Killing flexible working?

Swipe back or get fired

The fight has become real and it’s definitely not a stress free one. These are the news we have seen over the last few months

So it seems we have to surrender to the wishes of the big companies and all return to pre-pandemic and be back in the office.

But why are companies demanding employees to be back?

They mostly cite that in-person collaboration is invaluable and it fosters innovation. The reality is, there is probably a political aspect of local governments pushing bigger companies to bring their employees back as it hurts the economic centers and the businesses around them if people work from home.

In my mind there is an aspect of trust too. Let’s face it, for a lot of people they don’t trust what they don’t see and they believe if employees are home they are slacking and not being as productive, even though again and again there are studies that comfirm otherwise.

The impact for the employees

While there are indeed very good reasons to be in the office as a team, to brainstorm together and foster more personal relationships or welcome new joiners into the team, companies have failed to really articulate where it really improves performance.

Working from home ended up blurring the lines between rest and work with many employees struggling to switch off and working much longer hours. Yet it is interesting that despite all of this, the reality is they still prefer to maintain such arrangements. After all flexibility is the key. Being able to make a choice and adapt to the circumstances can be quite invaluable.

However, what they are being told is that if they don’t swipe your card they could be fired (said no motivational speed ever). This adds a lot of unwanted stress, unless you a) prefer to be in the office and b) you actually believe the reasons the company is sharing with you to return.

Sourced from: https://www.usemultiplier.com/blog/empower-employees-to-fight-return-to-office-stresses

The fight back

The reality if employees are not convinced of the ask so they are fighting back. A good summary can be found in this BBC article here

Not even the looming recession or mass layoffs which have been seen in the news the last few months are stopping “the fight”. If you know something works why would you give up on it?

The fight is not new, has just escalated since covid. For years many working parents have tried to get some flexibility to be able to support their families, but it was a long lost battle in which one of the couple (mostly the mum) would give up working to be able to support the kids while the other half would put on all the long hours in the office.

Will be interesting to see how the fight continues and to which extend employees will get united (beyond specific areas where union exists – anyone living in the UK will know of all the strikes we’ve had for more than 1 year). Will they go to the office as asked but then stop adding all those extra hours in the evenings and consequently reducing productivity? Or will they quit and search for places where the flexibility is being offered?

After all, right now we have globalization and the world can be your oyster.

Be careful with what you wish for

As we have seen in several studies, productivity had increased with flexible working and remote working. On average, companies have benefited from increased performance and productivity as the days have become a lot longer even if employees need to do breaks middle of the day (go to the doctor, get the kids from school).

If employees are doing something to tick a box, it won’t certainly make them any more collaborative or innovative, on the contrary. Instead, they will use their commute to search for companies which still offer the flexibility they value. And they will jump out when the opportunity comes.

The companies that will succeed long term, are those that are willing to embrace new ways of working, thinking and collaborating together and are not bound by the rules of the past. Adapt or die.

Further reading

• Time here
• Forbes here
• Multiplier here

Other articles I wrote on the topic

• Leaders of tomorrow
• The great resignation
• Return to the office
• You can’t have it both ways
• I don’t trust you therefore I need to see you
• The future of the office

The AI race – My take on AI

In our generation we had never so much disruption as now.

We had 2020 which no need to describe further, before that we had several economical crises along with global warming and now we have AI. Whereas AI is not new, the exponential growth right now is insane, to the point every single company out there is trying to find ways to incorporate it as part of their business model as it will be a way to deliver even more money to the shareholders.

Have we stopped to think about what it means for our society? No, why would we?

Unlike the nuclear war threat which was controlled within the governments, AI is a private arms race. It’s all about acing the market and making money as fast as possible. Who controls our destiny in this case?

If you know all your competitors are all trying to understand how to use AI to accelerate their business models why wouldn’t you? Of course you will.

The future? Unemployment on the rise

The reality is a lot of us will lose our jobs in a near future, probably faster than we were thinking. From a company private stand point yes it makes sense. Is it ethical? That’s the debate.

All of us will try to scratch our heads to stay afloat on the tip of the iceberg for as long as we can, but the reality is the apples will start to fall without the eco-social infrastructure to support that change.

Are governments ready to support a huge number of unemployment along with the cost of climate disasters? Nop

What it means for our future

When I saw the news that Elon Musk warning about AI (article here) my first reaction was, we’ve lost control clearly, because one thing is for sure, Elon Musk doesn’t care about the impacts to society, so if even he is raising alarm bells it’s because we clearly don’t know what we are doing anymore. For all I know, we are probably all F*.

