Trouble in Paradise: Let’s Get Them Back to The Office!
And why a breakdown in trust is the real problem
The BBC have announced the death of office culture as we know it. Daily headlines are ringing the bell for ‘back to the office’, contrary to the progress we have made towards a more flexible world of work in recent years.
But why are so many leaders leaping from the very real problems of culture in the workplace to the assumption of ‘back to the office’ being the solution? Let’s look at a few of the stats that are driving the news cycle:
87% of companies now work with a hybrid programme (JLL) and it's the most common work style globally
98% of employers want their employees back into the office and 37% are mandating days (workplaceinsight.net), whilst others are offering social, wellness and financial benefits for doing so
The big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Meta have used scare tactics as incentives: aligning lack of office presence to less promotional opportunities
Some of the stories around the ‘back to the office’ push are farcical. Dell has recently announced a colour coded tracking system related to an attendance scorecard. Manchester United co-owner Jim Radcliffe has cited a ‘drop in emails’ for being the reason that he is forcing people back to the office (surely this is a good thing?).
There’s a bigger shift at play here.
Hybrid working has become the fall guy because it’s tangible, visible, and something that we can fixate on in times of uncertainty (the world of work is currently being branded with a military term ‘VUCA’ - ‘volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous - Making Work Human, Derek Irvine and Eric Moseley).
But let’s start with what the real problem is. If it’s not just about hybrid working, what is going wrong?
We believe there are three elements to consider:
Let’s take each in turn:
Leaders are zero-ing in on control in a time where uncertainty is everywhere.
They’ve established their careers in a time of workplace socialising, late night pitching, and ‘water cooler’ moments. It feels familiar, comforting even, to see bums on seats. It’s based on a perception that “everyone used to work hard, and now they don’t”. And it’s reflected in the conversations we’re hearing about the next generation and their attitude to work. Gen Z admires people for whom work-balance is their top trait (Deloitte, Feb 2024) and as a result are seen as unambitious and lazy by the old guard, despite them being twice as likely to want to become CEO as Gen X.
In ‘Humanocracy: Creating Organisations as Amazing as the People Inside Them’, Garel Hemel and Michele Zinini talk about bureaucracy being the issue. When companies face uncertainty, they want to add something, and that thing is usually a policy, or an initiative. Let’s restructure. Let’s create a mental health policy. Let’s provide a wellness scheme, a social gathering.
The result?
For the majority of the organisations they studied, the creativity of the organisation wasn’t matched to the creativity of the sum of the people in them, sometimes not even to the sum of one person. We are actively limiting the creativity and capability of our teams, by not trusting them enough.
There’s so much good intention by companies. But the ‘add-on’ approach to solving issues of company culture, quite simply isn’t working, and employees are looking for more:
A study by Oxford University’s William Fleming examined the impact of a wide range of workplace wellbeing interventions (stress management, wellbeing apps, mindfulness classes) and found that virtually NONE of them worked. This study was of significant scale: 46,000 workers across 230 organisations of all sizes. Numerous other large scale global studies mirror these findings, and yet the projected investment in wellness is £94.6bn by 2025 (The Guardian)
These solutions add another stress to individuals, rather than looking at the world of work structurally, and working with teams to solve the issues they are facing. We’ve had numerous conversations recently with organisations that believe the PTSD associated with a post-Covid working world is only now coming into full effect, and they have no idea how to solve it.
“We have new expectations about our working lives, our working hours, not just the location, but the style of working. The introverts saying ‘I loved it when I didn’t have to see anyone’. I think those codes haven’t adapted. So we went from pandemic, to a weird space, into this forced behaviour. What we haven’t done is say ‘how do we rewrite completely the rules of workplace culture?”
- Nishma Patel Robb, President WACL and founder The Glittersphere
Interestingly, the tried and tested ‘lets create a great culture’ methods of socialising and organised fun aren’t working either. People are placing boundaries around their work lives and private lives. Staying late at the office for drinks isn’t necessarily seen as part of the work life they want to buy into, or focused on the right things to strengthen in their culture.
Lots of new models are emerging to challenge the age-old 9-to-5 in the hope of addressing these cultural challenges. But despite being backed by evidence they haven’t changed the world quite yet.
