Flexible Working

I work with many employers, in all sectors. When I talk externally to their target audiences, they want to know: “What do people want from us as an employer?” and “What puts them off working here?”

I see that Flexible Working/Work-life Balance answers both. Employees increasingly expect it, and would be deterred if they don’t think they’ll get the right balance. You can see the need from recent reports like this one or slightly older ones.

This has quickly developed and become more sophisticated. It used to be structured working patterns (typically to fit round family life) and taking the odd afternoon at home for a delivery. Now it’s a greater breadth of need, more ad-hoc, and with far lower levels of permission. 

But there’s another aspect that comes up in research like this: people with high flex are more satisfied, but perhaps work harder. Is that because they are more engaged, or because flexing like this is new and they lack the skill/experience/role-models to have control?

In my last blog I talked about a connection between tech and flexible working. We can let tech dominate our lives. (And if we don’t take control, then we are in danger of not having moments of reflection, even boredom. And that can mean we don’t think and innovate.)

I think the secret to flexible working is to take control. Often I conduct an internal focus group and hear: “My boss won’t allow that” or “We can’t do that in my team”. Sometimes that’s about not having tech, or having a customer-facing need. But more often I think it’s about perception. It’s not my place in a focus group to say: “Are you sure?”, let alone “That’s not true, is it?” But I don’t think that the controlling manager that they fear really exists much anymore. A lot of managers have got a long way to go, but I don’t think they count the hours people are at desks. I don’t think they have time.

And that’s part of the problem. If they haven’t got time, perhaps they themselves are visibly doing long hours. That becomes the culture. Maybe too they haven’t got the time to spell out what they expect, and their attitude to flexibility. I haven’t heard many managers say “That can’t work here” – and not because they believe it but can’t say it. They want the results and outcomes – but from where or when, I don’t think they couldn’t give all that much of a hoot. So, I think employees need to demonstrate what they can do, in the way that best suits them and their work (which may be Mon-Fri 9-5).

But the question remains, can employees take control? Or do they lack that – very new - skill, and end up taking on more?

The Problem with E-mail

The Problem with E-mail - via Stanley Kubrick and Leonard Rossiter

Mostly I don’t work in a conventional office. Most are larger than my 2.47 m². They have more people in them. But I’m fascinated by office culture. We all are. Because it shows people at their worst. The best sitcoms work by trapping people in an artificial situation. That’s a dictionary definition of an office. Hence we get: Reggie Perrin, The IT Crowd and, well, The Office.

I think people show themselves at their worst worst when using e-mail. I’m not quite sure why – it really is a very useful tool. This article offers some insight, it is useful, just so much so that we try to do everything with it.

Like any written communication, without genuine care you risk being misunderstood. I spend a lot of my time in quiet bemusement as I see people in fury/confusion/damage-limitation as some text/update/tweet has been misunderstood/inappropriately used/taken a massive swingeing kick at some hornets’ nest. As humans – we don’t seem to learn. If they re-made Dr Strangelove (Hollywood; don’t), it wouldn’t be implausible for the Doomsday machine to be triggered by an ambiguously worded e-missive.

When they imagined the future it was always videophones. Of course it was. Spoken word and conversation get two people to the same point. Add visual cues, and it’s unbeatable. They didn’t imagine text on teeny screens. But when we invent the videophone, we go to e-mail before we talk, let alone Skype/facetime. Even for a difficult or sensitive conversation, we’re like moths to a gas lamp, always drawn to this limited technology. 

The problem is that it’s temptingly quick. We can’t break the loop. So we invent ways around it. Every time I open a browser version of my e-mails, it’s introduced a new way to organise them. Or, in my experience, to hide or confusingly re-arrange them. Then companies introduce Yammer or Slack or somesuch to enable better conversation. From my observation, they fail more often than succeed.

For me -– it’s not the tool, it’s the use. I am as bad an e-culprit as anyone, but I self-impose some rules. Max 16 e-mails in my inbox; 10 or fewer is ideal. That requires sub-rules. At times I need to stop what I’m really doing to manage that. But otherwise I’d feel swamped, and/or keep chopping and changing. For the main, I stay off of an evening/weekend. Then there’s a glorious fortnight each summer when I turn off my data entirely. And if the topic is hard or complex; I talk.

My question is, how many take control in in a fluid, tech environment? How many just let it happen to them? Can people do it naturally, or do they need support? And if they need support, where from

There’s a parallel here with work-life balance, and I’ll return to that next time.

Internships and Institutional Poshness

“Internships play a key role in employee retention, with graduates who have been interns likely to stay with a company for longer than those who weren’t, according to research published by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR).”

Internships are on the increase. “The leading employers featured in the research are offering over 13,000 paid internships and work experience placements this year. This is the highest level ever recorded and an increase of 10% on 2014” (Graduate Market 2015, High Fliers).

And there’s a key reason for it: “For the majority of employers who offer paid work experience places, such schemes have become an integral part of recruiting new graduates.” (Graduate Market 2015, High Fliers).