We have ignored global warming and we are ignoring what this means for us. Could AI be used to improve our lives? Yes it could, but again, it’s more a race to try to make as much money to the individual without thinking about the consequences.

The whole problem comes down to lack of accountability. Who is accountable for when things go wrong? The AI? The people that developed the AI? The company using AI? The ones trying to use AI to exploit us? You can’t even trace it to anyone, so no one is accountable. If no one is accountable, you can do whatever you want without consequences. The incentive to do wrong is huge!

Human connection is gone

If you can’t trust what you see on the screen, is the painting real or not? If someone else can use your voice to their own benefits and purposes, if the person you are speaking over the phone might not be your kid or your mum who can you trust? Even video calls can’t be trusted as using AI you can really become anyone you want. Without trust what have we left in the human connection?

Democracy is dead

Can you imagine Cambridge Analytica powered by AI? Yap, we are f# because I’m sure someone will

We are stupid

We are the only species that will kill each other and our world because we are selfish. It’s very easy to exploit our little stupid brains to someone’s purpose (whoever is using AI to their own benefits). Everyone knows whoever controls AI controls everyone else and the worst is, we are so glued to our phones seeing “cat videos” we won’t even realize we are being controlled. We have been already.

Can we do something?

At the end of the day, AI (at least for now) is a tool that can do anything we ask for it to do, so yes it could do our the world better but that would require the whole world to align and realize we need to think about what we are doing before we kill each other.

Is there any hope that we’ll actually do it? Very little but we are still at the point we can do something about it. Now would really be the time to trigger the emergency button and stop everyone and think through what we want our future to be before we no longer have a say on it.

Also would really help to educate people – but this assumes people want to be educated to understand what it means for them. We can’t look into a specific action or feature, we need to be able to look into at macro level and understand what it really means for our future.

If you want to educate yourself, here’s 2 podcasts to watch

• The AI dilema – Here
• Mo Gawdat – Emergency Episode (here)

Finally, how do you know this post was not written by Chat GPT? Well, probably because an AI would write a lot better than I do. Soon enough human written posts will be a thing in the past. In fact I would say they are already.

You can’t have it both ways

It’s really interesting to realize that the “new world ” we were expecting – a world post covid – looks more and more like old world.

There is a major difference though…. we’ve seen how it could be!

Before covid

Most of us were in the office Mon – Friday with a clear separation of home and office modes. We would leave the office and call it a day.

Some of us had worked the odd Friday from home and it felt amazing, but it was more an exception rather than a rule.

You were expected to be in the office every working day no matter what and going to doctor was something you had to plan months in advance, it felt almost has hard as if you were asking if you could be naked in there.

We didn’t know any other reality

During covid

We suddenly had to work from home full time, from our kitchens, from our sofas, from our beds. We missed our daily commute where we could listen to podcasts, music, catch up with your favourite series or just sleep. It all blurred up.

The number of emails increased like a never ending tsunami.

New joiners would come and leave without meeting anyone in the flesh.

The instant chat was bipping like a disco.

Meetings became the modos operandis. If you need something, book a meeting.

As a consequence, most of us ended up working longer and longer hours. The time spent on cummuting went into working, with the flexibility to take / get the kids to school, take them to their after school clubs or even a change to say hi to the neighbours.

Post Covid Year 1

As covid rules started to ease, it was the age of hybrid working. At the beginning there was quite a lot of freedom. People were encouraged to try to return to the office and for many of us it was pleasent to return back a few days to interact with the colleagues. The coffee chit chat was back, it felt refreshing but also less productive.

Where we stand now

Bit by bit, we are being asked to be there full time. Why? I don’t quite know. The only thing I can think of is because the ones making the decisions don’t know any other way. I struggle to compreenhed why companies can’t embrace flexibility. It works both ways!

You can’t expect your workes to do the same hours they were doing from home AND return more often to the office.

An article from guardian (here) says that more than a third of the workers would quite if they were asked to return full time.

Give me an article that shows that being in the office increases productivity

Yeah I’m waiting…..

No?

