Bits and Pieces

Reflections on the Week

Uptown Funk

I’ve started to venture up to town a bit and one reason is to attend ‘Write Club’ (does what it says on the tin), which is being hosted by Town Square, a new coworking space near Old Street.

I’ve written about coworking before and it’s getting a lot more attention as organisations embrace flexible working. It’s a pretty broad church and Town Square are an interesting player that are firmly at the community end of the spectrum. They are interesting because they have deliberately opened up in under-served towns and communities, often as the first coworking space. Places like Wrexham, Bicester and Bognor Regis.

Most of their locations have their own names (the Rhyl one is called Costigan’s as it’s in an old pub) but this one is under their brand name and in partnership with Islington council.

Their mission is to have a Town Square in every, er, Town Square. It’s an admirable goal and I’m sure we’ll see a coworking space in every town or on every high street, even if they are not all theirs, in the not too distant future.

There’ll also be a lot of other options in what I believe is called the ‘Flex’ market in Commercial Real Estate. The office is changing and being blended in with other things. Town Square are blending it with community, education and economic development. Others will blend the office with hospitality and concierge services. New combinations will emerge that we can’t even imagine right now.

What’s clear is that we’re not going back to beige cubicles in big grey boxes.

Paperback Writer

I’ve been going to Write Club for some time, on and off, since it was started by my mate Bernie Mitchell some time ago. Bernie is immersed in the coworking community and he’s held it at a number of spaces over the years but the format has remained the same.

It’s very simple. We share what we are going to write, then we write for 90 minutes and so, and then we share how we got on. It’s completely non-judgemental (that’s not to say there isn’t the occasional subtle bit of bragging), it’s OK to say you didn’t do what you set out to. People normally end up doing something useful and being more productive than they would have been at home.

There’s something about sitting with other people who are working that just helps us to tune in and focus in a way that we often struggle to do on our own. It’s more than just the background burble of activity, although that’s helpful. It’s more to do with immersing ourselves in a shared space to ‘do the work’ and the energy field that is created. We have are engaged in a common endeavour even though we are all working on our own, separate things.

The socialising is important, it’s good have a change of scenery, meet people, have lunch together. We do share some ideas and information and support and encourage each other.

This is something you could start up yourself. You really only need one other person to get value from doing it. You could use a coffee shop for a venue, or a pub, or maybe find your local coworking space and ask them if they’d host.

It’s a new way of working (that’s been around for a decade or so, but, you know. New to most people).

Shout To The Top

Bernie told me many years ago that I should be blogging because I had interesting stuff to say. I don’t know that I believed him at the time but I did start and going to Write Club helped to develop that into a more regular habit. What it has enabled me to do is to find my voice (you may be wishing I hadn’t but, hey, you signed up for this), to find out what I wanted to write about and how I wanted to express it.

After several years of writing ‘corporate’ papers, marketing copy and press releases, I had become quite skilled at writing in a many different styles. Unfortunately, none of them were my own. My writing was also quite stilted and safe and, to be honest, a bit dull. It’s taken a while for me to ‘unlearn’ all that stuff and develop my own style.

Why am I wittering on about this? Because, quite often, people feel they don’t have a voice. They feel they can’t speak up, that they are not allowed to, that what they have to say isn’t of any value. This is particularly true in organisations, where a few voices often dominate (the HiPPOs) and everyone else keeps quiet.

This is, of course, disastrous. How often when a project comes to grief or a decision proves to be wrong to you find out that several people knew that would happen at the beginning but no-one asked them, and they didn’t feel it was safe enough to speak up? And it’s not 20:20 hindsight, because that was the conversation when the bosses weren’t in the room.

So when I was listening to Daniel Coyle (author of The Culture Code) on the excellent Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, what he said about psychological safety leapt out at me.

“It’s not about creating psychological safety, it’s about giving voice to everyone” (my paraphrase)

That’s exactly it. You want everyone to have voice, to say what’s on their mind. That way you get the most diverse input and you make better decisions.

Psychological Safety is such an abstract idea (and why isn’t it just, er, safety?), both for leaders to figure out how to create and for people to work out if they feel it. But ask them if everyone voices their opinions freely and they know exactly what the objective is and whether it’s being achieved.

Maybe some ways of creating psychological safety is to run things like ‘Write Club’ in your team, or a speaking club (some companies have internal Toastmasters group), or do some improv, or do anything that encourages self-expression and mutual support. If you help people to find their voice, you won’t have to worry about them speaking up. In fact you probably won’t be able to shut them up once they’ve started.

And the psychological safety will mostly take care of itself.

(I have to say, I can’t endorse the whole interview as I thought some of what Coyle said was bollocks. It even inspired my LinkedIN post this week (yes, he did talk about Navy Seals)).

Wherever I Lay My Hat

This week, AirBnB announced they were going to go over to flexible working completely and allow people to work any place, anywhere, anytime (so-called ‘Martini working’ for those with a long memories. Fun fact: this was our unofficial slogan for the Telecom Gold email service in the 1980s! Different times …)

An astute bit of PR for them which has reportedly led to a huge spike in views of their recruitment pages. To be honest, they couldn’t really do anything BUT go down this path but they have made a virtue out of a necessity (although, thinking about it, Slack were completely office-based before COVID, and for a long time Microsoft ran their email on UNIX rather than on their own Exchange platform that they were flogging hand over fist to corporates).

It helps to signal that the benchmark for what a ‘corporate gig’ is has shifted and permanently so. We’ve passed the inflexion point and flexible working is now ‘the new normal’. It’s funny how many of those who kept saying that we would soon move to the ‘new normal’ are, er, not moving the new normal but insisting we’ll all be going back to the office. Try telling a Gen Z’er that they have to commute into an office every day!

(Oh, you have. And it’s not gone well, has it? I wasn’t actually suggesting it, it was rhetorical device…oh, never mind.)

Sugar, Sugar

I try not to go fall into the trap of making everything into a binary (although I may be guilty of the odd attention-grabbing juxtaposition on my posts 😉) but in this very same week PwC announced that they were giving employees Friday afternoons off during the summer, prompting bad-tempered anachronism and professional shouty-bloke Alan Sugar to tweet;

“This is a bloody joke. The lazy gits make me sick. Call me old fashioned but all this work from home BS is a total joke. There is no way people work as hard or productive as when they had to turn up at a work location. The pandemic has had long lasting negative effect.”

Well, it looks like it’s has a negative effect on some of us, Alan (ahem).

Now, although Sugar punts himself as an ‘entrepreneur’, most of his money is in property, a lot of which is city-centre office blocks. So you could say he had little choice OTHER than to take this stance but, unlike AirBnB, he has not turned it into a virtue. He’s turned it into a big sign saying ‘Selfish, out-of-touch plonker’.

I fear this is a matter to which we shall be returning as I see no end to this self-serving bollocks for some time. As if we haven’t got enough to contend with …