It got me thinking about the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s report from 2015, into elitism at top law, accountancy and financial firms, where disproportionate numbers of jobs go to the higher socio-economic classes. I blogged about it: “Institutionally Posh”. The report found many things that favour the better off and better educated. A couple of high(low?)lights:

·         “[firms seek] the capacity to present a “polished” appearance, display strong communication and debating skills, and act in a confident manner at interview … Russell Group universities are successful in providing them with high numbers of talented candidates according to this definition.”

·         “… the current definition of talent may disadvantage talented students who have not benefited from similar educational advantages or been socialised in a middle-class context…”

It seems to me that internships only perpetuate this. Not unpaid internships, that effect is well known, and we’re surely getting rid of them.

Sutton Trust: “the cost barriers to participating in an unpaid internship have significant consequences for social mobility”

Alan Milburn "most interns were unpaid and recruited informally", which was disadvantaging those from less affluent backgrounds who "simply cannot afford to work for free for any length of time".

But this literature review points us towards the conclusion that the more affluent are also more likely to get internships (and hence a better graduate job): 

“The use of internships to increase the chance of gaining a place on a graduate scheme has proved to be the most effective way of securing a job before graduation”

“These results suggest that attending a private school does increase the chance of gaining an internship”

That’s my observation when talking to graduate employers, graduates and students. There’s an increasing professionalisation to getting a graduate job. Not just ensuring you get the right course at the right university, but taking part in the right events, having the right social skills. It all helps to get the right internship.

But how is that knowledge shared, and it is equally shared? Or are those from more affluent backgrounds more likely to be exposed to these ideas, earlier?

It’s hard to blame employers for getting the best people to do the jobs they want them to do. But there’s two questions:

• Should they take a more fundamental look at how they attract, recruit and select young talent? And I don’t just mean dropping a 2:1 requirement 
• And wider than that even, should they take a different look at what they want young people in their first jobs to do, to open those jobs up to more people?

Policy, rules. OK?

As a school governor, I’m keenly aware of the risk of drowning in policy. In schools, policy is needed on a range of issues, and all aspects of safeguarding. However small your school – and ours has three classes, total – you need the same number of policies, many of which overlap. The sensible thing to do would be to take a holistic view, combine and cross reference. But that takes time, and in a small school, where everyone wears many hats, that time is harder to create. It often makes sense to simply churn out the next policy to ensure that we are reviewing when we should.

The actual discussion tends to be a quality one. Less about basic compliance and more about whether the policy is communicated, understood and observed. But a couple of articles recently made me question the value of formal policies.

This one first, under the headline: Diversity Policies Rarely Make Companies Fairer, and They Feel Threatening to White Men. Now, whether we should be too concerned about the feelings of those that have tended to be hugely advantaged in the workplace is up for debate. But the findings here – that white men applying to firms that are actively pro-diversity feel under more pressure and perform worse – is an interesting finding.

What is more alarming is the concept that: “We can’t be discriminatory; we have a diversity policy”. That breeds complacency. It means that the people aren’t using the policy to challenge their assumptions or prejudices, they’re using it to reinforce them. That’s a policy that isn’t communicated, understood or observed.

This posting “Ditch Your Employee Handbook” was far more uplifting. I really like the coathanger analogy. But it was these two observations that stuck out for me. As we’ve seen above: More Rules = Less Judgement. And then the absolute nub of this all: Rules can’t keep you safe. It’s all about judgement, and that’s down to the individual. And it’s no surprise when the Nordstrom Employee Handbook is routinely referenced (even if it has been supplanted/exaggerated).

But what do we do when you’re in a sensitive or hard-to-navigate situation? If there could be safeguarding, legal or reputational damage? Can we rely on people to make the right judgements? Or rather, how do we support them to, whilst holding them to account if they don’t?

It’s a topic I intend to return to, but if you have ideas/observations, do share.

What's Important At Work Part 4 of 4

In my last post I made the case for creating your own definition of What’s Important At OUR Work?

Because when you have that, then you can build a story of your organisation, and what’s important, valued and different. You can use it to promote you as employer or to become a better employer. You can feed it back internally to build your Status and Reputation, Integrity and Values, Leadership and Vision. It can become the stimulus for staff to innovate and create to make you a better organisation and better serve customers. It can be the starting point for creating ambassadors for your career offering.

What is undoubtedly true is that different parts of the story will be more effective for different people. I think you need to understand that, and identify what to turn up for some and down for others. It probably involves some segmentation. But don’t get too hung up on making that rigid, people aren’t one neat little set of attributes. They’re complex, messy. So don’t stick to other people’s definitions - I’m thinking especially of generational segments here. It’s your definition, your story; identify your own segments. (And here’s a good example from Lloyds Banking Group). 

In fact try not to make the whole thing too rigid. It should be about allowing people to identify with the story. So they can see how what you’re showing will apply for them. Ideally, they’d be able to tell it themselves with their own words and experiences. Consider carefully whether a toolkit or a presentation is going to give them that understanding and freedom. 

And I don’t think it matters whether you approach this as a brand, engagement or culture piece of work. Often that’s complex and messy too. What does matter is to truly understand what’s it’s like from your employees’ or potential employees’ perspective. Once you’re at the root of What’s Important At OUR Work, then it’ll become obvious what will work for you, your organisation, your people and the people you’d love to have.