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Stephen Barden
Working from home especially the hybrid model has been happily clutched to all our bosoms, it seems, by employees, senior managers, not necessarily middle managers, hr, especially HR coaches, and consultants in all their forms. Plenty of commentary, I think, has gone into the question of whether it affects productivity and even whether people approve of it or not. But how much thought has gone into the impact this has and will continue to have on our relationships, both workplace and personal, and on the state of our organizations and of our communities. While more flexible working is a very good thing, my concern is that many organizations think that it's an add on. They can simply add add a wing onto a creaky old building without looking at what it's doing to the whole house. It reminds me of those country mansions which start off as Tudor, then they add a Georgian portico in all its glory, then a couple of Victorian wings, and finally a Grecian column or two. The whole pile looks, feels and is a mess. The UK's Office of National Statistics has been conducting research on remote and hybrid working since May May 2020. In the three months ending the last week of July 2024, nearly 40% of employees in the survey were working either entirely from home or a mixture of the two, and those are conservative figures. Other research studies put the figure for hybrid working at 44%. The consistent majority of remote and hybrid workers have been those between the ages of 30 and 49, followed by the 50 to 69 year olds. Differences between men and women are negligible, so a really significant number of people in the UK work at least part of the time from home remotely. In the U.S. it's even more dramatic. According to Statista.com in the second half of 2024, 53% of U.S. employees reported working in a hybrid way, although the U.S. bureau of Labor Statistics puts that figure at lower down at closer to 35%. That's relevant, by the way, the discrepancy, because there's still a significant variation in reliable data. Another issue that affects consistency, I feel, could be that there's still a rush to interpret incomplete data depending on one's views and interests. But it appears that so far people are so happy with flexible working that they, according to some of those surveys, would rather resign than lose that flexibility. But let's look at some of the other evidence that's emerging. Earlier this year, Harvard Business Review published an article which was a roundup of 69 other articles that had appeared in management and psychology journals on the impact of the pandemic and of remote and hybrid working on organizations between 2020 and and 2023. One of the findings was that in this new flexible culture, there was heightened anxiety, particularly among conscientious higher performers. This was accompanied by weakening team bonds, and both were apparently eased when people were able to talk to their teammates in person rather than remotely. So I dug a little deeper to see if there was any other evidence that work related anxiety was rising. CommPsych, which bills itself as the world's largest provider of mental health services, issued a report in April 2024 in which it said that anxiety is, and I quote, the number one presenting issue reported by US Workers, topping depression, stress, relationship issues, family issues, addiction and grief in 2017. Work related anxiety, they go on to say, wasn't even in the top five. In May of 2023, the Society for Human Resource Management, based in Virginia in the United States and with a global membership of 325,000, conducted a survey amongst a thousand workers and around 30% of those said their job was making them feel overwhelmed. Around the same number talked to feeling anxious at least once a week. Now, hang on, what's going on here? We love remote working, but we're feeling increasingly anxious. Yes, it could be, as the CEO of Com Psych was reported as saying, down to the conflicts in Gaza and the Ukraine, the pandemic, divisive political rhetoric and a major election year in many countries, including the us. But it doesn't explain this huge surge in workplace anxiety. After all, they weren't saying that they were anxious about personal, social or political issues. They were very clearly saying that they were anxious about and in work. And the SHRM research attributed this to workload as the biggest factor, followed by pay, understaffing and poor leadership or management. Here's another bit of research I'm afraid, this time Deloitte's Gen Z and Millennial survey of May 2024 with a sample of 23,000 participants in 44 countries. Both these age groups saw their work as intrinsic to their identity, second only to family and friends. And over a third of both groups, Gen Z, a little more so, said that their job plays a key role in their stress. And what got them all anxious overwork, not being recognized, not being supported, unfair decision making. Very similar to SHRM's research. And by the way, just to get it in proportion, 48% of Gen Z hybrid workers complained of long working hours. That's 48%, nearly half. And the Deloitte research found that half of gen Zs and 45% of millennials agreed or strongly agreed that they felt burnt out at work. So where have we got to so far? A large percentage of employed people are working all or some of the time from home. The majority of those are so keen on flexible working that we're told they would rather resign or change jobs than go back to the office permanently. However, coinciding