Future Work/Life is a weekly newsletter that casts a positive eye to the future. I bring you interesting stories and articles, analyse industry trends and offer tips on designing a better work/life. If you enjoy reading it, please share it!
I'm not sure whether it's been a sustained period of scorching weather (which in the UK means anything more than a week above 25 degrees Celsius) or another emerging case of burnout, but I've been struggling to sit down and write anything over the past couple of weeks – hence the more sporadic than usual newsletter.
On the burnout point, over the next few days, I'll spend some time analysing my creative output over the last 18 months to look for any trends. If I had to make a guess, though, I'd say that on a roughly quarterly cycle, I'm hitting the wall, which in my case is much more evident nowadays because of the effect on the frequency (and arguably the quality) of my writing. It's an intriguing development for me as while I know full well that I've experienced burnout before over the years, it was always challenging to identify in the early stages due to the nature of my work.
The story of reaching those latter stages of burnout – exhaustion, extreme cynicism and disengagement from work – is something that I hear again and again from friends, colleagues, clients, and partners. Aside from the obvious advice to rest, there has to be a better way of catching it early and managing to avoid a negative impact on our mental health, relationships, and quality of work. More on this to come over the next few months as I hunt for a solution that can scale to the millions of people affected – let me know if you have any bright ideas!
I don't know about you, but I'm already getting a little tired of the conversation about whether we should be returning to the office or not. Companies who are insisting upon employees returning full-time will only get away with it if it’s for one or more of the following reasons:
Money: if you pay enough, then you'll be able to persuade enough people to come in. Is that a wise way to spend your money when some flexibility would broaden your talent market? Unlikely, but it's your choice.
Prestige: some companies have built enough of a reputation for career advancement that people feel that it's worth sucking it up and doing your time to take a big jump forward into your next role. Does a culture like that appeal to me? No, but plenty disagree.
Proximity to the boss: if you’re sat next to the boss in the office, does it make it more likely that they turn to you rather than someone who works from home when that important project needs assigning; or even when that next promotion opportunity comes around? Based on the evidence? Yes. Good management? Of course not.
Living situation: if you have nowhere to work at home or just don't like your partner and kids, there's no other choice than to go into the office. In this situation, making provision for your team is undoubtedly a smart and necessary move.
I've now seen evidence both first-hand and from multiple secondary sources that people will quit if you don't offer a remote or hybrid work option. It's also evident from numerous surveys that the vast majority of people (never less than 90% of those that I've seen) want at least some time at home. Surely, therefore, now is the time to move the conversation on to how managers can balance facilitating team collaboration with coaching individuals in discovering how, where and when they work best?
[Bloomberg]
RECENT CONTENT ON THIS SUBJECT:
The Big Quit: Employee burnout and a robust job market have workers eyeing greener pastures from Digiday.
Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home from Bloomberg.
Big macro pressure on jobs demand vs supply from ZeroHedge.
Companies miss out on talent if they don’t offer remote work from Bloomberg.
Are we returning to the office? Or is the future remote? From a16z.
Anywhere Jobs: Reshaping the Geography of Work from Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
I had a great chat with Melissa Daimler on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. Melissa has spent the best part of two decades working in learning and development with iconic brands like Adobe, Twitter and WeWork, and specialises in workplace culture. As you'd expect, she shares some fantastic insights into what it takes to create a positive culture that supports innovation and growth and, in the latter case, how articulating values alone doesn't guarantee a psychologically safe environment in which to work – you have to follow through on them.
The key takeaway I took from our chat was the idea of 'reculturing' that Melissa introduced – essentially, that culture isn't some fluffy, nebulous thing that emerges organically; it's something that you do.
"On a good day, what’s happening? What are we doing when we're in the flow? What's happening when you're working with team members who are being really effective? What are some of the things they're doing? That's a very kind of design thinking approach where you're really trying to get in the shoes of the people that are in this environment day-to-day.
And then we start talking about the opposite of that. When things aren't working, what’s happening? And then once we get a core set of values, we move into more of those behavioural statements – things that you can observe; things that if I were giving you feedback on it would be really clear, so I always recommend that we stay away from any kind of idioms or philosophical statements."
Why do I like this? Because it's practical and demonstrates that you can create and improve your working culture with consideration and rigour, which is far more useful than sticking a list of ten meaningless values on the wall of the office, just because it makes you feel like you're ticking boxes.
Combining a genuine sense of purpose from leaders with listening to how your team delivers their best work, adds up to something meaningful.
Talking of values, another recent podcast guest, Bob Glazer, runs an online course to help you discover and articulate your own. I love Bob's podcast, Elevate (and he wrote an excellent book by the same name) because, to continue the theme, his guests tend to bring some very practical, realistic advice to all things leadership and personal development. In addition, Bob started a weekly mail-out several years ago, The Friday Forward, which took the same approach and given there are now a quarter of million people on it, you've got to assume many agree with me.
As well as his writing, he's the CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global marketing business, which has been fully remote throughout its decade-long existence (and he’s just written a book sharing some key lessons). If you listen to the show, you'll hear us discuss the importance of recruiting people whose temperament and attitude suit a distributed company, which is a critical insight when considering people's changing expectations about how, where and when they work. So, yes, businesses need to be agile in their recruitment, management, and development approach. However, I'd also suggest that individuals reassess what they want from work and their relationship with an employer.
The data suggests that after a year of battening down the hatches, the job market is about to explode as millions look for new roles. One easy prediction is that almost all of those job-hunters will look for more flexibility in terms of where they work. What hasn't yet emerged is how they'll assess the capability of businesses to bring out the best of them in the short-term and longer-term, the capacity to support their career development.
After a year in which most people coped pretty well with working remotely and have become accustomed to the joys of pyjama-based working, lunchtime naps and an early dinner with the kids (that's me I'm describing, by the way), the next question they should consider is how to thrive as a remote worker. That, I believe, will ultimately determine people's propensity to return to the office with any frequency, not the threats nor the perks offered by companies.
One last thing: thanks as ever to everyone who's been in touch with their responses to recent newsletters and podcasts. I'm also enjoying growing the network of people with whom I'm discussing and sharing insights related to the future of work and how that intersects with our personal lives. So if you'd like to join in too, please reply to this email, and we can arrange some time to speak.
Have a lovely weekend.
Ollie
Any Other Business:
I’ve written before about how working less can, in theory, help us achieve more. In this excellent piece from The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker writes about how ‘Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work’.
As all football (soccer) fans will know, the Euro’s has arrived, so here’s an incredible data visualisation of nearly a million passes made in 890 major league and cup games this season (make sure you click-through to watch it).
If you’re into maps, here’s a fascinating one showing the Heihe-Tengchong Line in China, either side of which the population density varies hugely.
And finally, in this trilogy of pretty pictures completely unrelated to the future of work, here’s a weird keyboard idea. Each key has an area proportional to the frequency with which it’s used in English. Who would’ve thought ‘J’ would be so small?