Here’s some that shows remote working does:

• Business news daily https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15259-working-from-home-more-productive.html
• And another here

There’s really good reasons teams should get together in the office – at least once in a while:

• To establish relationships
• To welcome a new joiner – and here I would suggest different team members rotate the days so that the new joiners gets to interact with everyone in the team, get to ask questions and as a consequence learn from different people.
• As I wrote in the future of the office here the office should be it’s own experience, with a valid reason why it makes sense to go. Celebrate success together, team lunch, team brainstorming, you name it.
• I tell you what is not a good reason: To tick a box and because the ones on the top making a decision can’t embrace new ways of thinking.

Why are people reticent to embrace being back in the office more often:

• Because it’s expensive – yeah my friends, it’s expensive to go to work even if you bring your own breakfast, lunch and snacks
• Transport is totally unreliable – As I type, I just discovered there is another train strike next week in the UK with only 1 train an hour in my area. There is no way I would be able to drop / pick the kids from school.
• Because we don’t see the value in it. When I go to the office I want to chit chat to my colleagues, which is the point of going right? But this means I am less productive or sometimes I don’t even get the chance given I’m in the office while in back to back meetings with a remote team all over the world.
• It’s exhausting – the time spending in commuting is no small ask. On a good day it’s a good 2h20 per day lost, which I could have used to sleep and / or work a bit more while having the chance to be more present with my own family.
• No infrastructure – Where do we leave the kids? Let’s face it, costs are going up everywhere, we can’t just simple fund enough after care hours. It’s also not fair on the kids to leave them in after school care until 19h because the parents don’t have a choice. The way I see it, we should embrace decentralization and having smaller centers close to schools and embrace community life.

I’m pretty sure this list could be augumented a lot.

I am curious to see what will happen to the talent pool once they send more applications to companies offering flexibility. I do believe we have the power to strike back and change the paradigm of work. We can work differently, there are other ways, not just the old way.

We need to embrace the leadership skills of tomorrow and not be afraid to do different. We need different, we need better!

@champagnecruze

*Pulls up Linkedin – Which one are you? 😂 #generations #corporate #workhumor #workfromhome #relateable

♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey

How to enter the corporate world

In the current competitive world, you can’t wait until you are out of uni or school to think about the labour market. The reality is you need to get in there before you consider applying for your first corporate job (I’m not even calling the 9h to 17h because I don’t think that even exists anymore).

Be ready to think outside the box and rethink how you see yourself and any role you might apply to.

Just having an education isn’t enough, not even if it’s the cream of the cream, the top of the top.

Enter the world of skills. Whereas most generations still perceive a role mostly as a title and experience that comes with it, think of it as the unique skillset you will be building up and that makes you, well you!

If you don’t have any corporate experience yet, how can you grow yourself? Think about any part time or summer jobs you could do. Embrace your inner barista or run the finances for your local football club.

Do you have any hobbie you could monetize? Then go for it.

By the time it comes to send your first cv you need to be able to tell the story of who you are and what you can offer. Think about all of the skillsets you can aquire and will make the difference in an infinite list of cvs.

Focus on the soft skills and adaptability. The skills needed today won’t be the skills needed tomorrow. AI could replace a lot of the known jobs today. The ability to reinvent yourself will bring you the competitive edge that could save your butt tomorrow.

Let’s break this down with some examples

Any public facing role – And I’ll continue using the example of the local barista

You will be learning customer service. Your are dealing with people and having to prioritize work & dealing with pressure: do you clean those dirty tables or do you deal with all the orders right now. Don’t underestimate the bliding need for a coffee on a Monday morning. You need to get as many coffees out as possible. For this to happen, you will have looked into the end to end process of making your favourite brew from order until it’s ready. What can you prepare in advance to ensure the flow goes as smooth as possible and with the less steps needed. This would be process optimization. Handling all the many requests: (1 flat white, 2 sugars, oat milk, followed by a cortado no sugar to a capuccino with steaming hot milk and a customer that is afraid to miss the train while keeping a smile on your face, is dealing with pressure and acing it.

These are skills you will need anywhere you go.

Organizing a local event

This could well be, organizing a celebration for your local club, getting the community together. You will be dealing with many suppliers, negotiating prices (most likely you will be cost sensitive), and ensuring all the different components of the event come together on the day of the event. Drinks are served, people attending are happy, you rented the place, positioned all the bins in place so rubbish collection end of the event is as smooth as it can be.