with the surge in flexible working, there has been another surge in workplace anxiety and mental health issues. And Millennials and Gen Z seem to be really feeling the pinch more than anyone else. About half of those who during those first lockdowns in 2020 would have been anything between the working ages of 18 and 39 are now feeling burnt out, knackered, and with very little say in their own destiny. Where does that leave us? It initially prompted me to ask the obvious question, which is is there a correlation between that surge in remote and hybrid working and the rise in workplace anxiety? Then I realized that actually asking that question, trying to prove a statistical link, is diverting us from the more valuable human questions that may at least point us to some much needed solutions. First, what happened to us when we were in lockdown? What was going on when we were shut up in our attics and in our heads and only emerged to talk remotely to colleagues and friends? What is happening now to workplace behavior, relationships and people management, both as a result of the pandemic and of increasing flexible working? Okay, what did happen when we were in lockdown, or what may still be happening now? We certainly know that children, parents, particularly those approaching or in adolescence, found their social skills atrophying just as they were exploring their sense of self, their place in the world, that larger world, was closed down to them. And a number of studies show us that the impact on adults was almost as dramatic. Language skills deteriorated and people reported difficulty in actively engaging in and ordering complex discussions. In an article in the New York Times dated August 28 this year, Matthew Scher says, we emerged from quarantine with less ability to make eye contact or conduct ordinary conversation with acquaintances. In other words, we had spent such a long time in our heads and in the heads of social media that that chatter became central instead of peripheral. Interacting on a face to face basis calls for evaluating, adapting to, and interrelating with others at a very immediate level. In an article from the Baylor College of Medicine, Professor Eric Storch of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences says exactly that. And very specifically, face to face interaction is key for developing social skills. It allows someone to practice who they are and get pretty immediate feedback that helps us learn how to effectively navigate the world and interpersonal relationships. The only face to face interaction we had during lockdown, if we were lucky enough, was with the bubble family and partners. What we lost, or at least became very rusty at, was the ability to navigate the world, to interact with people of very different and diverse opinions, thoughts and emotions. And most important, we didn't have to contextualize our interactions in the physical world. We constantly use and adapt our social skills not only to the person, but to the context. We behaved differently in a restaurant, or in the boss's office, or at PTA gatherings or client meetings. But in quarantine, we had only one context. Our homes, our virtual work meetings were not only locked in a false context, but they were also close to monothematic. They were transactional. They were held by managers or team leaders to get something done or to review what was being done. And managers mistook this new remote world as one which they could continually invade at all hours of the day. They didn't see it as invasion, while their subordinates, on the other hand, were in the schizophrenic position of feeling both invaded as well as obliged to respond to those demands. No wonder so many of the least experienced of our people complain that they feel burnt out. It would have been much more difficult for managers to make such demands in the physical world, and their subordinates would have had the experience and or the support of their organizational culture to moderate excessive demands. One of the values of organizational cultures is that they create norms and temper demands outside those norms. That tempering the context is not present when you're alone in your kitchen office. So people emerge from the pandemic not only with their social norms and boundaries being eroded, but less able to empathize, to navigate, to negotiate, to adapt. And of course, many of the millennials and Gen Z who entered the workplace during or just after lockdown had little or no experience of any other workplace norms. And what did they emerge into after the pandemic, when we had apparently gone back to normal workplaces in which transactional virtual meetings were still the dominant force, where the only regular, consistent inquiries are those outcome focused video conferences. Why? Because where you have hybrid organizations, it is statistically likely that at least half of its people will be working from home in any one day. That means that it's possible, even probable, that you may not physically see some of your colleagues or even members of your own team for weeks on end. What's wrong with that? Well, let's go back to the importance of context, this time with specific regard to Good management. When I, as your manager, only see you when we are in transactional mood, then I don't know what you're like when you're dealing with others. I certainly will not know how you deal with your own team. I won't know how you behave to other members of staff. I don't know what you're like as a colleague, as a member of this community that we call