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Stephen Barton
First of all, thank you very much for your feedback to our previous episode on Flexible and Hybrid working. Your warmth, your thoughts and questions make all the difference from this being a series of me talking about what I think is important to one where hopefully we both do. We also seem to have done some serious climbing up the management podcast charts in both the US as well as the UK. We got to number 37 in the management charts in both countries, so thank you very much for that too. Last time I talked about some of the major issues that have emerged with hybrid and remote working and about what we are in danger of losing or could be in danger of losing, cohesive cultures, strong relationships, and even the home as the safe space. What I strongly recommended was that management didn't just knee jerk and go for one or the other back to the office or totally remote or even a sort of arbitrary percentage, but actually use the opportunity to think deeply about what their organizations and I stressed organizations as a whole needed to thrive. Really dig down, I said, and align the architecture of your organizations with what it is there to do. So some really serious critical thinking about the ideal structures, the methods, the relationships and behaviors that the organizations needed. And also look at what people had gone through during the pandemic, what we learned from there. So not just getting the ducks in a row, but the whole coop as it were. But I said rather gloomily that I didn't think management would do anything like that because they'd become fixated on getting back to normal after all the disruption. Keeping the keel even. Even if the keel may be cracked. Well, as you may have read, a real life case study fell into my lap a few days after we published that last episode, which I'd like to use to explore these themes a little more, and particularly around what I meant by doing what the organization needs. On September 5, the consultancy firm PwC UK told its 26,000 employees that from January 2025, partners and staff would be required to spend at least three days a week or or 60% of their time in the office or at client sites. And what's more, they would all be monitored to make sure that they were obeying the new instruction. Now, PwC may well have conducted a really thoroughgoing process analyzing exactly what their business needed before making this change. I've no idea actually, but there are two things that caught my attention almost immediately. The first were the words this feels right, UK managing partner Laura Hinton said in the PwC press release. This feels right for our business and right for our people. Given our focus on client service, coaching and learning and development feels right. So hopefully there would have been some evidential data about whether it would be good for the business or not. Hopefully there was consultation. The change can't have been because there's been a drop in profits because PwC UK's consolidated group revenue, announced in August 2023 rose 16% year on year to 5.8 billion increases across all business lines. So unless something has really gone wrong in this fiscal year, which I certainly can't find, this feeling right can't have been prompted by a loss of business, by clients voting with their feet. It may have been, but all I've got to go on, and more important, what clients and staff have to go on is a feeling. The other thing that gave me pause for thought was the fact that adherence to this new policy would be monitored, policed, as one new source unkindly put it. And that move is a very clear signal, intended or not, to both staff and partners, we don't trust you. We don't trust you to do what you've been told. I was reminded of an article in 2021 in a LinkedIn talent blog extolling PwC successful culture of work flexibility. One of the tips from PwC's former people experience leader in the US and Donovan to build a culture of work flexibility was, and I quote, ensure trust is baked in, unquote. In other words, trust your people to do the job. Now let me just remind you and myself that I'm not against putting more emphasis on working in office face to face if it is good for the organization. In fact, I'm not against any system as long as it is good for the organization. And for me, good for the organization means ensure that it's good for a reasonable balance of all its stakeholders. But in order to do that, you really need to dig down and discover what is good, what is good for the business, the client, the staff, the owners, the market, think it through and then manage it through. PwC UK may well have done all that, but all I can see as a business owner and therefore a potential client is feeling and no trust or at least a degree of mistrust. And the two things that PwC say on their site that they do is provide trust solutions and consulting solutions. Managing change without solid evidence and reasoning or even consultation in an organization means that you end up with a very narrow range of options of how to ensure that the change is actually applied. You can either appeal to popular sentiment or you can enforce and monitor that it's happening. Popular Sentiment can work when you're offering something that your people really want. As in, guys, we know this is what you want, so we're giving it to you, aren't we? Nice. And it works best, of course, when you've consulted enough to know what your people actually do want. But as we know, popular things are not always good for the organization, and they're rarely popular when you're taking something away. You can also, as I said, manage by enforcement and monitoring if the prevailing corporate or social culture supports it. A fairly extreme example would be Henry Ford's tightly controlled production lines. Enforcement of workplace attendance can also work when