It’s Not What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It
We have known for a long time that the office is a place for performance. Presenteeism is rife, as it performative busyness. Walking around looking anxious or rushed sends out a message that says “Do not interrupt me, I am doing important and valuable work”.
Back in the day, it used to be rushing around with a handful of papers or an armful or folders, but today you can get away with staring intently at your device, tapping on it furiously or speaking loudly on call to someone (not on loudspeaker, though, because then you look like some wanker off ‘The Apprentice’).
This is particularly true of managers who don’t really do anything. They have the added opportunity of attending and running meetings, a perfect stage for them to show their true worth (and they frequently do…).
These are the people who long to return to the office. The ones who miss the stage, the ones who love to look busy, the ones who want everyone to see how important they are.
Chris Herd put this more pithily in a tweet this week
People whose main job is meetings: we need to get back to the office
People whose main job is getting shit done: we get more done remotely
A survey done for Slack showed that two-thirds of managers wanted to return to the office full-time, whereas as only a third of their employees did. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what this says about who does the work and who just looks like they are doing work.
Who’s That Girl?
A BBC article headed “Women warned home working may harm their careers” began:
‘Women who work mostly from home risk seeing their careers stall now workers are returning to the office in large numbers, according to Bank of England (BoE) economist Catherine Mann.’
The reason given for this was that they would miss out on the ‘… spontaneous office conversations that (are) important for recognition and advancement in many workplaces.’
It is so depressing to see this stuff trotted out again and again.
I’m not going to pretend that face-time with the bosses isn’t important, or that isn’t the way that people used to get on, but it’s hardly a template for the future, is it?
How does the prolongation of this lamentable state of affairs help us improve the situation of women in the workplace, or anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to be tied to an office? How does it help us expand the available workforce? How does it help us ensure the best people get to do their best work?
And it’s a pretty stark admission that people get on because of familiarity rather than effectiveness. As my dear old dad used to say, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. How is that good for organisations, for the economy or for the country? (Look at the current cabinet if you want to know how this works out…)
I can’t help thinking we are looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope.
The problem is not that you have to be in the office to get ‘recognition and advancement’. The problem is that organisations are only giving ‘recognition and advancement’ to people who are in the office.
It’s not that you need face-time with the boss to get on, it’s that the only people getting on are the ones who get face-time with the boss.
Unless there’s some correlation between office attendance and ability that I have yet to discover, that seems unfair, unpalatable and unsustainable.
Handbags And Gladrags
For many, one of the benefits of working from home has been being able to wear what you want and feel comfortable in. The sales of yoga pants boomed, whilst those of formal wear fell through the floor. So much so that M&S has stopped selling it in many outlets.
The concept of ‘business casual’ has shifted from ‘polo shirt, chino and loafers’ to t-shirt, joggers and slippers (for men, at least). Dressing up for important Zoom meetings meant shirt & tie + PJ bottoms, at least initially. Even that has started to go out of the window, as the foolishness of it began to be evident.
But impressions are important, aren’t they?
Well, they are and they have been. But Zoom has given us a new window (literally) to see people through. Instead of seeing the ‘polished professional’, we see more the messy human, the real personality, the whole person.
Whilst we are desperately trying to fill-in information that is missing from a physical experience, we’re actually getting a different set of information, a different perspective.
We naturally judge people by how they appear to us, we instinctively sort them into friend or foe. That’s what business dress is really about, looking friendly and unthreatening by conforming to narrow stereotypes, appearing as ‘friend’ and not as ‘foe’.
But now we have a different way of seeing people. They might not look ‘like us’ anymore, so we look to see if they are ‘like us’.
‘Suited and booted’ has been on the way out for a while. People don’t want you to show up looking smart, they want you to show up. For real.
You Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover
At the heart of these problems is that we not only jump to judgements, our judgements are really poor too. Turns out we are really awful at assessing the abilities of other people. Almost as bad as assessing our own abilities (most people believe their driving skill is ‘above average’).
Which is why we have the lazy heuristics for judging the merits of employees of appearance and presenteeism. We go on our ‘impressions’, which are hopelessly biased and unreliable.
Or we assess people against a set of competencies, which may or may not encompass the unique skills they have. Not that it really matters because we lack enough data or skill to assess them anyway and so reveal far more about our own idiosyncracies than we do about their ability.
What we end up with a bunch of spurious details produced by needless process that we use to obscure the fact that we could have achieved the same level accuracy and utility by reading their tea leaves.
I don’t really have an answer here but I do think it includes transparent and open processes, and to base rewards on the performance of the team rather than the individual. It also means being realistic about how well we can judge others and recognising this assessment theatre for the dangerous and damaging nonsense it is. And ditching it, obviously.
The objective is to have a sense of the individual’s value and their contribution to the organisation. It does not have to be demonstrable and verifiably right, it simply has to be seen as fair by the person being evaluated, and ideally by everyone else. Pursuing some false notion of accuracy simply ensures injustice is felt on a regular and consistent basis.
Although you have to admit, creating a reward system that pisses everyone off is quite an achievement. I’d say that’s above average crapficiation.