably TMO, but..”

The first reason I dislike it is the base logic, or more the lack of it. There are many things that people do in their lives that would be highly inappropriate to share with most other people, never mind in the workplace. The second reason I dislike it is that it takes the kind of “radical candour” approach that many feel uncomfortable and suggests that if you don’t comply, then somehow you’re repressed or restricted rather than making a perfectly reasonable choice to keep things to yourself. If I don’t want to bring my whole self to work, then that should be entirely my choice and totally acceptable to others.

But over the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on some of the debates that we’ve seen about organisational behaviour and the stances taken on social issues and I’m starting to see a much more problematic issue with this approach. Some organisations are increasingly moving away from employment policies and are straying into social policy, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

Our job should be to create safe and inclusive workplaces, where people can come and perform their work without fear or intimidation and go home at the end of the day to their private lives. We should be creating environments that aim to reduce and remove discrimination, we should make sure that our workplaces are legally compliant and we should foster respect and understanding. But I wonder if making bold stances on our positions on social issues serves us, our employees and society well.

As we increasingly see “culture wars” break out on a whole range of topics, is the workplace somewhere that should provide a safe space away from them? A place where active positions intentionally aren’t taken, but that acceptance of all is a requirement. The alternative seems to me to be that we either risk alienating employees through stances that they don’t agree with but feel unable to challenge, or we engineer our organisations so that they only accept people with certain social views and beliefs.

Ultimately this means working alongside people who might have completely different views and beliefs to us, that will hold opinions that we do not agree with and will challenge us and who will maybe do things in their lives that we find difficult to accept. But we recognise that at work we don’t bring these aspects with us, that they our part of our private lives and we respect the right of everyone to have a private life, which is entirely separate to how we behave at work. In a funny way, that could actually be more inclusive.

Stay in the pack

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I remember the advice careers advice my father gave to me many years ago, “make sure you perform well enough so you don’t stand out, but not so well you get given additional work for no reward”. Whilst it might have been a little tongue in cheek, the underlying message of, “stay in the pack” was clear. It wasn’t advice that I took to heart, he worked in an entirely different occupation in an entirely different time period, the sentiment behind it stuck in my mind – the fear of standing out.

Whilst not necessarily articulated in the same way, that fear runs through much of society and through organisations. Not just in terms of how we individually navigate the world, but how we do so organisationally too. I wonder how many corporate decisions each week are taken with exactly the same logic in mind? Stay in the pack, don’t be an outlier, don’t stand out.

This isn’t by any means critically judging those decisions, it is easy to see why when you look at how the court of public opinion judges those that don’t.

Make a loss – you’re poorly run. Make amazing profits – you should be taxed more.

Make a statement on a social topic – you’re woke. Don’t make a statement – you’re corporate drones.

And when societal moments like BLM or the post pandemic return arrive, the pack moves at pace like a herd of wildebeest on the plain and no organisation wants to be left behind in the jaws of the predator. Decisions are made, not on the best needs of the organisation, their workforce, or their communities – they’re made on not wanting to be outside of the pack. To not stand out.

There are many examples throughout corporate history and even over the last few years where organisations have got it wrong and individual leaders are blamed, called out and see their careers suffer thereafter. Sometimes it is causes long lasting damage to the brand and their commercial success. No wonder, sticking with the group is so appealing and embedded across corporate life.

Like so many other topics, it feels like this needs a long more thoughtful discussion than it will ever get. What do we want organisations to stand for? What topics do we want them to have an opinion on? Is it ok just to stick to the knitting? What matters most? But until that time, and I wouldn’t hold your breath, expect more conformity, more anodyne statements and God help anyone who gets it wrong.

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.