RTO's Dead Cat Bounce

ALSO: the CEO pay gap is impacting culture, will your job save you from Alzheimers?

RTO firms increasingly look domineering & out of touch

Despite the fact that the Amazon RTO push has become a reputation crushing failure today advertising giant WPP told their employees that they’d be expected to be in the office four days a week from April.

Let’s take a look how this has worked out for Amazon. Of course, firstly the firm has realised that it doesn’t have enough office space to enforce the policy. Secondly half the firm's employees have now applied for jobs outside the firm.

‘Mission accomplished,’ you might say if you believe that the mandate was a low cost way to reduce total headcount, but according to Professor Nick Bloom those ‘most likely to quit are senior and high performing, damaging profitability’.

Firms like Amazon who have implemented strict five day mandates have endured months of publicity framing them as out-of-touch bullies - it’ll take a while to rebuild their reputation as progressive destination employers. Comfortable with that positioning is JP Morgan who followed last year’s 5 day mandate for bosses by extending it to their full workforce today.

WPP’s 4 day week is a gamble. Unlike tech (Amazon) and finance (JPM) media jobs aren’t aspirational career destinations any more. Opting to defend their margins, firms in adland have struggled to keep pace with salary growth in other sectors. CEO Mark Read adds an extraordinary chaser to the mandate, saying that the 4 days should include at least 2 Fridays a month.

Working in an advertising agency used to be gloriously paid, now those who work in the field squint into spreadsheets all day earning salaries that are often substantially lower than the clients and media owners they deal with. Their morale can’t be helped by overhearing corner office dwelling bosses talking about the good old days of long lunches and foreign jollies on lavish expense accounts. It’s hard to believe that we’re ‘all in it together’ with the C suite when the boss is pocketing almost £7m a year. (See more about the CEO paygap below). Bosses who lived through the good old days haven’t quite clocked that the job isn’t what it used to be.

As Nick Bloom says, when these new policies are introduced it tends to lead the best employees to the door. Despite the seeming contagion of these office mandates ideas, in aggregate the numbers haven’t substantially changed.

WPP claims that the action was 'to focus on the culture of the company'. Interestingly when workplace research company Gartner ran analysis on flexible working and culture they found that the part of their company cultures that employees were most proud of was.... flexibility.

Good luck to WPP, like Amazon they look set to discover that you can’t build the future by just asking to turn the clock back to 2019.

It’s the year that AI breaks out of its Bit Torrent era into packaged workplace products

I'm really intrigued about this. TLDR is a new product launch that takes the Google Notebook LM approach to meetings.

A video is produced summarising the key points of meetings that you've missed - including clips from the spoken content of the call.

Check out an example below. You can imagine that this is a way to save us the burden of attending everything in their calendars.

I think these AI assisted products are going to come thick and fast as we move from the Bit Torrent era of AI to the Spotify/Netflix era. Here’s another one, Granola takes your meetings notes and makes them a little more detailed. The product tag line ‘The AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings’ is so bleakly evocative that it left me questioning if we weren’t adapting to the bad thing rather than solving it.

On the same lines this is a very good booster case for why AI general intelligence might be imminent (more on the same lines by a developer here)

---

Upskilling your team is the secret of success / Sponsored post

Rollie Attard is the CEO of a massively impressive textiles manufacturing firm Panaz in Burnley. I’m always delighted to see thriving manufacturing businesses in Britain and I was lucky enough to spend a day with the team seeing their dazzling work.

Rollie is obsessed with building a strong culture and him and his team are focussed on hiring and training local talent to help keep the business growing. The Department for Education have highlighted them as a great example of a firm upskilling employees to help drive success.

Check out the short film I made with the Department for Education and The Independent.

• 94% of C suite women bosses have played competitive sports - I spent a lot time reflecting on this and would love to know your thoughts on why it’s the case in the comments below…

• A reminder that the growing CEO pay gap is having a direct impact on building cohesive workplace cultures. The High Pay Centre say that FTSE 100 bosses make more money in less than three days than the average worker does in a year

• Will your job protect you from Alzheimer’s? A study of over 400 professions found that taxi & ambulance drivers had the lowest proportion of deaths from the condition. (One suggestion is that constant stimulation of the hippocampus, used for navigational and spatial processing, was the protective factor). No data for people sitting on Teams calls answering emails all day

• Showing the limits of cringeworthy PR answers in front of straightforward questioning Amazon bosses got a savaging at the Business and Trade Select Committee (enjoy more, and more here)

• The real estate industry are trumpeting this as good news: legal firms renegotiating their lease reduced their office footprint by an average of 9% in 2024

• Tory leader Kemi Badenoch wants you to know that ‘lunch is for wimps’ and sandwiches aren’t real food - she likes to eat steak at her desk for lunch. In fact evidence that suggests our decision making and energy levels are substantially enhanced by taking regular breaks in our work (The whole Badenoch interview is worth gawping at)

• London has become so dominant in the UK that its holding the country back. 30 years ago ‘just under half of Britain’s very highest paying jobs were located in London 30 years ago. Today that figure is almost 75 per cent.’ Yet more brilliance from John Burn Murdoch in the FT.

  Being an outsider can give us a valuable perspective on how to think differently, in the US a paper found that “immigrants are responsible for 36% of aggregate innovation”.

• Regaining control is the secret of beating burnout says this HBR article. (I love this, precisely what I said in my book Fortitude, still averaging 4.8 stars at Jeff’s emporium)

• Taking breaks, talking to strangers and more: a fun and provocative piece about the benefits that smoking brought to the workplace

• Former newsreader Lucy Thorpe tells a compelling story about being ghosted at work

Previously on Rituals… we’ve talked about the recurrence of food and routine forming rituals that seem to embed something special about culture. It's included talk of Crisp Thursday, Pizza Meetings, the Ten at Ten, last week we added Spud Club, a group of colleagues at Benefit Cosmetics collectively carb-loading on a Monday lunchtime.

This week I’d like to raise you Soup Monday, courtesy of the The Grattan Institute in Melbourne. As former CEO John Daley explains, each week ‘one staff member cooks vegetarian soup, another cooks soup that may have meat in it, and somebody else brings bread. And all Grattan staff members – and invited guests – eat lunch together’.

It was something that the organisation started at its inception, the coming together provides a space for gossip, chat about sport or just getting together with colleagues familiar and unfamiliar. The soup also represents the endeavours of a coworker, ‘each soup is also one person’s individual effort, and over 800 soups so far have all been delicious’.

I love this so much - you can read former CEO John Daley writing about it (I just want to mark your card that he does turn soup into a metaphor for the Institute’s work).