Decompressing Work Culture
Start with fewer meetings.
I read a piece by Bruce Daisley of Make Work Better called Fixing culture starts with calendars, not offices.
The title is a sort of straddle. Bruce starts with a discussion about CEOs who are convinced that their disconnected cultures are caused by hybrid work screwing everything up. Rather than examining the root cause of the disconnection they perceive, CEOs simply demand another run at back-in-the-office. Daisley cites data from Nicholas Bloom:
Amazingly 6% of employees have had five or more attempts. In the US alone that's almost 10 million employees. Imagine what it must feel like to experience 5, 6 or even 7 RTO attempts!
Perhaps one of the causes of disconnection is the interminable RTO efforts.
Bruce then offers this: CEOs are focussed on the wrong thing. Rather than the mythical water cooler experience leading to serendipitous brain-storming, CEOs fail to appreciate that workers time is so timesliced into meetings there are basically no productivity boost from RTO. Brian Elliott recently wrote:
Research by Yuye Ding and Mark Ma on S&P 500 firms shows 'Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance' and lead to 'significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values'.
Most executives don’t think the mandates they’ve already imposed have helped. Among executives who have instituted a return-to-office mandate, only 1 in 3 thinks it had “even a slight positive impact on productivity.
Daisley offers up a powerpoint making his argument, and suggesting six ways to slash meeting time.
My jargon leads me to promoting asynch communications, ‘burstiness’ in communications, and setting one or more days a week as ‘no meetings’.
And perhaps the biggest takeaway (from Brian Elliott):
The group most likely to leave in the face of mandated RTO are high-performing employees.
Work Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive posts in your inbox please become a paid subscriber. If you only lurk, I won’t shame you.