General | change-effect

Poor decision making doesn’t get better in time

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 ok to say, “I don’t know”

Posted on January 6 by Blog

If you were asked direction to a location you didn’t recognise, what would you do? You might get out your phone and go to a source of information – a mapping app – and see if that might provide the data you need. You might suggestion the person speak to someone with more knowledge of the local area. Or you might simply say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know”.

But what if you were asked your opinion? Well you’d have to have the answer, right? Because we all have an opinion on everything. But should we?

Anyone who has known me for a period of time will know that, in the past, I’ve not been short of an opinion or twelve. Whether it is age, fatigue or, (with a more generous filter) the advent of wisdom, I’ve found myself expressing fewer and fewer (in fact that’s one of the reasons I haven’t written on here for over a year). Perhaps needing to express fewer opinions is a more accurate description and yet it comes at a time when the world seems to be going the other way – particularly on social issues.

We are losing the art of intentionally not knowing and replacing it with mass produced “oven ready” positions shared by both social and traditional media. Not only does this place at risk one of the fundamental drivers of progress, human curiosity, but it also significantly impedes our ability to actually identify the root cause of issues or challenges that we are trying to solve and replaces them with a dumbed down artificial, and often polarised, “solutions”.

You can apply this to so many of the key challenges we have – immigration, housing, economic growth, creating fairer workplaces, even conflict. Deeply complex and complicated issues that are beyond the proper comprehension of most of us are reduced to soundbites as we seek not to understand but instead to apportion blame. And in a world where “cut through” is king, this feeds the approach that our politicians and the media take, creating a vicious cycle that gives a sense of action without going anywhere.

Another option is to take the same approach to our opinions on topics we don’t understand as to being asked for directions. We could seek out sources of information, we could seek out people with more knowledge of the topic, or we could simply say, “I don’t know”.