One of the most renowned groups in this space are Hoxby, a global agency that brings together individuals working in their own workstyle. We interviewed the co-founders, Lizzie Penny and Alex Hirst, who have also written the best-selling book, ‘WorkStyle: A Revolution for Wellbeing, Productivity and Society’. They’ve been learning live with their own agency since 2010, and bringing these learnings to other organisations,
“What if we gave everybody in our business the freedom to decide their own WorkStyle? What would a business look like where that’s the case, where we’re not office bound and we’re not bound by time?” - Lizzie Penny & Alex Hirst, Hoxby
Despite their extensive data, live case studies, and in-depth consultation they are facing growing challenges in convincing big business to make a change. They are at pains to say that WorkStyle is not the same as flexible working (which they do not believe has worked in the 70 years it has been in existence).
“I think for us, firstly, it's flexing around an outdated system. Secondly, it creates this in-group, out-group dynamic, because the fact is the prevailing way of working is still nine to five, five days a week. And if you work differently, you're perceived as having special benefits or being treated as special in some way, which puts you into this out group which creates negativity.”
Humanocracy takes a different approach to providing freedom to work in your own way, using the concept of aggressive decentralisation to harness the full capabilities of internal teams. Bringing decision making to the lowest level, creating a market economy, and infusing reinvention of how things are done throughout a business, rather than creating innovation labs and offshoots to create these new working behaviours. (They cite that there are 580 of these labs around the world, and very few are a success, because there hasn’t been a wider cultural shift across the business).
‘Chrono working’ recommends working in line with our body clocks and our natural peaks and dips of energy. Adobe’s ‘Future of Time’ report backs this thinking and HR leaders are starting to take note, but it’s very much at the fringes.
The common thread with all of these models, is that despite the data, despite the case studies, the call back to the familiar, the ‘tried and tested’ working cultures of old is strong, and it’s everywhere. As Alex, from Hoxby, says when asked why leaders aren’t making changes, “It’s hard, isn’t it?”
So, how do we rectify this ‘Trouble in Paradise’?
We believe that Community, not control, is the answer.
But what makes a thriving community?
Models of community are rife, as marketers have reached the realisation that communities are crucial in building brands, and they have sought to put guardrails around how to optimise them.
Much of the thinking is sound, but isn’t necessarily being applied to how you build an internal self-sustaining, autonomous community.
In ‘Belong: Find your People, create community, and live a more connected life’ - Radhal Agrawal refers to community being at the heart of every layer of our hierarchy of needs, whether they are basic human needs, physical and mental wellbeing, purpose, or joy. She says that we are at the top of the food chain precisely because we are the best at collaborating, whether it’s through storytelling, skill sharing or community building. Radhal knows a thing or two about community, having founded numerous start-ups with community at the core (Thinx, Daybreaker). She uses the CRAWL acronym for her approach to building successful communities:
C: Core values & Constraints (your community needs guard rails so that people understand if they want to be part of it) and who your Core Community members are that will drive it forward
R: Rituals and traditions. All communities need this for meaningful connection
A: Aesthetics. How your community looks and feels matters. We connect with all of our senses.
W: Why do you care and why should this community exist.
L: Language. How do you present yourself internally and externally, and what common language binds you together.
Charles Vogl outlines a similar take in his ‘The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging”, designed to help leaders create stronger, more engaged communities by fostering a sense of belonging in their teams:
Boundary: who is in the community and who is not, and how do they feel part of something special and distinct from the public
Initiation: the rites to move from being outsider to insider
Rituals: repeated activities that reinforce the community’s values & identity
Temple: a sacred space (virtual / physical) that holds the community together
Stories: powerful tools for communicating the community’s values
Symbols: shorthand for the community’s beliefs and values
Inner rings: smaller, more exclusive circles within the community that others aspire to join
Wherever we looked we found common elements, but our biggest finding is that Community Building is messy. It’s never ending. You have to be dedicated to it as an organisation, because there is no silver bullet.
But how do we make the first steps? To rebuild this broken trust, we believe there are 3 elements you need to develop with your community (not for them):
Purpose
Purpose may be the most regularly mis-used business term of the last few years, but it’s genuinely crucial in connecting a community. Yet it’s often overlooked in the future planning of organisational dynamics, and is constantly under pressure from the rigours of business as usual.
There are huge benefits to be gained for pretty much any organisation from putting time and effort in making its overarching company purpose concrete…but that’s not what we are referring to here. We believe you need to identify WHY your community should converge and collaborate: what is the shared desired outcome? It might be driven by a strong shared ethic; it might be the sheer craft and practice of what you are doing; it might be a shared material outcome; it might just be having fun and enjoying working life together. But we can’t assume that it just exists because a group of people is sharing a payroll and physical or virtual spaces.
