Things ain't working like they used to!
We need to look with fresh eyes to what work has become
The most limiting factor in work right now is the urge to hang on to ideas of what it takes to create success.
I had two enlightening conversations on this last week. One chat was with a veteran of sales who recounted to me the challenges he had communicating with a Gen Z colleague who worked with him.
‘I told her what a laugh we used to have coming in every day and going to the pub on Thursday and Friday’.
‘I don’t need to do that, I’ve got my friends’, she replied.
He was stumped. He’d been trying to invoke the fun of the past. ‘I just don’t know what to say to make the culture feel better, the young ones aren’t interested,’ he said.
Another person got in touch with me via LinkedIn expressing the challenge of dealing with young employees in her organisation.
She was anxiously observing ‘a lack of resilience’ exhibited in younger millennial colleagues: ‘we’re finding it difficult to get employees to work hard for clients (staying late on pitches etc)’. She even confessed that employees were crying when pressure was applied to them.
I suspect I came across a little unsympathetic, I’ve heard this so many times that I wonder if people are looking with fresh eyes at the story they’re telling me.
The truth is that the natural order of work has fundamentally changed in the last five (to ten) years. Expecting our team members to care about how things were done in the past is a huge mistake.
Knowing what used to be great right now is almost the most limiting pre-conception to bring to contemporary work.
Why? Because unless people are shown why something matters they are likely to use their own eyes to see if does.
For example, we might tell young employees: please be in the office to improve the culture. They see the request to spend huge amounts of cash to sit on Teams calls all day.
Let’s set aside what used to happen in our day and let’s look with fresh eyes. If someone were to travel to the office every day in 2024 it takes a quarter of their salary.
Peak day return fares to London right now might surprise you. A day return from Reading is £40, St Albans £24, Southend £46, Slough £35. A one day Travelcard in London is around £10.50.
But yes, you or your boss might have lived in Zone 2 or 3 (or in the equivalent outside of London) when you left college, today SpareRoom say that there isn’t a single postcode in London that is affordable to new graduates.
Yes, we used commute every day. But wages haven’t kept pace with the cost of living in the last 10 years. Since 2015 median household income has risen 6%, about a third of what rent has risen in the same time.
In London tenants now spend over half of their wages on rent. (The measure for ‘affordable housing’ is a third, in London the real stat is currently 54%).
So let’s put those fresh eyes to use. What would we do in this situation? Would we come into the office and go to the pub on Thursday and Friday night? Would we come in every single Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or would we skip a few?
When faced with this calculation it’s no surprise that someone might think that office time is less important than the big boss (who has his own parking spot and whose lavish salary has been pinged around employee Whatsapp groups) has declared.
We might tell young employees: success here is about working late on pitches, we work hard play hard after all.
They are seeing bosses who dial in from their garden office telling them how they need to work harder, while they see property prices that have risen so far to make owning property completely unattainable for themselves. Yes, it might have worked in the past but the deal that work represented was also different then
The average age of people sharing property was 24 in 2017. In 2022 it was 31.
A rough way to think of that stat is to say that half of the people sharing a flat or house in 2022 were over 31 years old.
What was your boss doing at 31? What were you doing? Was it leaning over someone to stir your beans? Comedian Paddy Young gives a vivid description of being in a houseshare in his thirties: “When we’re all cooking at the same time. We’re like a DJ crew.” I’m really not sure you or your boss have relevant experience here. Maybe this is why people don't see the value in working late anymore?
Does this mean that nothing works?
No, of course not. Think from scratch what would create a connection between people, what would make them feel invested in the group. Giving people the space to build connection is vital. (It’s what the Presence deck is all about).
But please spare us the chat about what used to work. Loan your boss the copy of Who Moved My Cheese? he bought for you all. Yes, change sucks, now you need to think afresh.
In the free Presence deck I say the first job of good cultures is to reduce meeting time. This brilliant article in the Wall Street Journal adds fuel to that fire.
The piece cites the stat that in the US face-to-face meetings only account for 8% of the working week as one of the reasons that work is becoming lonelier.
"Meetings can make people feel lonelier—and even more so if the meetings are virtual, behavioural researchers say". It adds that ' those who describe themselves as “very lonely” tended to have heavier meeting loads than less-lonely colleagues.
This is why I take issue with the idea espoused by Brian Elliott (formerly of Slack) of 'one online, all online' meetings. This is a charming democratic notion suggesting that when one person has to dial in to a call we should afford that same experience to everyone. What it means in reality is that people who have travelled to the office are forced to sit on Teams calls at their desk, next to colleagues in the same meeting. This well-meaning error is sadly one of the reasons why work is becoming disembodied and impersonal. Office time should be about connection
After growing evidence that wellness programs don’t work, employers are re-evaluating their use of them. What should they replace them with? Actually working out what wellbeing at work really means and getting rid of the stressful parts of work to fulfil it. For example at Gap an ‘experiment included providing store workers with predictable schedules and the freedom to swap shifts without managerial approval’: ‘the stores registered increased sales, while the workers reported feeling better in various ways — even extending to improved sleep quality’
Management by walking around was once the go to style of leadership, then was laughed at. This TikTok user suggests that in the hybrid era walking the floor when you’re in the office is a way for any of us to raise our profile internally. I’m a bit 🤔 but it’s worth watching
RTO mandates saw senior executives leave the likes of Space X and Apple, based on LinkedIn data. Space X saw 15% quit after they brought in their 5 day office mandate
City planners in Chicago are subsidising the conversion of unused offices to residential property. I pitched this as an election topic to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme but sadly they postponed the feature because of the early election catching everyone by surprise
An interesting article about the rise of local coworking hubs popping up across the US (archived back-up link)
I’m closing the day at the EG ‘Future of the Workplace’ event in a couple of weeks
Sad reading, having not been in an agency office for six years, it sounds like things have changed quite a bit; a real challenge to be upbeat I guess.