The impact on organisations

The impact on society will undoubtedly change the way we work, at least in the short term.  Organisations who cannot (or are too slow to) adapt, risk being left behind. These changes also affect the relationship between organisation and individual, with vast swathes of people looking to their companies, societies and institutions to support and engage them in new ways.

Firstly, working days will likely become less defined as we increasingly work from home.  In the same way, as we can’t help – and often welcome – disruptions from children, pets or household chores, we may find that work invades our free time.  The time we claw back from not having to commute will be reclaimed by the ‘always on’ nature of future work, resulting in work and home life being interwoven, the result of which may well be longer days and less ‘off’ time.

Individual preference for working styles will also be a factor.  In the same way as ‘introverts’ have been distracted by noisy, bustling office environments, ‘extraverts’ will likely be missing the dynamism and buzz of conventional work.

Communications teams will be affected as the same comms channels (email, Zoom) are being squeezed.  Learning & Development teams will be finding out that conventional knowledge transfer is unlikely to exist in its former guise.  With limitations around real-life collaboration, we’re unlikely to learn from each other in the same way.

Work relationships will suffer; with serendipitous collaboration, over-the-desk chats and coffee-area gossip being seriously curtailed.  Many will argue that’s a good thing for productivity, but a poorer one for a sense of team spirit, fun and enjoyment at work.

Lastly, the management model will need to change to adapt to the new world. Many global businesses still adopt a highly top-down management style.  Requirements such as having to punch in and out for work, with bonuses and KPIs tied closely to attendance will be shocked into reality – that the notion of trust and control will have to be carefully managed.

What we can do about it – nine top tips:

1. Focus on you and your team’s mental and physical health. Wellbeing teams will have to make sure that these skills are a fundamental part of each manager’s toolkit.  The organisation now has a duty to make sure the team are physically, mentally and emotionally well, by offering support, regular chats, time to exercise and broken-up working day.  Or as US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it this week: “recreation and re-creation are the same thing”.
2. Resource people properly. They’ll need a proper desk setup, laptops and phones, access to file sharing, video communications and collaboration tools.  You may need to re-shape IT, H&S and HR policies to do so, but make sure your teams are properly equipped to work remotely.
3. Make it fun. With lower levels of social collaboration, work can seem very… dry.  Create time for informal chats, celebrations and fun – in meetings, roadshows, conferences and training.
4. Keep your messaging tight. With any chaotic event, maintaining organisational values and goals is hard.  Keep re-stating the why of the organisation, reminding them and thanking them for doing meaningful work.
5. Follow strict meeting guidelines. Firstly, don’t over-invite people to meetings; give them the opportunity to say ‘no’ and limit them to those people that really need to be there.  Send recordings to the rest. Have sharp agendas and clear boundaries (i.e. nobody should speak for more than 60 seconds). Make sure you close them out with clear outcomes and responsible people.
6. Create a buddy programme. Knowing that the most effective ways that people learn (i.e. on the job, with people) will be impacted, why not create a less formal ‘buddy’ programme.  With clearly defined roles that are linked to performance ambitions, people can learn from each other with regularly scheduled catch-ups.
7. Trust people. With less clearly defined organisational structures, you may need to leverage a more matrix-style organisational design.  This means less control, more delegation, letting people play to their strengths and getting out of their way.
8. Set clear, regular boundaries. Early and often.  Clarity in expectation setting requires a particular set of skills and will be key in maintaining morale, productivity and momentum.  With the lack of formal performance management systems like appraisals, clear goal-setting can take away a lot of performance issues.
9. Don’t forget about people. Especially when people aren’t visible in the office, the temptation will be to communicate by cascading information from the organisation to many people, by email or video call.  But one-to-one is still crucial for maintaining morale and connection. Thank people sincerely, offer help, listen intently and check in on them regularly.

Please remember that people will remember.  The role that organisations play in the new world is not only good for the organisation itself, but for society as a whole.  Companies that treat people badly, forcing them to bend to their will, have not gone unnoticed.  Leaders who do not lead with integrity will be remembered for it… Organisations that are generous, supportive and value their people will also be remembered.  And with a shifting balance of power from organisations to people, can you afford to get it wrong?

During the First World War, the Army replaced all the soldiers’ cloth caps with tin helmets.  The injury rate of those soldiers actually went up by quite a long way…  What was the reason?

What we measure

Statistics may be one of our most effective and efficient vehicles for communicating information.  It is natural for people to trust numbers over words, because statistics present numbers in an attractive format that everyone can follow.  In addition, numbers represent a wide variety of information – including election poll numbers, service level agreements & KPIs, net promoter scores, football results, engagement surveys, the retail price index …or of course profit.