“What we realised pretty quickly was that it was the intangible elements of an organisation that make it a community; and the thing that actually matter. It doesn’t matter that you have an office, it’s that you have a shared sense of purpose, for example. That’s what binds Hoxbies together more than a place ever could. A shared set of beliefs, shared values, and so as a result, Hoxby has gone from strength to strength over the years, but the culture in the community has always been consistent.” - Alex Hirst, Hoxby
Autonomy in particular cannot be achieved if there isn’t an aligned purpose that everyone is working towards; and lack of a purpose against which success can be measured is often what leads to hybrid working being so stressful for leaders, and a focus on presenteeism vs. impact as a result.
Bruce Daisley, workplace expert and best selling author of Fortitude (alongside other excellent best-sellers about working life) says it’s unrealistic that everyone will have the same values or over-riding purpose in their day to day. What’s crucial is defining this at the relevant level, and then them feeling like they have a part to play in the overall vision and purpose of the organisation.
“The danger of thinking that 1000 or 100 or 500 people can all feel the same is a slightly unrealistic version of culture. So that idea that people can feel, whether it’s their local team, or whether it’s a group that they work directly with, that they share something with that group and they feel a bond, and that bond ripples through. You might work in the finance team, what are your values - we always get the numbers done on time, accuracy always, it’s a very different set of values to the new business person. The idea that you would expect those people to have the very same values is unsympathetic. However, they can both feel part of something and everyone is pulling in their own individual way to make things work. You can be bound by a set of guiding behaviours and actions and know what matters to you” - Bruce Daisley
Safety
One of the crucial learnings from experts in this space, is that you need to both lead by example, but also set up psychological and physical space for people to drive cultural change. It’s not just about directing action, it’s about setting up the conditions for new behaviours.
“If you put a sign on the wall saying it’s a great place to work, it doesn’t mean it’s a lovely place to work” - Bruce Daisley
Safety means establishing a culture of learning, curiosity, but also the ability to say ‘I don’t know’ and not feel like this is going to affect your perceived performance. This needs to be led from the top, otherwise it never gains traction.
“The best leaders will be the ones who go, ‘I don’t know’ and who are comfortable with their vulnerabilities” - Nishma Patel Robb, President of WACL and founder of The Glittersphere
Safety also comes from familiarity, from knowing each other on a different level. It’s one of the reasons why ‘back to the office’ has been heralded as a solution, but the pandemic showed us that this kind of intimacy can be created in different kinds of ways, if done intentionally. The lines between work and personal life were disrupted at this time, and so the ‘safe space’ we need to establish has expanded. Lizzie and Alex from Hoxby refer to the ability to bring your ‘whole self’ to work; and how as leaders they need to reinforce their chosen culture every day:
“It’s about connecting on a human level…bringing your whole human to work is expected at Hoxby, because we talk about WorkStyle”
“The big thing for us is to start with leadership [when fostering community]..you need to live it every day..we’ve developed our own Hoxby model of remote leadership” - Lizzie Penny and Alex Hirst
These elements all help to build an inclusive community, but it doesn’t necessarily happen in a linear way. Nishma Patel Robb talks about her focus on encouraging people to colour outside the lines of their roles, and feel ok in doing that, as it will create interesting intersections that you didn’t anticipate, and this is where bonds and value get created.
“Building moments of intersection really helped. It was more than just a set of words” - Nishma Patel Robb
Autonomy
Autonomy is a crucial element to successful community building, and it’s the element that falls down when trust is broken. Charles Vogl is very clear in his belief that a community is only a true community when its members start to interact independently of the individual / body that started that community. It’s something that many leaders struggle with.
“The failings have always been when I’ve tried to control. People rail against it; it doesn’t feel natural.” - Nishma Patel Robb
Nishma believes leaders need to balance guidance with granting autonomy and allowing organic growth within the community, but that knowing when and how to give up control is the difficult part. This is at the heart of the perceived issue of hybrid working: control is so much harder when you can’t see your teams in action.
One of the organisations we’ve worked with extensively over the last couple of years is Wikimedia, the foundation that powers Wikipedia and probably one of the world’s most devolved organisations when it comes to community and its power base. We spoke to Zack McCune, the Director of Brand at the Wikimedia foundation, who has come to intricately understand the foundations of community through his work. He talks about the importance of understanding where the power sits with the community, and working with those community ‘managers’ of sorts,
“I think I’ve become more practical. There’s a belief that community work is going to be radically participatory and everyone’s going to share power. That is not true. It still has power brokers, it still has centres of control” - Zack McCune
One story that McCune shares is a branding challenge, where the organisation considered rebranding the Wikimedia foundation to Wikipedia, given the latter’s strong brand awareness. Through a lengthy collaborative consultation with their communities, the foundation came to realise that a small, but powerful, base of community members felt strongly that the rebrand shouldn’t happen; and the foundation respected that point of view.
