Get Back
Well, I am just back from my holidays… probably be quite chilled this week.
So let’s start with the news that yet another big tech company has announced it is going to enforce Return to Office policies more forcefully - “Amazon CEO tells staff ‘it’s probably not going to work out’ unless they visit office three days a week” (The Guardian).
30,000 Amazon employees signed a petition against the return to office mandate back in May but CEO Andy Jassy is giving them the old tin ear and insisting that staff return to the office three days a week because ‘the leadership team had decided that it was better for Amazon’s culture, and easier to learn from each other and collaborate more effectively, when they were in the office together.’
Nothing like a full and open consultation, and that’s nothing like a full and open consultation. That’s an order from above justified with the usual excuses for which there is no real evidence. It’s just leadership team ‘feels’, so that’s alright then.
I wonder what happened to ‘Data trumps Opinions’? Oh no, that was Google. Well, what’s their position? ‘Google now requires most employees to come in at least three days a week, with an executive at the online search firm stating that “there’s just no substitute for coming together in person”.
Oh.
So the rest of the Tech? Meta, Twitter, Disney and *checks notes* Zoom (?? WTF??) are all dragging people back into the office because, er, culture, collaboration, something, something, innovation.
The message seems to be ‘we just laid off a ton of people and we’re going to lay off some more, so do as you’re told or you’ll be out’. It’s just corporate muscle flexing, a naked application of power.
I can’t help thinking these companies are hastening their eventual demise. For so long they’ve been looked up to for their work practices (sometimes wrongly, in my view), their innovation and their adaptability and yet when the opportunity presents itself to make a step-change in those by adopting new ways of working, they are firmly sticking to the past. More than that, they are doubling down on it.
I’m not saying they are going to disappear, they have huge market presence and financial power and will carry on despite their missteps - but they are not immortal. They were once the vanguard of business, now they are laggards. One day (sooner than they think) they will be the dinosaurs and we all know what happened to them.
Summertime Blues
When I was in corporate, holidays went like this.
“Oh God, I need a holiday”
Do two weeks work in the week before going on holiday, setting up all the actions that need to be done and checking in with people to make sure they will get done and all projects will be kept on track.
Spend first week of holiday thinking about work and trying to relax.
By start of second week, work has receded to the background and actually start to relax and enjoy my holiday.
Two days before coming home, start thinking about work. Tension and stress start to rise.
Get back, spend first day and a half going through emails. Find out that none of the actions have been carried out by any of the people who promised they would do them.
Do two week work in one week to get everything back on track.
Add names of those who have let me down or just blatantly lied to ‘List of Bastards’
“Oh God, I NEED a holiday”
Of course, today you have your phone, so you can keep on top your emails and other messages and hit the ground running when you get back. And make sure things get done. And never stop thinking about work. And never get to relax, so never truly enjoy your holiday.
So that’s much better. Progress, right?
Cake By The Ocean
Getting some petrol on the way home, I perused the front pages of the newspapers displayed outside in that stand with the flappy bits of plastic that always slip out of your fingers and flop back down, trapping the paper and making you drop it.
ANYWAYS … this Daily Fail headline screamed at me (their headlines always scream at you. Their business model is to make you angry, so they always scream…)
Is it true? Well, the number of requests granted for people to work from overseas locations has increased.
There are many perfectly good reasons why this might be the case - not least of which might be staff retention. There are many perfectly good locations that these people might be working from. How many of those locations could be described as ‘at the beach’, I don’t know. Nor does the Daily Fail.
Of course, the Fail are going to characterise that as ‘working from the beach’ because it’s inflammatory. They put it in quotation marks but it’s not attributed to anyone, so it’s just how they choose to express it. They later say ‘Figures from accountancy firm RSM UK in July showed that 33 per cent of businesses are allowing employees to work remotely outside the UK. The phenomenon has been branded 'working from the beach’.’
Really? That’s news to me. I thought it was called ‘working from anywhere’, or ‘remote working’, or ‘hybrid working’, or ‘flexible working’, or literally anything other than ‘working from the beach’.
We get the grist of the matter later on. ‘As many workers return to their jobs today after the summer holidays, the figures will infuriate council taxpayers who do not have the luxury of working remotely.’ Ah yes, it’s another way to stoke up some grievance and sow division. Workplace change co-opted to the culture wars, along with the usual parade of right-wing rent-a-gobs to add their rants.
It turns out requests have ‘soared’ to more than 700 last year. Out of a total workforce of 1.4 billion. This is why we have a productivity problem. Politicians worrying about things that are utterly irrelevant rather than running the country.