Running the finances for your local club

You can even do this in a basic spreedsheet, by keeping note of all money coming in and coming out. You will need to be organized and ensuring every cash flow is kept on record so you think ahead of what the club might need – more sponsors? more events so you get further revenue coming in?

Creating a website or a small plugin

Are you good with programing? You can create apps, plugins and websites for other people and already monetize your work. When it comes to sending cvs later you will be able to showcase your portfolio.

These are just a few examples, I’m sure you already have other skills you don’t even realize you can have. Don’t worry about not having done something in a specific role. You will be holding a skillset that is unique to you and could add value on any given role.

Which skills will be key? Well, this is my own view:

• Emotional inteligence – In a world where everything can be replaced, automatized emotional inteligence will continue to be one of the most important skills you can have. If you are able to maintain a cold head and think though any given problem without letting your monkey mind run wild and loose the plot, you will be a step further than most. This is not something – unfortunately – that schools even will teach out and most of the parents won’t be focusing on this either. They both focus on what they can measure, and that will be school grades. Emotional inteligence takes time and patience. It’s keeping those foundational rocks that will eventually become part of who you are. You also need to be aware of the emotions others around you are holding and how certain words could trigger a chain reaction to those around you. (You can read more about it here). It’s one of the core leadership skills for a reason and I would say one which most “leaders” lack.
• Organization – You would be amazed to know how so many people completely lack basic organizational skills. Be it in terms of organizing your own agenda, your shopping list, your life, your calendar, whatever it might be. If you are unable to keep a clear track of what you need to do and where to find what you might need for a given task, you will lose valuable time finding it later. Your mind needs to know where to go instantely for any topic. If you find you are lacking, invest time to get there. Be it organizing your own 1 per 1 lego pieces by colours – so you can find the colour you need when you need it – to keep a diary of the things you are doing and where you are spending your time. Organization has never been at the highest as in recent years. You will be surprised how even home organization is such a thing now with the rise of Marie Kondo.
• Empathy – I wrote about it so many times, so I will keep it short. Those who lack empathy and are unable to read other’s emotions won’t go far. Empathy and emotional inteligence go hand in hand and are really powerful tools. If you want to read what I wrote before check here.
• Ability to learn & focus – This might seem obvious, but you need to have the foundational skills on how to learn anything. Most of us have the attention span of a fish and can’t focus on more than a few seconds on any given task without being distracted (yeah blame it on tik tok). If you are able to focus on your mind on something new and allocate time to keep on getting better and better means you will be able to learn anything. And you really need the ability to repivot and learn anything as new skills will keep on coming all the time. If you want to continue to be relevant, you can’t just rely on the fact you might be really good and some given skills. I do recommend a digital detox once in a while and you will find that you have tons more time than you thought you had to allocate to learning something new. Whatever rocks your boat. The what is even less relevant than the how or the why.

So no matter your age and where you are with life, just focus on the skills of tomorrow and bagging as many relevant one as you can.

The frog and the pan

If you’ve read my original posts on this space you know I have a good friend, the frog. So this is the story about the frog in the pan and how it has followed me all my working life.

Like the frog, if we are thrown into a pan of boiling water we would jump straight out. We know it’s too much, we know it will kill us immediately.

But, if every day we warm up the pan a little bit, almost unnoticeable, then the frog starts to cook slowly but doesn’t realise as he adapts to the new temperature. The frog will end up cooked but won’t even realise it was time to jump a while back.

We are intelligent people, we think, there’s no way I would allow myself to “cook” (aka burn out). Let me bring you some stats: 79% of the UK workers will end up facing burn out (article here) especially if we consider the environment for more than 2 years. Personal life and office life become blurred and like the frog in the pan we are starting to boil without noticing. Though I do believe we actually notice but we end up without knowing what to do. It’s not so simple to jump out (even though we are in the midst of the great resignation).

Don’t be fooled, change in itself also adds to stress. Will you like your new job? Will you be able to adapt quickly? Will you like your new colleagues? Is it the company for you? What about your boss? Of course all of that would be thought through before you actually say yes but there’s nothing like being there to truly find out what it means for you. Many of us end up preferring to stay “with the evil you know” than jump into the unknown. So you stay.

You try to think about ways you can make the solution better, but before you realise your normal routines kick in and you’re not really changing until you really boil. 

Also there is something else that plays quite a big factor here. In some cases yes you are in the wrong company and your values don’t align with the company, your team could be the worst out there or your boss could be an ass. In those cases, by all means, face the jump and get out.