“In doing a consultation with our communities, we learned that the word Wikimedia is deeply meaningful to them. They rejected the change, and we haven’t made the change”
He advocates for bringing problems, not solutions to your community, and working with them to build approaches (even if you have a good idea of what the solution might be).
The ‘Fearless Culture’ substack, by Gustavo Razzetti, talks about building a ‘culture of ownership’ by looking at 3 elements. Efficacy (the satisfaction of creating results), self-identity (personal attachment to a job or purpose) and belonging (human need for connection. But ultimately, we still have to decide where decisions lie, and this is where leaders struggle.
Humanocracy thinks it has a solution. They advocate for aggressive decentralisation and entrepreneurialism within organisations, where decisions are made at the lowest possible level to promote this autonomy. Essentially they look to create free markets within organisations, and organisations like Nucor in the US and Haier in China have shown this approach is incredibly effective.
“Throughout the long history of social progress, the most powerful argument for change has been the assertion that every human being deserves the fullest possible opportunity to develop, apply and benefit from their natural gifts, and that unnecessary human-made impediments to this quest are unjust. That is why we stand against bureaucracy: because human beings deserve better.”
This all sounds great in theory. But how do we actually create shifts in our organisation, particularly in times of conflict or struggle?
Organisations tend to reach a point of taking action on culture when they hit a situation of dire need. Post merger, post redundancy, post new leadership. Or after a global pandemic. It’s pretty likely that problems will have gone pretty deep, and that there will be a fair bit of fragmentation.
That means that more than ever, creating a culture for your organisation, one that everyone is invested in, is a collaborative exercise. You don’t make a play FOR your community, you make a plan WITH your community. There needs to be recognition that there is an existing ‘social climate’ in your organisation, you are not starting with a blank page.
We help organisations to go through this process to create a Community Contract. It’s an output that everyone can look to, scrutinise, build together, and hold each other accountable to. It won’t solve every organisational issue that you have, but it will set you off in the right direction.
Core to this contract are several stages that we’ll dig into in next week's post:
Community challenge: We need to be transparent and open about why our internal community might not be functioning as we hoped & go beyond superficial symptoms (e.g. blaming hybrid working).
Value exchange: The reality is that value exchanges between employer and employee have shifted. What was once ‘income for time spent’ has shifted (on the employee side) to more a focus on outcomes, to purpose, to being motivated by the specific work, by facilitating a life outside work. Tapping into these drivers & facilitating them is often overlooked, or delivered against with ‘benefits’ that don’t deliver. The value exchange needs to be explicit.
Community Map: Communities are inherently made up of many micro-communities (especially as you scale). Identifying the different community variables and understanding what makes them intersect & thrive is key. They might be communities of practice, of wisdom, of advocacy, peer communities…or entirely random! You won’t be put energy into community building on every dimension - but a thriving lattice of communities, brought together by shared value exchange, is what will nourish a strong business in bad times and good.
Support Structure: Autonomy begins where boundary-setting & trust begins. How do we shift decision making and action further from the ‘centre’, and what needs to be in place to make that happen? How do we give people time, recognition, resources and infrastructure to take the reins and do things differently?
Visible Changes: What actions do leaders need to demonstrate to drive behaviours? How do we set up a culture of curiosity and one that rewards experimentation?
Next week we’ll dig into all of this and more. For everyone, we’ll be bringing you our latest LookUP List, and snapshots of our Contract framework and our Expert interviews.
Paid subscribers will get to join our Book Club on Trouble in Paradise, where we all benefit from each other's knowledge, and get a deeper user-guide on the Community Contract framework, based on our work with community-focused organisations. And, of course, full access to a particularly strong crop of Expert interviews we’ve done in this space, including…
Zack McCune of Wikimedia, The foundation that drives Wikipedia, one of the most community led organisations that exists globally
Bruce Daisley, best selling author of ‘The Joy of Work’, ‘Eat Sleep Work Repeat’ and ‘Fortitude’
Lizzie Penny and Alex Hirst, founders of Hoxby and best selling authors of ‘WorkStyle’
Nishma Patel Robb, Founder and CEO of The Glittersphere, and President of WACL
See you next week for more!
Caroline and Matthew