our company. So I won't know whether you would be a good successor or whether you need to adjust your behavior until it's too late. We learn as much, if not more, about the people we manage and the people we work with when we have the time and the space to see them interact with others throughout the organization, how they are as part of the community, not as my manager or my direct report, but as members of this community. But you may be thinking, surely we can do that in a hybrid organization. After all, on average, we're still in the office more than out of it. Yes, we can. And I'll deal with that a little later. The issue, however, is not the flexibility. It's when the center of gravity shifts from the office to the home to the home office, as well as from the cultural, the organizational, the holistic to the transactional and the individual. Globally, companies are shrinking their office space and will continue to do so with hybrid working. They don't need to accommodate all their people all the time. So the days when people felt they had literally a place in their organizations are gone in those companies. Yes, a number of corporations try and organize so called anchor days when everyone's expected to be in the office once a quarter or so for training, catch up seminars and social get togethers. But these, even if held consistently, are not the norm. They are attempts, rituals, if you like, at reminding people that in the past, somewhere in the past, they belonged to and with a coherent working community. This isn't an attack on hybrid organizations and flexible working. It has huge advantages, not least the reduction of that hideous waste of time commuting. We also know that hybrid organizations have not lost productivity levels. In fact, many report increases. And that's not surprising, by the way. The dominant focus is on those transactional results focused meetings. But there's no doubt that staff turnover, particularly amongst managers, has increased significantly, as have staff disputes and conflicts. Acas, the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration service in Britain that traditionally did most of its work on disputes between employers and trade unions, so called collective disputes, suddenly found in 2023 that individual disputes, grievance, disciplinary, whistleblowing, and discrimination outnumbered those collective conflicts by 6%. And the switch had happened all in the space of one year. HR consultancies and advisors, as well as dispute resolution specialists urge that organizations be alert to issues and act early to head off conflicts. That's far too late. It's a little futile to spend your time adjusting your steering to every time you find yourself heading for a crash. It might be better finding out what it is about your car or your driving that's pushing you in that direction. Corporate, institutional and organization leaders, and I mean at board levels, need to think deeply and radically about what their organizations need to thrive for the future. And if you start off with what the organization needs, rather than your shareholders and you and management, you will, unless you're hanging on to old interests, start the analytical cascade that examines in ruthless detail all of its essential ingredients, its purpose, its objectives, its channels, its resources, rather, relationships, and so on. Take this opportunity to rebuild your house. Really dig down and align the architecture of your organization to what it is there to do. And only then, once you've modeled your infrastructure, can you build your superstructure and soft furnishings, as it were, your anchor days, your seminars, your catch ups, and so on. This is not a difficult process, but it's a deep one, it's a courageous one, and it needs to be championed at the very highest level with innovative and courageous inputs from all levels. In the meantime, while this is going on, look around and step up your mental health capabilities. Really find out what happened to your people in the pandemic and what's going on with them now. Not only the people who feel anxious and overworked, but the attitudes of managers and how they've changed because they think that people are actually living at work rather than working from home. Unless we know where people are coming from, the state of their sense of self and their assumptions, particularly about communicating and social skills, will have little idea of how to interact with them. Get people together in one room to find out what would make it easier for them in this hybrid environment to enjoy doing a good job for the organization. What is it that's making them anxious or burnt out or in conflict? Organizations, particularly in business, once housed the most innovative of minds. Minds that introduced radically new ways of thinking, new products, new services and new technologies. I hope that those minds, if they're still there, realize that they have to turn that creativity to reshaping the organizations, their relationships and their people to ensure that we all thrive and continue to thrive. But to end on a pessimistic note, I strongly doubt that they will. I do fear that those minds have become fixated on keeping what they think is an even keel. Nothing to rock the boat after all the disruptions of financial crashes, pandemics, unstable governments, Brexit and so on. My advice is the keel needs fixing, and if you don't do something about it, keeping it even will be the least of your problems. I'm Stephen Barden. This has been another episode of the Power of Balance.