A new new work manifesto
Sue Todd and Bruce Daisley shared their view of a new mindset towards working in Campaign magazine today.
I applaud their commitment towards changing the narrative around what working culture looks like, if you haven’t explored any of Bruce’s podcasts — they are well worth listening to, and I’m looking forward to the upcoming Culture2.0 event, but I don’t know if this goes nearly far enough.
Let’s see what they outline:
New Work Manifesto
Modern work is frying our brains. We’re working longer and the way we’re working is taking more of a toll on us. We believe we can make work more enjoyable, more rewarding and less taxing. By committing to this simple manifesto we believe we can improve work and our lives.
Agreed — although I’d say this is extremely white-collar-worker focused in terms of ‘frying brains’.
Presume Permission
The New Work Manifesto is grounded in trust. We’ve all accepted all of the ways that we’ve added to work in the last ten years but most of us have been scared to ask for any flexibility in return. The New Work Manifesto assumes permission for flexibility. Trust is given — and we all work to sustain and earn it with our actions. People find they do their best work in different ways. Leaders’ roles are to support workers achieving results in the way best suited to them.
I’d love to agree with this — but flexibility is absolutely not a given, and many organisations do not see employee/employer relationships as a two way contract. I give you money, you give me outputs. That is the contract, and flexibility is the exception not the rule. I see what Bruce and Sue are aiming for here — a new mindset and state where permission is implicit, but we have two stages to get through first — i. understanding of the potential of flexible and non standard formats of working; ii. explicit permission and encouragement; iii. implicit and presumed permission is the final stage.
We are in the middle of a transition to implement more flexible and agile working practises at Carat, and I’d say we’re only at stage II, and have a long way to go before presumed permission, and even then — permission is not enough, we need to move to support and encouragement. Permission is saying ‘sure, go and try something, but you’re on your own’. Support is ‘sure, how can i help you succeed?’. This is a new and radical departure from decades of working models — and people need to be supported, not just unshackled.
Also, I say encouraged, not enforced. I’ve heard of organisations which enforce weekly ‘fire breaks’ where people are sent to work from home. What if home isn’t the right environment for me? Personally I prefer working in the office if I’m super busy, because I know I will sit up and get stuck in, whereas my couch at home is prone to procrastination and biscuits.
40 Hours is enough
We have this idea that the more we work, the more we accomplish. There’s simply no evidence to support it. The idea that working longer achieves more has been proven to be untrue. Let’s respect 40 hours as a solid week’s work — and let people find the right time to complete it.
Bang on. Sort of. But lets not put a number to it.
“40 hours as a solid week’s work”: I only work Monday-Thursday, does that mean I don’t do a solid week’s work? Does that mean part-time team-members don’t do a solid week’s work? The notion of days, hours, weeks, old units of time need to be softened. There are plenty of people who want to work in bursts, which go longer than ‘a week’ or shorter, or flow between multiple things.
Reclaim your lunch
Stepping away from our desks — and our emails — is one of the most important parts of achieving more at work. Let’s discourage people from eating al desko and urge everyone to use lunch breaks to refresh themselves.
Agreed — but again, not only lunchtimes. The shift needs to be less about ‘have a break at lunch’, and more about ‘work in the mode which is most appropriate and when its most appropriate’. If I’m in flow, and want to work through my lunchtime — that’s flexibility. If I’m not feeling like I’m really cracking a piece of work, and its 3pm — then there should be nothing tethering me to my desk at that time, perhaps I go home early, or go for a long walk, or meditate, or do some reading.
Give us some room
Open plan offices are bad for concentration. While most of us are able to get emails and discussions done in open plan environments, there should be no embarrassment in stepping away from our desks — or arriving later to them — to achieve deeper levels of thinking.
This I’m totally in support of. But again doesn’t go far enough. This isn’t the employees’ problem to solve by getting away from their desk. The organisation needs to create spaces and places for mixed styles of work. Quiet spaces, noisy spaces, cubes, rooms, whatever it might be. It isn’t fair to expect someone to find another type of space when they’re at work — the company needs to provide the right forms of environment for the forms of work.
Digital Sabbath
An escape from digital enslavement. No one should be forced to answer work emails at the weekend. There’s no action as simple as turning off phone notifications that has anywhere near the impact.