But… hands up if you believe the enemy is actually yourself. You can keep on changing companies but a few months on and you realise you are exactly following the same patterns of your old company. We are our worst enemy. Having the right boss – and I prefer to say line manager – will keep you grounded and challenge you to think about your ways of working so you can indeed make changes that help you long term. But mostly it’s actually self-inflicted.

• We like to be busy – or put another way – no one likes to say I have a lot of free time. It feels you are doing something wrong, that you are not making enough, that mind you, that you’re not cool because everyone else around you is super busy. It’s addictive. Yes, yes it is.
• Ego – I wrote a few times already but ego plays a big unconscious role. You compare yourself, you want to come out on top even if that means working until you boil.
• We don’t have enough examples when we start that show us there is another way. That if you work just smarter and focus on your priorities – without jeopardising your health and your valued relationships that you can still be successful. That feels unachievable, so you follow all the examples you see. 

The scary part is, all of what’s driving you to boil – or most of it – is unconscious. It’s routine, it’s in your working DNA.

It will require a lot of strength to break the cycle and implement incremental changes that will lower the temperature of your pan.

Before I dive into what can be done. I will quote something my husband keeps on repeating to me as a mantra:

“My boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, this is why I poop on company time.”

Maybe it’s a bit extreme, but there’s something to think about for sure.

At the end of the day, work is just work. It’s in your hands to make it more enjoyable and bearable. 

So what can you do?

• Learn to say no. Not just to others, but to yourself too. Every yes you say, it’s a lot of no’s you are also saying. If I accept this, it means I can’t have dinner with my family. It means I won’t have time to exercise. You get the picture. Saying no is hard. It is (unless your kids are asking you for the 1000th snack in the last 5 minutes). It requires practice. You can start with small steps. Say no to peers who ask your help and when you believe that will jeopardise your goals for the day. Then start by accessing your “yeses” and thinking about what you will lose in that time slot. Can you really fit it in your day? 
• Start your day by writing down your priorities. That’s to write, your top 3 things you really need to achieve that day which can be both work or personal. You need to have something measurable at the end of the day.
• Protect your calendar – I wrote at length here (show your calendar who’s the boss) but now you know what are your priorities you need to find slots for them. Ideally they would be done in the morning when your brain is fueled by coffee (unless you’re a tea drinker). Are there meetings in the middle that would get in the way of having a good 2h slot of uninterrupted work? Can you move them or even better do you really really need to go? Cancel them. Have a go, cancel them. See if anyone dies.
• At the end of the day assess what you’ve accomplished. I find myself always doing a stretch of work at the end of the day because I feel I achieved nothing during the day (just meetings). It’s a trap I keep on falling into. Probably if I had the time to retrospect about my day I would find I had already achieved more than I can think of by the end of the day. Really take a few minutes to think of what you’ve achieved and what you can do next day to achieve your top priorities. What failed? What was in the way? Did you need more uninterrupted time to get them done? With this in mind prepare your next day. 
• Think about your boundaries. What can you compromise and what can you not? As an example, except if I have to go to the office – I need to either drop my daughter at school or pick her up. It’s really important for her that I’m present and it’s important for me too. I get to chit chat with the other parents and establish relationships which help her as well make friends. I need to show my face. So if any meetings fall on those slots I say no to them. No matter who the requester is, senior or not. Same is valid with the bedtime routine. The answer is no. I’m not willing to compromise that. Maybe for you it’s a slot for daily exercise. Whatever it is and it can be multiple things. Think about them as they will act as your compass as to when you are taking too much.
• Once in a while (monthly, quarterly, even daily) assess how it’s going. How do you feel? How many days of utter stress and feeling out of control did you have? What are the things you can do to help you out? Do you need a day off away from work and family to think about what you can do to feel more grounded and healthier? Then take it! It might feel like 1 day’s loss and you’ll be even more behind where you wanted to be, but you’ll gain so much more. Maybe you’ve reverted back to saying too many “yeses”. Maybe you are not delegating enough. 
• Setting time aside for the things you really enjoy. We all have hobbies and things we really enjoy doing. Whatever those are, save time to do them. Ideally you would have time for them even during the week too. Even if it’s 15m, it can be totally refreshing for your mind. Sometimes I get 15m aside to read during my quick lunch break and those 15m give me a lot of energy to face the rest of the afternoon, not to mention they lift my mood (I obviously don’t read the news).
• Work out what works for you. There’s no one rule that fits all. You need to find what are the things you can do to help you live a more balanced life. Can well be asking for help – either for home commitments or work. We are not machines and it’s ok to slow down. If you are not boiling down you will be more productive at work and home. One single fresh idea is worth many tired ones. Try one of your ideas and see how it works. If it doesn’t work, go back to the drawing board and think of what could work. Finding what doesn’t work in itself is quite powerful too.

