Is email the problem here?
ALSO: how the brain works // 72% of workers want 2 days at home in the future
“They’re not putting in the graft we are”.
I was on a call with a company last month who have a developing problem. Like most office workers they have had their team working remotely for the last 9 months, but over the course of time a number of the managers have started believing that some of the employees aren’t working as hard as the others. I was interested whether this was based on performance. ‘No, the performance of the team is consistent and is doing well, we’re up a lot over 2019’.
But the bosses were concerned that there wasn’t consistent application by all team members. I got the sense that this was an issue for the managers largely because some of the team members had been raising it. They were hearing the standard quibbles, ‘they don’t answer my pings very quickly’, ‘I just don’t get a response that makes me feel they were using their email when I messaged them’.
As a result of this concern the managers had started increasing the amount of video calls, the volume of reporting and the number of reports that the ‘slackers’ needed to do to prove to their colleagues that they were working. What had started off being a successful transition to homeworking had now become significantly more bureaucratic than in the old days of the office. My question to them was ‘if some people are working less but getting their jobs done, does it matter?’ (I don’t think they found this question helpful, by the way).
This debate really boils down to whether you consider that firms are buying outputs or inputs. If the team members are reaching their objectives then surely the firm could decide to incentivise them to do more, raise the objectives or merely be content that they are getting what they paid for. But the company was hitting the goals it had hoped for, and yet it was being framed as poor performance because people didn’t look like they were working hard enough. It begs the question how long should it take to do our jobs?
The esteemed British economist John Maynard Keynes was convinced that society could sustain on people working for around 15 hours a week. As an example of just that, Charles Dickens wrote 15 novels, 200 short stories, edited a weekly magazine and didn’t work in the afternoons. (These days, of course, one take on that story would be that if only Dickens had turned up for the PM shift he could have knocked out 30 books and managed two magazines a week).
The writer Cal Newport is convinced that we could do our jobs significantly quicker if we changed one simple thing about the way we work. Because firms hire workers and then give them a connection to attention demanding information network it’s very easy for workers to find themselves spending all day answering emails and doing video calls. At the end of the week it doesn’t feel like much has got done, but we’ve exhausted ourselves doing it. Newport believes we should just stop using email and has a book out next year saying just that.
He believes that if work was run more like the production lines that manufacture products we’d be freed of this illusion. Want a team to produce video assets? Great - give them a workflow that enables them to do that and let them produce videos. Need a team to deal to sell to customers? Great - give them a sales pipeline tool, a way to contact customers and let them sell. He believes that because we use a single (communications) tool to do all of these things it is desperately unproductive and incredibly distracting.
It’s Newport’s vision that if teams were simplified into individuals doing a particular job and then focussed on using software that was chosen for the task we could all work in a far more efficient way. What systems does he believe? Well, virtual shared boards like Trello or Miro. In Trello work is split into projects and people are assigned to specific tasks within that project. When a worker logs on then they go to see what tasks are assigned to them and get on with them. He’s convinced that if we worked more like this it would liberate us from the stress of having to constantly check messages to see what we should be doing - and maybe allow us to achieve Keynes’ vision of doing our job in half the time.
I’d love to hear from you if your firm uses Trello or Miro or other productivity tools (simply reply to this email).
I have a friend who is studying neuroscience and a couple of years ago I was chatting to him and said 'who should I be reading?' and he said the best voice in the field was a psychologist called Lisa Feldman Barrett. Sure enough I looked her up and her book How Emotions Are Made was dazzling and brilliant. This week I chat to her on the podcast. (All the way through I say her new book is out this week. It is, but only in America it seems, because… publishing).
I chat to about how the brain really works. Along the way you're going to discover that no, your dog isn't capable of feeling guilt, we talk about the test (that was in a previous episode) called the Reading The Mind in the Eyes test that is used to measure personality and much much more. LISTEN HERE
Last week’s podcast with happiness expert Mo Gawdat was the biggest of the year by someway.
Seriously good newsletters that you might have missed:
Deutsche Bank (who paid no UK corporation tax in 2019-20) say that remote workers should pay 5% extra tax. Of course, I forgot, tax is for every other sucker except big business
72% of workers want to do 2 days a week at home but some bosses are already telling workers to get ready to come back - ‘nothing can replace the office’ says man with nice corner office and here’s a story about one US boss who is especially toxic in his desire to force his team back, masks and all
One of the butterfly effects of the shift (of whatever small extent) to remote work is that it will change our relationship with cities (I mentioned cities as eggs here) - here’s an article how leaders like the Mayor of Paris are talking about the 15 minute city (everything is walkable for you)
On the subject of that here’s an article from Ireland about how local businesses are booming in this adversity (thanks to Alan Dooney for this one)
I’m speaking at an event for Kellogg’s next week, I was very impressed that the events company, Clear, designed it as an experience for employees to watch on their TVs rather than laptop
Lockdown might not have lead to a surge in lockdown babies but it definitely saw an increase in lockdown pets
It might be explained by the surge in loneliness that lockdown has caused: 4.2m of Brits are always lonely (up 60% from normal times)
You get $5m but you have to live at a random location for 5 years, are you up for it? (click the link to see your location - I got just outside Santiago, Chile)
I loved finding this while doing some research this week, it’s the map of Europe evolving each year since 400 BC (the music is a bit intense, but it’s something to stare blankly at while on a Zoom call)
Make Work Better is created by Bruce Daisley, workplace culture enthusiast. You can find more about my book, podcast and writing at the Eat Sleep Work Repeat website. You might want to catch up on my recent talk at RSA.
I find it incredulous that we are still caught up in what people are doing instead of what people are achieving. When will this madness end??