This perception of reliability in the data is risky.  Looking at our children’s school grades to the cost of the Tokyo Olympics to the percentage of trains that run on time - what that data doesn’t tell us is how much our children are learning, how good the Olympics will be, or the quality of the customer's journey on those trains!

The problem with the numbers

The problems come when the data used to represent the outcome, becomes the outcome.  The numbers are not the means to the end.  Happy customers are the means to the end – the customer feedback scores are a representation of that means!  It drives me nuts that organisations focus so much time and effort on getting good feedback scores, rather than focusing that effort on just making them happy.

Another story is that of our old favourites – traffic wardens. For many years now, local press around the UK has been reporting that traffic wardens have been giving out bogus tickets because they have to fulfil a certain quota of tickets per hour.  Anything from buses, police cars and even tow trucks have been ticketed – but I don’t believe that it’s the traffic warden’s fault… If you were working in a culture that actually defined your success in your job by the amount of tickets you gave (and docked your wages if you didn’t meet that target), what would you do? 

What difference would it make to the traffic wardens if their success was defined as the lowest number of disputes?  What if success was defined by the greatest number of people re-educated with not having to give a ticket?  What if a traffic warden was rewarded for having to give out the least number of tickets (because people in their 'patch' parked properly?) How would that change their approach?

The trouble with focussing on the numbers is not the numbers. It’s the focus. In the gym you can focus on the number of calories you burn, or you can focus on your quality of health.  On Twitter, you can focus on the number of followers you have, or on the quality of those relationships.  At work, you can focus on your call abandon rate, meeting room utilisation, profitability or KPI adherence.  Or you can focus on delivering an awesome service for each and every person and let the numbers take care of themselves!

And the solution to my riddle? The number of injuries of those soldiers did indeed go up – but the number of deaths from head injuries went right down, saving thousands of lives. The piece of shrapnel would have previously killed them outright.

Cognitive dissonance theory states that people strive for internal consistence and psychological comfort. It says that people who are "psychologically uncomfortable" are able to actively change what they believe… if they are uncomfortable with two conflicting beliefs. Consider an example:

You look in the mirror, thinking to yourself “I really must lose some weight”. A matter of only a few hours later, you find yourself tucking into a doughnut that someone’s passed round the office. In a moment of panic, you realise that you’ve committed to yourself that you’ll be good – and now you’re a bad person for eating the doughnut. 

You’re psychologically uncomfortable, so what do you do? Your options are as follows:

1. Justify your behaviour: (“It’s Sally’s birthday, it would be rude not to”)
2. Ignore or deny the data: (“It’s probably a low fat doughnut”)
3. Add an extra clause to your contract with yourself: (“I was really good yesterday and I walked to work, so it’s okay once in a while”)
4. Change your behaviour (“Right, I’m throwing this doughnut in the bin”)

Unfortunately, the last one is by far and away the most effective, but also the most difficult.  It’s much easier to do any one of the first three and just change what you believe!  Rationalising and justifying incongruent behaviours are more common than you might think – from “I know I should give to charity, but I’ve been really busy recently”, to “Donald Trump is an alpha male, so it’s OK for him to make those comments”. And as human behaviour and organisational behaviour are identical, intrinsically linked and inseparable, the same things tend to happen in the world of business – to the detriment of us all!

Recently, Amazon drivers have admitted to driving dangerously and even urinating into bottles because of the pressure to maintain an unreasonable delivery schedule. The organisational cognitive dissonance could well be that “it’s OK to treat our drivers like that, because we believe that our customers should come first.”

Sports Direct has engaged in some shocking behaviour by fining staff 15 minutes’ pay for being one minute late, even though they’re made to stand in long security queues. The organisation’s cognitive dissonance there is likely to be “If they didn’t steal from us, we wouldn’t need to be so strict”

Bank bosses justified the dysfunctional behaviour that prompted the banking crisis by explaining that the regulations were too loose, and anyway, “you shouldn’t have let us get away with it”.

There are also hundreds of smaller, micro-dissonances that justify a range of behaviours at work. Consider “Steve’s a bit of a bully, but he really makes us an amazing profit!”. Or “it’s OK that we make people work really long hours, because they wouldn’t make an effort otherwise”.  Or “we know we should have more senior women in leadership roles, but there’s no good women around”.   Justifying or rationalising ‘uncomfortable’ behaviours (rather than challenging them), can lead to a culture of sexism, bullying and low integrity; among many other dysfunctional outcomes.

So, do you want to rationalise, justify and explain away the reasons you reach for the doughnut… Or do you want to take the tough choice and opt to change your behaviour instead?

Could there be a good shout for reversing this trend? Should we be promoting that instead of the company interviewing the candidate – that the candidate interviews their prospective manager in equal measure?