the most important aspect of the job is to be on the premises, where people are primarily paid for their actual presence by the shift or the hour. Hence clocking in and clocking out. But when you're working in a knowledge industry and you've already rolled out a system based on trust, albeit because the pandemic forced you to, you have to manage differently. And by the way, I've now moved beyond the PwC case study because they're not the only organization that is trying to get their employees back to the office by hook or by crook. For whatever reason, when you monitor people's presence, you're saying very clearly to them, we don't entirely trust you to deliver, so we want to see you delivering. And of course, once you send that message, you get into the quagmire that starts with the question why? Why do you mistrust them? After all, business continued to grow, clients aren't walking away. Your people seem to have kept up their part of the bargain. They've worked in a hybrid way and they, on the face of it, appear to have kept up productivity. My good friend chatgpt tells me that all the big consultancy companies have experienced strong growth in 20, 23, 24. By telling your people that you don't trust them, even though that may not be your intention, you're also stripping them of at least a layer of ownership, responsibility and loyalty. Is that important? I think it is in the knowledge industries. You're asking me to use my knowledge, my intellect, my relationships and my skills, but you're saying you only trust me to do so when you can see me. It doesn't make sense. So you literally only trust me as far as you can see me, as the cliche goes. Okay, then, I don't trust you either. There's another message you may be sending as a manager that you don't trust yourself to manage people unless you control their space in some way. You don't trust yourself to manage your people unless they're on the production line. And yes, I am implying that we're still running organizations, including those in the knowledge sector, as if they were direct evolutions of the production line. Now, here's the irony. You can bypass this entire trust debate by going through the review I talked about by looking at what is best for the organization as a whole, by cleverly constructing working groups to look at different aspects of your organization, its purpose and its business, by including key players, by aligning everything with what is good for the organization as a whole, what you're there to do, by doing all that you can to strengthen, not weaken, trust. I keep on saying that this sort of review is not difficult. It isn't. It's rigorous, it's comprehensive, but it's not difficult. Difficult is when you meet resistance and hostility. And there's resistance and hostility when those affected have no say in change. Or worse, when they have no say and they see the flaws in the plan but could do nothing constructive about it. In my experience, most people welcome taking part in reshaping their organizations, in reshaping their working lives. They may moan and groan a bit, but once you start, it turns into an extraordinary energetic and creative process. And the only people who have I found get in the way of it are actually top management who think it's time to get back to work when actually they've been doing it all the time. Come on, you're actually asking your people to help shape the way they're going to work for the next decade or so. All in the best interests of the entire business, including themselves. What's not to like? And remember, the recommendation is not necessarily to change the business. It's to review the way you run it. It's to review the way you structure and operate it. Ah, here you say this will take time and money and attention. This could all be better used to increasing our business. Now, for goodness sake, man, has nobody told you that we've been through hell and we need to get back to normal? Let's take those arguments one by one time. Developing the design, the process, and the outcome of change, yes, takes time. But it takes a lot less time, money and disruption than you'll waste if you jump in boots and all without thinking, without reviewing money. Well, my first response is, I hope so. I hope it costs money. If it's worth doing, it's worth spending on. However, clearly a program that looks to refocus the business for the long term would cost much less than some of your current annual programs that do little more than spin the wheel a little faster. And here's the final piece. Normal. There is no normal. Normal, as the German automobile industry, amongst many others, are finding out, is another word for hanging on to what worked in the past. In the last 15 years we've had our personal lives, our social norms, our commercial models ruptured by a massive financial crisis, a global pandemic, the shifting of global political axes and technological and AI advancements, all of which have shifted not only the attitudes and expectations of individuals, but the requirements, tools and organization of our businesses. And something I haven't touched on at all here of our institutions to which we look for support. So here's where I would like to end this. The whole flexible working debate is such a good opportunity to review the most effective ways of working, particularly in the knowledge industries. And the debate shouldn't be just about hybrid or in office or flexible working or whatever. It is the ideal time to think about and design how our organizations and the people in them can operate most effectively and fruitfully in the market in the context in which we now find ourselves, not the one that we had 15 years ago or even five years ago, the one in which we find ourselves now. And fiddling with flexible working or faddling with feelings is really not going to help. I'm Stephen Barton. This has been another episode of the Power of Balance.