work

Poor decision making doesn’t get better in time

Posted on by Blog

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.

The talent you need is all around you

Posted on by Blog

Keen observers will know that I have a particular dislike for the made up, “Great Resignation”. I’d go as far to say that it put up a good challenge to “The War for Talent”, “The New Normal” and anything involving the word, “Disruption” to be the most vacuous phrase that has ever dribbled out of the side of a mouth. And whilst the context is different, the commonality between all of these soundbites is the lack of understanding and analysis that goes with their use. They’re just repeated mindlessly by the mindless.

There is no doubt that the labour market has been through a period of change. It was dormant for nearly two years, so it should come as no surprise that when it started up again it would behave in a less balanced way than before the pandemic. And there is no doubt that people have made different decisions over the last couple of years based on their experience during the pandemic period. That said, I have little time for anyone bemoaning the lack of talent.

Almost three quarters of a million young people are not in education, employment or training (NEET), around 350,000 people of working age with a disability are unemployed, single parents are twice as likely as unemployed as those in a couple, refugee unemployment rates are up to three times the national average, and only 25% of men and 20% of women leave the criminal justice system with any type of employment.

The idea that in all of these groups, in all these statistics there is a void of talent – well frankly it simply doesn’t add up. And whilst I know it is hard and I know it is unusual, as leaders of organisations we cannot overlook the opportunity that exists to create meaningful work for people and to mitigate the risk of the skills shortages we have created for ourselves through a lack of strategic workforce planning.

This isn’t about corporate responsibility, or employability programmes, whilst neither are among in and amongst themselves. This is about the search for talent and about the performance and productivity of our organisations. You can read more about it here.

What if we simply just don’t know?

Posted on by Blog

Matthew Syed wrote a brilliant comment piece in the Times paper this weekend on the public debate on the performance of the Government on handling the Covid pandemic. You can read the piece here, but in summary (and for those that can’t access it), the premise of the column was that too many opinions were thrown around before there was enough data and fact to actual judge the outcome. And now that there is, there are few people willing to change their opinions or admit they called it wrong. Before I go on, it isn’t a pro or anti Government piece, it is an assessment of how our public debate and assessment of situations is becoming more tribal and less rational by the day.

By coincidence, last week there was also a tweet by the well known business man, Sir Alan Sugar, reacting negatively to the news that PwC was continuing the practice of “summer hours” and relating it to the WFH debate. I don’t know the PwC policy in detail, but this is an approach I’ve worked with in the past. Essentially it is compressed hours during a period of time in the summer that allows people to work their hours across, normally, four and a half days rather than five. You can read that tweet here.

It wasn’t long before Twitter and thereafter Linkedin were alight with various references, emojis and gifs likening him to a dinosaur. Now, to be clear, I wouldn’t have expressed any view in the way that Sir Alan did and I totally understand the concept of “live by the sword, die by the sword”. But the language and tonality of the debate was an example of exactly the point that Syed was making in his article.

Different people, different organisations, will have differing views on how to handle themselves. Whether that is their strategy, their physical location or indeed their working practices. I’m not sure, in my living memory, that I’ve heard one organisation be criticised because of their choice of physical location – although that said, having worked for an organisation that was one of the early adopters of Milton Keynes I’m aware there were a few raised eyebrows.

But the debate about the future of work, and before it the recent debate about Black Lives Matters and #MeToo have become polarised in a way that is fundamentally unhealthy to the development of both positive workplaces and a better society. On one side people are castigated as “lacking trust” or being “dinosaurs”. On the other as being “work shy” or “lazy”. None of which makes any sense or represents the complexity of the challenge we are facing into. I don’t think anyone would say that surgeons aren’t trusted because they aren’t allowed to work from home or that the entrepreneurs that started businesses in their bedrooms were in anyway lazy.

Similar to the pandemic, we are in a moment in time that requires more reflection, better evidence, a diversity of thought and approach. And most of all, it needs us to recognise that we simply don’t know. Only then will find the curiosity to explore and ask the right questions.

I’ll be talking about this and more at the CRF event on The Realities of the New Working Environment this Tuesday. More here.

The P&O scandal shines a light on our privileged view of work

Posted on by Blog

Like many, I was pretty gobsmacked by the brazen approach of the P&O CEO Peter Hebblethwaite in addressing a parliamentary select committee last week. If you’re unaware of the story, it broke a couple of weeks ago when P&O effectively fired a quarter of their workforce with immediate effect via video. And, unsurprisingly, there was widespread outrage from politicians, the media, trade unions and employer groups. Rightly so, these were acts that even if the law was taken out of consideration were highly immoral and unethical.

But the fact these made headlines, these are just the actions of a rogue organisation, right? Sadly not.

Before I go on to make my main point, I want to stop for a second and clarify something that I think is important to the context of the argument. There is an intellectual difference between believing something is wrong or right and believing it is the principal argument that needs to be had, right here and right now. In a world full of opinions, but limited space and time, our job as leaders is to curate all of those multiple points and focus on the ones that matter the most, for our teams, for our organisations and, for society. The ones that matter to the majority.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the world of work and creating a sustainable future we fail to do this. That’s why you’ll find the last twelve months littered with articles and opinion pieces about flexible working, working from home, remote working, hybrid working, the four day week and more and why you’ll find little on the increasing practice of fire and rehire.

What is beneath this? Well the first set of issues relate predominantly to white collar, professional workers and the latter to blue collar skilled or manual workers. It is simple as that. And yet the latter group make up a much more significant proportion of the workforce. So as leaders and HR professionals we focus on the things that matter to us personally, and the journalists write about the ones that matter too them. Curiously there is a significant overlap.

I’ve spoken before about my concerns about restructuring work without thinking about the majority of workers and the communities that they live in and I stand by these concerns because they are very real and pressing. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in progress in the workplace or moving towards a different more flexible future, I just don’t think it is the most pressing issue that we face in our societies and in our workplaces, right here and right now.

If the P&O situation tells us anything, it is that for many of us our view of work is shaped by a privilege afforded by position. These practices have existed for years (Irish Ferries did something incredibly similar in 2005) and they’re going on in organisations today. And of course, this is just one of the unfairnesses that exists in work. If we believe in creating a future that is better, that is supportive of all and that creates the kind of organisations that we would be proud that our grandchildren work in, we would be better starting there rather than feathering our own, already comfortable nests.