Empty Chairs At Empty Tables
This week I went to the excellent Workplace Trends conference, learnt a load and met some great people.
One of the sessions was a panel discussion on office utilisation (no, really, it was much more interesting than it sounds!). The general consensus was that utilisation levels, which were only just over 50% pre-COVID, are going to remain at a much lower level than that henceforth. Demand is also much more uneven and ‘peaky’, with concentration around Tues/Weds/Thurs, peaking on Weds, whilst Friday is practically empty. There was discussion about how you could shut down floors on low demand days and other ways of flexing the space.
Then someone behind me asked the question I had been thinking, “What is wrong with offices only being used at these lower levels of demand? For a long time we’ve accepted they will be empty on 2 days at the weekend anyway, what’s wrong with even lower utilisation?”
This got a series of ‘does not compute’ responses from the panel, as I think they genuinely had not thought about it before. They all assumed that offices should be aiming for greater utilisation (to be fair, that has been the focus for the past several decades).
There is a strong argument around sustainability, heating and lighting large unused spaces is both expensive and wasteful - you might even say criminal, given the climate crisis we are in and the need to hit net-zero as soon as possible. It’s hard to do energy-saving at a granular level right now, so it’s not a short-term solution but it’s not a show-stopper.
Back to the question - what’s wrong with low levels of utilisation? The House of Commons chamber sits unused for a large part of the year. This country is full of churches that are only used once a week. It’s also got lots of farms with combine harvesters that are only used for a few months every year. And sports stadiums that are only open for under half the days of the year.
We can conclude, then, that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with having lightly utilised resources. What makes these justifiable? It’s because they are an essential part of the way that value is created (and I mean value in the wider sense, here - democratic, spiritual, communal as well as financial).
If you look at the question through the lenses of utilisation or productivity, then you perceive there is a problem with offices only being used fully for 3 days a week, for example. However, if you look at it through the lens of value-creation, and if the office fulfils an essential role in that value-creation, then what’s the problem?
The lenses of utilisation and productivity lead us to drives to get people back into the office but these may actually be value-destroying initiatives. We need to switch to looking through the value-creation lens and figure out what’s really needed for that.
I Don’t Believe In Miracles
I wrote a post this week on paradigm shifts and how people, notably leaders of organisations, are unable to see them because they reject anything that does not fit into their paradigm. We can see this with the way that work is changing in front of their eyes but their response is to double down on Return To the Office.
What is fascinating is that people not only reject evidence that doesn’t fit, they make up all sorts of stories to justify their adherence to their worldview, to validate their actions.
In this case, bosses simply don’t believe that people can be as effective if they are not in the office, despite evidence to the contrary. They go further, though, with their justifications and trot out a well-rehearsed set of justifications for getting everyone in the office, namely:
Company culture
Learning
Social relationships
Networking
Mentoring
Innovation
They say all of these will deteriorate if everyone isn’t in the office - but where’s the evidence that this is the case? And that it is, as they assert, inevitable?
This article in HBR dispels a few of those justifications, namely;
Myth #1: In-person learning is more effective
It’s not, in fact “because it rarely affords opportunities for meaningful practice and feedback, in-person learning often is less impactful than well-designed virtual live learning and eLearning”
I’d add that if they were really interested in making learning more effective, they would make follow-up coaching mandatory as this is shown to boost knowledge retention from 20% to 70%.
Myth #2: In-person events help create (or strengthen) culture
They make the point that events are one-off experiences that, whilst they may be pleasant, do not reflect the culture, which is what we experience through our every day interactions.
I’d add that strengthening the culture is not necessarily a positive as many office cultures are negative, characterised by politicking, posturing, disengagement and cynicism.
Myth #3: People need a break from their screens
“…the idea that we can solve for the significant work/life balance and mental health issues employees experience by sending them to a conference center for three days to sit in a ballroom and learn about “executive presence” is frankly absurd.”
The problem is excessive workloads and maladaptive working practices. Address the source, not the symptoms.
Myth #4: Networking and connection can only be done in person
“This myth is the direct result of a particular flavor of risk aversion: If I don’t know how to do something, it’s easier to just say it can’t be done and call it a day.”
Meanwhile, many people are getting on with it, networking and making connections virtually. The authors point to their own experience but we are evidence of it right here - many of you reading this are people I have only met virtually and have developed connections with (and the rest of you are friends I haven’t met yet 🙂).
To pick off the last two:
Mentoring can be done remotely but it requires a more intentional and structured approach, which will probably improve the quality of the mentoring and the relationships as well. Coaching and Therapy are increasingly delivered remotely, so can mentoring.
Innovation. Ah, the sacred ‘water cooler moment’, the magic fairy dust of serendipity that can only be sprinkled over the business by gathering people together. Most organisations cling to these myths because they can’t explain how innovation happens in the first place, so they cannot possibly explain how ‘the office’ plays a role in it. Instead they come up with fairy tales in which the office plays some sacred, mystical role. I mean, when you think of all the things that organisations do that kill creativity and innovation, many of which do rely on the office, then this justification is even more laughable.
Try To See It My Way
This is about taking different perspectives in order to make sense of what’s happening, something my mate Geoff Marlow calls ‘2D-3D mindsets’ and identifies as a key requirement for creating a ‘future-fit’ organisation.
Geoff argues that we each only have partial view but we all have a different partial view, so by gathering multiple views we are also able to build a more complete picture and have better sense-making.
It also reminds me of ‘The Johari Window’, which describes how others can see aspects of ourself that we cannot.
This is the source of Donald Rumsfeld’s famously gnomic comment
“There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don't know.”
There will always be unknown unknowns but we can gain a huge amount from uncovering perspectives beyond our view and looking at the paradigms that others hold.
This begins, however, with the self-awareness of the limitations of our own thinking and the recognition that other perspectives exist and are equally valid. Unfortunately, it seems, many ‘leaders’ are lacking in this area.
Danger Zone
I’m sorry to keep mentioning it but I have been a little bit obsessed this past week with the car crash that is UK politics at the moment and the move to what I hope is the endgame of the Conservative party’s psychodrama. Despite my best intentions to concentrate elsewhere, it is just a compelling spectacle. It is objectively hilarious and farcical, unless you happen to live here, of course, in which case it’s just painful.
Liz Truss has had the shortest ever premiership in UK history by some way, and that included two weeks of national mourning. I’m sure I could write lots of stuff about ‘leadership lessons’ we can learn from this, and I’m sure many others will (your LinkedIN feed may already be stuffed with them), but I don’t think it really translates across to organisational life.
What we have seen is a denial of reality and an obdurate clinging to belief in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Whilst that is certainly found in organisations, as I have explained, it is never to this degree. Reality would intrude far, far sooner.
The fateful ‘mini-budget’ was the final step in bringing a flawed belief system into reality and it fell apart almost immediately. The verdict of the financial markets, stunningly swift and brutal, exposed it as the fantasy many of us had always held it to be. Even in the most dysfunctional organisation, a fantasy like this would have got shot down long before getting that far.
However, that doesn’t mean clinging to outdated paradigms and doubling down on self-justifying beliefs isn’t dangerous. It’s just as easy to get rid of a CEO as a PM, after all, maybe easier. And a lot less risky
.