No one should be forced to answer emails, EVER. We’ve implemented a brilliant out of hours policy at Carat, but its addressing the symptom not the cause, and blaming the tools (digital) is not the right answer. This is a cultural issue around poor communication skills, and a lack of empathy and respect. If someone is sending you an email on a weekend, one has to look at the reasons behind the email — why is that person working on a weekend, who has caused that, what is the underlying issue? Email is a barometer of the quality of emotional intelligence within your organisation, and it naturally drops if there are better and more appropriate ways of working. So, don’t just switch the phone off, look at the reasons behind why you NEED to switch the phone off.
The Only Way is Ethics
Great working environments start with strong moral codes. It shouldn’t take pay gap revelations and toxic culture stories to draw attention to problems. We should assert our convictions and be held accountable for them. Let’s wear our ethics with pride.
Unfortunately, there is no accountability for behaviours which are not measured. Businesses are measurable in terms of revenues and profit — there are very few measures which make bad (or good) practises accountable. I completely agree with this paragraph, but there needs to be larger conversation about how ‘profit’ is not just purely commercial. Andy Swann of All About People and I were recently talking about how there needs to be a better index of organisations based not only upon profit (the share price) and not based only upon employee engagement(things like Top 100 places to work), but a blended measure which folds in values, ethics, culture, commercials and more.
Got to be me
Work should celebrate our true selves and allow us to be them. There’s simple proven ways to make this happen. We commit to letting this happen.
And this final piece I entirely love — we employ people, not resources, and increasingly, this is not their only gig. Embracing the entire human, and looking at their ‘B-Sides’ or ‘Side Hustles’, their passions and motivations, as a person, not as an employee, helps us to create stronger relationships, bi-directional relationships where we (employers) benefit from more of the individual, and they (employees) benefit from our investment into more of them as people.
I think there are three key things missing from the Manifesto:
Beyond the Individual — there’s no sense of the team or collective or share responsibility of the workplace here. You are not an individual, and you don’t employee individuals. You’re part of a team which is trying to do something together. New Work looks more jigsaw and connected — and should embrace the notions of not being alone. I’d love to see something which is about fostering the connections and benefits of having many diverse and interesting people under your roof.
Challenge — I would love to see something which speaks to speaking up, and challenging, candidly and with care (to steal an idea from Kim Scott’s Radical Candor), the status quo, behaviours, actions, even this manifesto. Good leadership hires people below who are better than above, to constantly challenge up and change and strive forwards. New Work is about not just doing, but building.
Action — these sort of manifestos tend to get plastered up on a meeting room wall, or in an agency reception, and then gather dust, acting somewhere between a motivational poster and a ‘Please keep this meeting room tidy’ notice. They should be living and breathing documents, and demonstrate action, failure, learning, improvements and tool kits for doing better. I’d love to see a smarter way of bringing these things to life, in a more dynamic way than words on a page, and something which is ownable and actionable by everyone in the organisation, not just leadership. How can they constantly evolve as we get things wrong, or as we learn what works better?
Manifestos are statements of intent — but our industry is brilliant at writing words in Campaign magazine, creating posters and straplines, drawing up ‘pillars’, creating bursts of intense activity, and then falling back into habit.
What I’d like to see now, is behaviour, not intent.
Organisations which take this to heart, and see it as an essential part of growing their business, not just a box to be ticked or an opportunity for press coverage — and the sharing of what they did, what they got wrong, and how they’re continuing to improve upon things — for the greater good of our entire industry. After all — we all end up working in each others offices at some point — all it takes is a quick look at LinkedIn to see how low our Kevin Bacon numbers are to each other (but that’s another issue for another blog post), so we all benefit by doing something better here — for our people.
I return to my first point at the top of the article — I applaud heartily Sue and Bruce’s attempt to change the narrative about work, and challenge everyone who read it, to also state now the New Work Manifesto simply does not go far enough, and tell everyone how you’re going one step further. How you’re going to do even better.
Better workplace culture is a non-partisan issue which we all have a responsibility, as an employee, as employers, as clients, as agencies, as trade bodies — and New Work is about building upon the great work of others, rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper each time.
Let’s see it as a competition which benefits everyone.
