Have we forgotten how to team?

ALSO: young workers are demanding AI at work

At the moment I’m immersed in some research about teams and teamwork. I'm interested in exploring why I so often hear leaders saying, ‘my team doesn’t feel as bonded as it used to be’. These testimonies often go on to reflect that the old tricks of running team social events don’t seem to having the cut through that they might have done in the past.

In the simplest sense a team is just a group of people working to achieve a shared goal. For most of us, whether we recognise it or not at the time, our first experience of being in a group, maybe even a team, comes from our families. The interesting implication for how we work is that families don’t look and feel how they did twenty years ago.

Twenty years ago families had a larger amount of time spent in each others’ company, now there is much more time spent alone consuming personal content on our own phones. Families have higher instances of divorce, plus working patterns are such that weeknight mealtimes for teenagers are increasingly individual rather than collective with the family. A fifth of Brits say they eat apart from the people they live with. It’s only natural that all of these changes will have an impact on the way we perceive the model of being in a group. Life is making us a little more detached from the collective. We’re choosing to spend more time alone, something that Derek Thompson, a writer for The Atlantic, describes as ‘chosen solicitude’.

What consequence will this elective solicitude have our attitudes towards being part of a team at work? Thompson’s article has prompted me to reflect on the evolving nature of teamwork. As he says, the way we live our youth has a direct connection to how we are as adults. In his words, ‘Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood’. If we aren’t in the habit of being part of a group as a child, the accommodations we need to make might feel uncomfortable as an adult.

Thompson believes that there’s an important point to take on board here, we should note that for many adults they’ve almost trained themselves out of being lonely. He says despite the fact that adults are spending an additional 99 minutes a day alone than they were two decade ago, they don’t report feeling lonelier.

‘We’re spending 99 more minutes a day at home than in 2003. Shopping at home, doing meetings at home, eating at home. It’s not just a remote working revolution it’s a remote living revolution’.

In his words, ‘Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century’. (It’s worth adding that some of the commentary to Thompson’s piece has suggested that, while adults aren’t lonelier, teenagers almost certainly are. It’s taking a while for us to be broken into this isolated way of living.)

New research from The Times seems to support Thompson’s point, finding that Gen Z workers don’t enjoy office time and want to spend more time at home - even as they often confess it feels an impoverished way to live. This chimes with direct feedback from bosses who have struggled to find a way for younger team members to feel connected to the team.

Thompson positions his piece as a call to arms suggesting in an NPR interview about the article that his strong advice to anyone is to force yourself to leave the house, that a virtuous circle of social good is triggered by making the effort to connect with others. He cites research that says that connecting with others is significantly more important for our happiness than other aspects of our life, like money. In my book Fortitude I reported how Jean Twenge, one of the world’s leading experts in teenage mental health, found that teenagers who had an evening meal with their families during the Pandemic saw their mental health improve and their anxiety decline.

As I’ve discussed previously in this newsletter the idea of demanding young workers to come in to the office is tin-eared to their financial situation.

Spareroom say there isn’t a single postcode in London that is affordable on a graduate salary. Most young people are faced with longer commutes than their predecessor generations.

It’s why organisations who want to build cohesive teams with Gen Z members need to think more holistically. Cameo are one of the latest firms to realise that there’s a quid pro quo of asking employees to come into the office. They’re offering $10,000 pay rise (and other benefits) to employees who commit to making it into the office 4 days a week.

None of this is to say that we can’t aspire to create tightly bonded, energised teams but we should reflect on the steps that it might take to build these groups - and recognise that the world outside us is moving in the opposite direction.

I’m absolutely delighted to have reached 100,000 subscribers to this newsletter this week. (Well it was last week but Substack had a glitch and I couldn’t post). I started posting regularly during Covid and have kept up a regular cadence ever since.

The research contained certainly informs my talks - and lots of readers have got in touch asking me to speak at their events. If you do get any value from Make Work Better spread the love by dropping the link in a Teams/Slack chat.

• JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon found himself in the news a couple of times this week. Firstly the audio of a rant about WFH employees hit the internet (‘don’t give me this sh!t that work from home Friday works, I call a lot of people on Friday and there’s not a goddamn person I can get hold of’. Then some wider context came out. The rant was provoked by a question by a worker whose whole team worked in different offices and was asking for a degree of flexibility with the recent RTO mandate. The worker involved found himself fired for asking the question after the town hall session (“Go and clean off your desk and get the f— out of here”) only then to be reinstated after the red mist had faded. Worth reading

• Following discussion about the downgrading of DEI objectives this data from the IPA suggests that - for the advertising industry at least - most organisations weren’t serious about DEI in the first place. Despite the ad industry being 55% female, ‘the gender pay gap increased from 15.2% in 2023 to 19.7% in 2024, in favour of men’. The ethnicity pay gap increased from 21.6% in 2023 to 32.7%.’

• Beware if your organisation bans AI tools, young workers are increasingly seeing AI as an important part of doing their job

• You may have seen the CEO of Klarna boasting that he was reducing the size of his company by using AI chatbots. Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company has shrunk from 5000 employees to 4000, and was on its way to 2000. To complicate things, before you cite Klarna as a visionary thought leaders, firstly this New York Times article explored the company’s open roles and suggested that the boss was pumping the tyres up to build unwarranted hype around the organisation. But then, oddly he himself last week said he’d had an epiphany that customers wanted to speak to real people and he was hiring again. I used to categorise managers as being either surrounded by calm or surrounded by chaos. It was a good tell for how they led. Siemiatkowski is definitely ‘chaos’.

• A convincing take about how relative prices have changed over the last 30 years. In the OP’s opinion the cost of necessities and luxuries have flipped. In the 1950s a TV cost about the equivalent of a year’s housing costs, ‘now you’d need to buy a $99 TV a month for 2 years to equal the price of one month’s rent’.

• ‘My strong advice is presume that every single thing you do on that device is being listened to,’ this was the advice that a friend of mine received on their first day working for a major social network. Most people whose phones and computers are monitored probably know about it but this Washington Post article gives you advice of how to check