I’d love to see a candidate grill a potential new supervisor on his/her ability to delegate, how many of their team have been promoted, and how often they dole out reward and recognition. Managers could be given a similar amount of time in an interview to explain why they are the right manager for the new recruit, explaining how they plan to develop and mentor their team, and how much time they regularly dedicate to 1-to-1s and feedback. Perhaps the manager’s CV should also be included with the job description?

Staff are effectively paid less than the minimum wage, because they are required to undertake security checks (read: they’re vigorously searched) in their own time. Conversely, if people are just one minute late, Sports Direct will dock their pay.  They also operate a “six strikes and you’re out” rule, for a range of ‘offences’.  This includes a December 2015 occurrence of someone giving birth in the toilets, along with four other “miscarriage or pregnancy related complications”, which came about because their staff feared disciplinary action. There were 72 other ambulance call-outs, including 36 of which were “life-threatening”. Apparently, it’s fine for staff to stay behind after work in their own time to be searched, but any other absences (even life threatening ones) could be punishable with losing your job. And Mike Ashley’s reply? “I’m not Father Christmas”.

These practices, with the review of any decent HR or Talent professional that I know of, would most likely be dismissed as unfair and over-the-top. These draconian policies were most likely dreamed up as a response to some perceived threat, and I’d like to think that no forward-thinking professional would consider them.

The effects of this “culture of fear” are certainly shocking, but I believe this is only the symptom of something much more insidious and disturbing. The thing that shocks me the most is how the mind-set of some organisations still exists in the industrial revolution. From the 1750s right up until the 1970s & 1980s, the ‘factory-line’ mentality worked very well, scaling down huge operations into bite-size, manageable, simple tasks. It was great for menial tasks that only required a human being to show up for work, on time, or the production line would stop. 

But nowadays in the post-machine, digital age, the means of production has shifted from employer to employee. If you want people to act like people (in other words to think, collaborate, use their initiative and solve problems), they you need to treat them like a human being and not a slightly better-smelling machine. 

Trust them implicitly; even if one or two of them might steal from you. Take care of their wellbeing and treat them like individuals; even if there’s hundreds or even thousands of them. Communicate with them, ask them what they think and then listen to the replies; even if some don’t want to talk. Develop them and grow them; even if some of them end up leaving the business. And recognise them, thank them and praise them; even if they’re only doing their job. 

In summary, I think leaders have a moral, ethical and legal obligation to treat people like people. The definition and concept of leadership has shifted in recent years, and I hope it continues to shift.

Profit is not the be-all-and-end-all, to be obtained at all (human) costs. Profit is a by-product of treating your people well. And for those people that dispute the connection between people-centric businesses and bottom line profit? Well, Sports Direct has just had an estimated £600m wiped off the company’s value, with untold more damage in reputation and brand. Imagine if just a fraction of that had been invested in developing a people-centred organisation.

This has resulted in most of the Kubler-Ross stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression – everything bar acceptance. Their reasoning, according to the behavioural science department of the London School of Economics, was that escalators of over 18.5m tend to have fewer people walking up on the left, as it’s too much effort. The result is a vacant left side and a crowded right.

But it seems that the number-crunchers have forgotten a few key facts.

One rule for everyone doesn’t work

Just because fewer people will want to walk up long escalators, it doesn’t mean that no-one will. There will arguably now be even more angry, suited businesspeople who are blocked by left-standers.

This creates mixed messages

Only four London stations are above this 18.5m height ‘threshold’; namely Angel, Holborn, Green Park and Tottenham Court Road. If we have to stand on both sides at one of these, why not all of the stations? How will we know which ones to walk at, and where to stand?

They’ve underestimated our London-ness.

And by this, I mean our engrained mind-set. Us Londoners are happy not having to talk to anyone while travelling, wrapped up in our ‘social norm’ of civility and autopilot commuting. The shock of having this comfort zone unpicked in in such a blatant way is disturbing to the status quo. This is London, not Paris. 

Instruction doesn’t work

It’s one thing to be told with a range of methods (by a person, a robot-lady, over the tannoy and with some yellow stickers) what to do. It’s another to be told why. If people don’t know why, they are very likely to return to their original behavioural patterns as soon as they can. 

Above all, there are lessons for the world of business. Large-scale behavioural change does not come about overnight, nor does it react well to being told what to do. People need a range of factors to come into play, in order for the underlying culture and mind-set to shift. This often includes (but is certainly not limited to) communication methods, leadership and peer role-modelling, reward & recognition and purpose.

For me, it illustrates an interesting point. No matter what the numbers may say or how "good for us" it may appear to be, there’s just one group of people that might derail the whole programme… The very people whose behaviour you’re looking to change.