Could new ways of working stifle change, learning and growth?

Sally McNamara, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Daniel Bluzer-Fry, Courtney Guilliart and Helen Babb Delia on new ways of working and how they may impact our capacity for change, learning and growth.

There's a lot of talk right now about how to make remote or hybrid work sustainable. And, if we can do that, how to avoid the potential downsides many of us have experienced, particularly in terms of erosion of culture and loss of connection and belonging.

A paradox is that for some people who've previously been excluded from the workforce flexible working is an equity issue rather than a matter of convenience or preference. It's given people who cannot physically attend the office the chance to participate more fully in the workforce and it has also allowed many others to strike a better balance between caring responsibilities and work.

The challenge is to make the most of the greater inclusion, freedom and autonomy that flexible working can bring while countering the potential downsides, such as loneliness and isolation. As inconvenient and as inefficient as it may be, humans want to be human, and it's often hard to feel a sense of genuine connection through a screen for eight or more hours a day. For those who are able to get to the office, it may feel highly inefficient to commute after more than two years of remote working.

It's full of contradictions.

For example, we're living in a time of more solo living (1 in 4 Australian households are single-person) and a time of a dwindling of formerly entrenched community rituals, such as Sunday church attendance or community sports. And the impacts are considerable: as one UK study found, the health impacts of chronic social isolation have the same implications for heart disease and stroke as smoking 15 cigarettes a day

There's also growing evidence to suggest that having a friend at work is a top predictor of engagement and retention. When I reflect on the moments that have mattered to me at work, they have, without exception, all been rooted in gathering with other people to celebrate, commiserate or collaborate. Developing a deeper friendship purely online is not something I've managed to crack, no matter how many forced festive online social events I go along to. Flattened into 2D, we lose all the nuances of body language and the transfer of energy that naturally flows when we are in the same room. And it's also much more tempting to slip into curt emoticon-laden communication on Slack, email or Zoom — especially when there's no danger of having to come face-to-face with the recipient in a shared kitchen at lunchtime.

Of the many contradictions, conundrums and questions, one that we are asking at RMIT FORWARD is could new ways of working, if poorly implemented, stifle future change, learning and growth? And if so, can we be more intentional — think harder, try harder and change more responsively to avoid the downsides.

Here are a few of the issues we've been thinking about — and what we’ve been learning by talking to those who are dealing with them.

Comfort Bubbles Being at home is naturally more comfortable than being in the office for many people — no loud colleagues, no lingering sandwich crumbs and take-out odours, no sharing of resources and greater control over interruptions. Whilst these conditions may bring the benefits of focus and productivity, we also run the risk of becoming even more set in our ways. Newly inflexible and intolerable to discomfort, we may find ourselves unable to change, learn and grow.

As Glenn Gore (CEO at Affinidi) put it to me recently:

“When you put yourself in an environment that you can’t control and is constantly changing and evolving around — you have to change and evolve yourself and that creates a natural resilience — when you’re at home all the time, it can really become a comfort bubble where you become less open.”

Shrinking Networks Less time gathering in person has become normalised, and we may not yet have fully realised the impact of the shrinking of our networks. In one of the largest studies of burnout, Gallup found the biggest source was ‘unfair treatment at work’, followed by an unmanageable workload, unclear communication from managers, lack of managerial support and unreasonable time pressures. All of these factors tend to have one thing in common — your boss. Without others around to counteract difficult interactions, a poor relationship with your boss could lead to damaging cycles of rumination and paranoia, leaving little mental or emotional energy for change, learning and growth.

Jin Tan (People Enabler at Affinidi) says:

“The problem is the success of flexible working is dependent on the type of leader you happen to report to— and leader expectations can be even more unclear and ambiguous when working remotely — it can be harder for employees to know where they stand or what the expectations are.”

Whilst the work-from-anywhere movement may benefit veteran employees in defined roles and who have trusted colleagues, others, such as younger employees and new joiners, may share those benefits. Unless organisations intentionally yinvest in enabling culture, connection and belonging from a distance for employees who don't already have established networks, some colleagues may become 'out of sight, out of mind' — with a huge bottom-line impact.

Depleted Resilience Far from the long-held management paranoia that being offsite and out of sight would mean less work getting done, the opposite seems to be the case: we are much more likely to overwork and, thanks to the addictive dopamine hit of technology, we're also increasingly struggling to switch off. Many organisations and workers reported productivity increases through the initial pandemic crisis in 2020. This makes neurological sense — we are hardwired to fire up and survive a crisis. The inevitable come down from crisis adrenaline started in 2021 and continues well into 2022.

One senior leader in a law firm shared the following reflection:

“When Covid hit, there seemed to be permission to experiment in the way we work and many people really took to that. However, long and repeated lockdowns have seen resilience depleted and that is not fully acknowledged. There’s now an emotional lag — and perhaps a sense you can’t complain or grieve for what’s changed or been lost because the lockdowns are over. The problem is the effects of the pandemic are still very real and will be with us for a long time.”

Walking to and from meetings and making tea in the kitchen may have seemed unproductive, but we need regular breaks to enable our attention and focus. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitan emphasises how attention switching and decision-making deplete us — with the kicker being that small decisions compete with important decisions for mental energy. With greater freedom and autonomy in ways of working, the number of 'small' decisions increases, and if we're not intentional, we can let this can deplete our resilience over time, reducing our capacity for change, learning and growth.

Comparison Traps The detrimental effect of comparing ourselves to the filtered perfection of instagram influencers is well known, with studies linking this to depression, low self-esteem and social anxiety. Is this also true of video conferences, where everyone else appears to be living their best life in front of their meticulously organised bookshelves?

When we are gathered together in one space, we are constantly processing non-verbal cues. We read the room naturally, picking up signs that a colleague might be struggling, for example. In online meetings, we're focused much more on what's being said, rather than how it's being said and we scramble to make up for the lack of non-verbal cues. And usually, the responsibility falls to the individual to self-regulate: organisations increasingly offer self-serve access to wellness or support programs rather than encouraging a collective norm to "struggle well" together through inevitable adversity. There is also evidence that online communication impacts different groups of people in different ways — research from Stanford suggests that virtual meetings cause women more fatigue than men.

When we feel we're the only person struggling in a team or on a project, it can be stressful and anxiety-provoking. It can take a huge toll on our well-being — along with our ability to change, learn and grow.

Tacit Learning Loss Explicit knowledge (policies, procedures, playbooks, technology systems) is easily documented and communicated to a new employee. But tacit knowledge (the unwritten rules of the organisation or team) can't be codified as simply because it's often subjective and quickly evolves. Norms, behaviours, mindsets and values are being lived out in person — often in different ways on different days. For example, one organisation I worked at had an official "no-bonus" stance for support staff, but it actually was available — you just had to know who to go to and how to go about it. And that information was communicated in person. The same goes for learning durable skills — would you rather have a static checklist on how to approach a difficult conversation, or absorb this subtle art through listening to colleagues around you navigate this in a range of different ways?

New ways of working hold a lot of promise for those people who are able to access them.

But it's like any significant change — the devil is in the implementation detail. The challenge is to ensure that one big change — new ways of working — doesn't lead to losing our ability to change, learn and grow.

This will take intentionality on many fronts — getting out of our comfort zone, building our networks in new ways and for new purposes, shoring up our resilience, creating space to struggle well together and proactively seeking out tacit learning opportunities — to name just a few.

FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.

Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria's economic renewal.

We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT's College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.

We leverage RMIT's multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.

Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au.