Fixing culture starts with calendars, not offices

'Presence' is a free research deck, a series of podcasts and much more

Every single week I hear from leaders that they are trying to get their workers back to the office more to help fix their disconnected culture.

Last week James Whatley wrote about attending an event of media sector CEOs where there was a collective certainty that things would be better if their teams were in more.

This month has also seen the new leadership of Manchester United demand a return to the office (ignoring a lack of desk space) to reboot the organisation.

But workers are exhausted with the suggestion that they should travel in to the office to sit on Teams calls. Oft-promised water cooler moments simply don’t happen in the way they are nostalgically recalled. Research from Nick Bloom suggests that 60% of us have experienced at least one RTO initiative by our firm. Indeed one in 20 workers have witnessed their firm try five or more RTO pushes.

Here’s the truth that bosses don’t want to hear: fixing culture starts with calendars not offices.

In the last five years the amount of time we spend in meetings has doubled. It’s contributed to a sense that work is a hurried haze of meetings, message pings and emails. Any leader wondering why work feels less connected needs to start there.

Today I’m sharing a whole project that comes from working with dozens of organisations wrestling with these same themes.

Any organisation who wants to foster connection between their team members needs to focus their attention on reducing meeting time before they think about RTO mandates. Work will be better if we can cultivate a sense of Presence between us.

Workplace connection was once about showing up in the office every day. Now success at work is less about presenteeism and more about creating the conditions to be present with each other.

Presence is a slide deck, a series of podcasts, a video and lots of links (through the deck). It’s months and months of work from me - and it’s all free. If you like the look of it, if you think it could stimulate change in your team it could be a good resource to share to start a discussion.

There’s more to come. Some of the organisations who have been trialling it are keen to share their experiences. Maybe you also want to try it and come on to Eat Sleep Work Repeat to talk to me.

Resources:

Download the Presence deck as PPT

Download the Presence deck as PDF

The full list of podcast episodes is here

• Half of us would change jobs to get a four-day week (the research also suggests that 11% of UK employees surveyed ‘are trialling it’

• Tesco’s CEO got a pay cheque of £10m last year. (Reminder: the growing CEO paygap is killing culture)

• The replies and quotes to this below tweet are worth checking out: replies, quotes

• There was a lot going on with AI & work this week

• It’s worth checking out this thread of Google announcements but this tweet is a fair criticism, a lot of the Google demos were just imagined features rather than product demos