Comfort and Joy: Working From Home

Zero commuting gives you a lot of your day back. Being around for my family, taking the boys to school is its own reward. More often than not I work from home. And the big ticket gains are, well, big. But there’s real joy in the small things too:

Shop at the fruit stall, the butchers, the bakers

Taking in parcels, for all of the neighbours

No soggy butties, no microwave pings

These are a few of my favourite things

Walk up the hill, views of the Peak District

Lost in my work, become more prolific

Will it be mushrooms? Fried onion rings?

These are a few of my favourite things

Tea on the hour, no need to make brew rounds

Test Match Special, Radconie in the background

Fried egg sandwiches, yolk down my chin

These are a few of my favourite things

I don’t want to come across as some kind of misanthrope. (I can’t deny it; I just don’t want to come across that way…) There are times when I’m immersed in some desk research or analysing a survey. Then I might not actually speak to another human for the working day. Then – dare I say it – I do miss the office bantz. So I enjoy my time onsite with clients too. Just for long enough, ideally, until I want to get back to my wee desk. And music, tea, a stroll, an indulgent lunch…

Another Point of View

Self-employment and often working from home leads into some interesting situations. Today I have already spent time networking with Edwina Currie and then on my doorstep with two Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Politics and religion. Two topics to produce polarised views. But I’m less interested in the poles than the spectrum. However much my views may have deviated from others, they have insight and experience that I don’t. I’ve heard them, they made me think about other points of view.

If I ever wanted to engage with them again, if I wanted to influence them to do something different, I can’t hope to change their minds. But I can take into account their points of view and work with them.

That made me think about this blog piece, which (rightly) attracted a lot of attention in my network. Written by Francesca Campalani, Head of Attraction at Deloitte, it’s talking about Employer Branding and discovering for your audience: “What do they want, how do they make decisions, what is important to them?”

For me, it’s vital to understand the range of views. It’s also vital to have an objective eye. For one, people won’t always be fully honest with their employer or potential employer. They’ll hold back. And both ways, negatively and positively. For another you (yes, you) have too many inherent beliefs, assumptions and prejudices about your organisation. It takes an external observer to cut through those and reveal the full range of truths to you. 

Oh, and you’ll want the other point of view to the above blog. Well, for me, segmentation and taxonomy are important – but only so far, and before they tip over into being too complex to usefully use. As this blog asserts “Targeting is not the holy grail of marketing. It’s helpful to a point but rests on assumptions about human behaviour that are unpredictable and misleading”.

And I agree with both blogs. That’s not double-think. That’s just seeing truth as a spectrum, and working out which points work for you.

Limits of Gamification

I was recently described as a “Kneejerk Devil’s Advocate”. Intended as constructive criticism, with a possible emphasis on the critical, I rather like it. It’s useful in my professional research to always take another point of view, to seek the other interpretation.

Right now there’s a buzz about Gamification. There has been for a little while now, which means that the idea isn’t going away. Given my approach, it’s natural that I come here not to bury it, but not simply to praise it either.

With any new idea, you will soon get the full range of:

•  Probable over-claims about the efficacy (I just don’t buy that all – even a majority – of change projects will now succeed with its addition)
•  Extensions that rather stretch the concept (this seems to suggest a nightmare-ish world where you’re CONSTANTLY pushed to new tiny targets)
• Things given the badge Gamification that maybe have little to do with it (this really seems to be about better collaboration between remote colleagues)

The more sensible applications recognise that :

"gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun"

It can help with recognition, it can help with learning, a variety of ways to build understanding. I love this example of a great creative execution to raise the profile of an unknown employer.

So, while I have reservations about articles like this that promise it’s the future, it does get to the heart of it: engagement. The problem is that whilst it makes the link between productivity and engagement, it mixes them.

For me, gamification can be best used to get people to understand and engage with ideas, so that they will do new/different/more things. I think it’s problematic when it misses out the understanding and moves straight to the doing.

Bankers were highly incentivised and encouraged to achieve targets without understanding the effects or considering the bigger picture. The effects of that are still all around us.

Imprecise Questions

Yesterday The Sun ran a research-based headline “1 in 5 Brit Muslim’s sympathy for jihadis”. It quickly came in for a lot of criticism. I don’t want to dwell on the politics, or general journalistic reporting of research. But much of the criticism focussed on specifics of the research. If you want to read about that, you can.

What interested me was the phrasing of the statements they were asked to agree with: “I have a lot of/some sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria”. For a long statement, it’s imprecise. Many picked up that they may go to Syria to fight against jihadis. But for me the real issue is the use of “sympathy”. That could mean they support them. It could mean that they feel sorry for them. And it could mean they see why radicalisation can happen for vulnerable young people. 

I reckon some of the responses covered all of those sentiments – but we’ve no way of knowing in what proportion – or why.

And that’s the problem with a lot of employer research too, engagement surveys being the obvious example. Now, they have a fine line to tread: questions specific enough to be meaningful, whilst keeping a manageable number of questions.

But it’s no coincidence that a lot of my projects start where other research has left off. Without a level of precision, all they can hope to do is to identify where there is a problem. But they often can’t tell you precisely what the problem is, or why.

You’ve got to start somewhere, but if you’re dedicating time and energy to listening to employees, make sure that your questions are precise enough to get you valuable insight. Or build in the time to get deeper into the bigger findings.

Golden. Delicious?

Marketing is powerful. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not.

Allow me to re-hash a story about beer. Brits started holidaying in Europe from the 70s. And drank lager there. They wanted to drink lager at home too. So brewers brought it to the UK. But not at 5+% ABV. No, Brits wanted to drink pints (and pints) of it. So they made it weaker. Naturally, it tasted terrible. So they needed very good marketing: “Probably the best…refreshes the parts…I bet he drinks…” And for 30-odd years we chose to drink terrible beer. That’s powerful.

And Hugh Fearnley-Whatsit got me thinking about another old marketing story. When the common market opened access to Europe, we got Golden Delicious apples. And it usurped a lot of traditional varieties. Ask anyone, in a rational moment, what’s the better tasting apple, and a Cox kicks its backside. Golden Delicious is an inspid apple. Neither tasty nor juicy. Often unforgivably mushy. But they have something going for them. Consistency. For all it lacks in anything you might actually want from an apple, on the supermarket shelf it’s always the same size and colour. As a variety, it’s got its own in-built marketing. As shoppers, we like that standardisation. 

But thinking about marketing employers, we often don’t want volume of customers (employees / applicants) – we want quality. When you look at your employer reputation it’s easy to pitch a broad appeal, to fail to differentiate. It’s easy to match the other apples on the shelf. Your ambition should be bigger. You should aim to dig out your unique characteristics and circumstance, to market how your heritage, culture, vision combine to create a unique working opportunity. Wouldn’t we all rather be an Egremont Russet, a Red Pippin, a Worcester Pearmain? And wouldn’t the discerning candidate choose them?

Don’t settle for being a Golden Delicious – find your unique qualities.