Even more amazingly, one council explains the requests include those from staff who want to take their devices abroad in case of an emergency. Personally, I wouldn’t allow that anyway but, notwithstanding, staff are getting pilloried for going above and beyond here.
I said some time ago that the argument over ‘remote working’ (or ‘working from the beach’ as it is referred to never) is over. The direction of travel is set, it’s just a question of how quickly and how far. But these bits of nonsense will continue because they’re not really about that argument, they’re about populism and fake outrage and culture wars.
(Please note: Wikipedia no longer considers The Daily Mail a journal of record. Don’t go to their website for news. The sidebar of shame is a different matter though…)
Starman
I’ve just been reading ‘Orbiting the Giant Hairball - A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace’ by Gordon McKensie. It was recommended to me years ago but something told me now was the time to read it.
McKensie was a creative at Hallmark, the greetings card company, and his premise is this: Corporations are Giant Hairball and if you get entangled with them, you will lose your creative energy and succumb to compliant mediocrity. However, it is possible to orbit the Hairball, so maintain your creative freedom whilst still being part of the corporate enterprise.
He describes it like this:
‘Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond “accepted models, patterns or standards”- all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.’
It’s an entertaining and creative take, as you’d expect from someone like him, but it was written in 1996 in a much more benign environment. Whilst I endorse his approach, the challenge today is not just to retain creative freedom (or individuality of thought, to put it more generally) but to protect yourself from the damage that is wrought if you do get entangled in the Giant Hairball.
Today’s corporate environment is a dangerous place. Entanglement in the Hairball won’t just make you a bit dull, it can do you real psychological and physical damage. You need to be aware of the dangers, alert for the signs and prepared to protect yourself (and others).
That’s why I am developing the Corporate Survival Guide, so people are warned of and can protect themselves against the real and present dangers they can quickly find themselves in. My focus for this month is to flesh it out and figure out how best to present it and engage you.
If you’re interested and would like to be kept up to date on progress, get involved in co-creating it and have first chance at getting the output, then register your interest via this form.
McKensie points the need for personal courage to pursue his strategy and says it’s not for everybody. Well, maybe it wasn’t back then but today the dangers getting sucked into the Hairball are so great today that I think it’s something everyone has to think about.
I wish I had, back in the day. Maybe I should have read the book when it came out…
Rewind
Hmmm. Not so chilled. Perhaps I need another holiday …
"Working From The Beach:" Human nature is pretty much the same everywhere, so my 11 years with the Government of Ontario, Canada, is informative on the connection between (A) The Daily Mail headline, and (B) why government is so bad so much of the time.
I am a government cheerleader, not one of those naysayers who believe less government is always better. Governments are the foundation of all society. Without government, there is no society. That's the bias I am writing from. And my government service ended 7 years ago, so I'm not writing this to defend myself or my job.
Early in my 11 years with the Ontario government I read a news article about a scandalous conference the government had held for judges and crown attorneys. The article's "work from the beach" headline was that the conference was "at a RESORT with a GOLF COURSE." The horror! I am a buyer and my portfolio at a previous private sector employer was conference services so I read the article with professional interest.
There was no scandal. In fact, there was no news at all. A perfectly reasonable conference at a perfectly reasonable price. And no evidence that anyone played golf.
But this is how it works between the public (that's US folks, YOU AND ME), the media and the government. Some "journalist" has a slow day and turns a handful of mundane government invoices into a story using creative writing.
And here's the important part, which I saw and suffered through for 11 years: a government manager can be perfect, they can have a perfect staff, they can run a perfectly error-free operation (which, let's face it, is impossible) and this perfect manager STILL has no security because the media will enrage the voters over nothing at all, and our pencil-neck milquetoast elected representatives will throw that government manager under the bus in a SECOND rather than stand up to the media and the electorate and say they've got it wrong and they need to shut up.
The result? When even being perfect is not enough, taking the relatively huge risks of trying something new, of accepting change, of hiring innovative people with initiative, of looking for ideas to make things better -- all are impossible. Keep it the same. Stomp out initiative. Slam the door on new ideas. The fear that "something" might happen that ran through the workplace was subtle, but all pervasive and it affected everything.
That's why government stinks and can't seem to get better. It's because we, the people, lap up those stories about non-existent scandals and reward the media for them. So the next time the government treats you like crap, before condemning them, first turn around and ask what you've done to make them too afraid of you to try being any different.