Return to the office – An update

I guess I wrote back about the return to the office last year before everything went pear shape again with Omicron. So here’s an updated view after returning on a weekly basis.

Disclaimer: I am fortunate enough that I can return at a more smoother pace (e.g. once a week) and don’t have a rule (yet!) that I need to be there X number of days like other areas of the business.

So here’s how a day looks like

Wake up at 05h30 – not used to that anymore. I struggle to open my eyes and comprehend which planet I’m on. I realize it must be Monday and indeed I have to get up (a good 5 or 10m later).

Leave the house at 06h20 for a 20m walk to the station. Fortunately the sunrise is earlier and I feel less afraid to walk in the dark so early in the morning. I rarely see a soul.

The train commute is pretty nice. I manage to read on the train – a part I quite miss from the old days.

I reach the office at around 07h20 (1h after I left home). It is very quiet and I really enjoy that. I have time to eat my breakfast at my desk, reply to a few emails and prepare my day ahead before I go into meetings and more meetings.

At 08h30 I call home so I can speak to my daughter. I feel sad I can’t take her to school. This was quite a big change for all of us, where I can now be part of the daily routines around my daughter and take her or get her from school. I rarely had the chance to do that before given the commute times to / from home.

From 09h onwards it’s meeting crazy but I can say it felt so nice to have the team meetings in person. We were just so happy to see each other in person or having a quick lunch together. We are social “animals” after all. We develop in a pack, by working together. This is at the source of our evolution, so even the most introverts will miss some sort of face to face interactions.

We’ve all agreed that if we could teleport to the office we would go more often.

One item I find myself doing quite badly in the office, is barely drinking any water as the ladies room is too far from my desk and not something you can go quickly and come back while in a meeting. So it’s not uncommon to leave with headache.

At 16h00 I shut down everything to catch the train home so at around 17h10 I’m back home for any final meetings and close any outstanding work. In the past I would leave at 17h30 and that was it, no more working after, but I struggle with that. Also I guess I’m not mentally ready to commute into rush hour. Not yet.

By 21h00 I don’t know again which planet I’m on and I struggle to stay awake.

Future of working

I wrote about it a few times and I will say I have not changed my point of view at all. The future needs to be flexible. I don’t believe there is one size that fits all. We all have our own needs and we all achieve efficiency and productivity in different ways. Some people say they are more efficient in the office because they get less distractions (e.g. chores to do or kids), I am less efficient in the office because I find myself wanting to interact to people and loose more time move round and about plus the commuting back.

The technology is out there, the whole covid situation has shown to the most sceptical of the leaders that teams can work remotely. Yes there is a lot you develop while working physically together. Going to the office needs to be an experience on its own that helps to drive a very specific purpose than the nature of the work done at home.

I do believe that companies that do not embrace flexible working – and come on, flexible working is not the odd day working from home – will fail to attract the best talent or retain those that they have.

Companies that offer flexibility will get flexibility in return and an increase in productivity. Also if people work from different environments, that will encourage diverse ways of tackling new situations and challenges.

So cheers to flexibility, we all need it. If you don’t trust your employees, look yourself in the mirror.

1 step backwards 2 steps forward

It is no surprise that careers today are no longer linear, nor the climbing ladder that they used to be. In the past you would expect that after a certain number of years you would go up and level and so on until you would eventually retire. It was an expected pattern.

Nowadays if we know anything it is not to expect anything at all.

Careers go all over the place, sometimes up, other times you move horizontally and even backwards to then continue ahead again.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/life-never-linear-my-career-visualized-neil-patwardhan/

Why is that?

• The nature of the job has changed in itself. Even from the moment you accept a new role and it’s job description, by the time you leave the role itself would have changed. You have the freedom – to a certain extent – to change and control what you do, to explore the boundaries and interact with different stakeholders, assume more functions, etc. In fact this is totally expected out of you. You need to be adaptable and flex to the business needs. If you don’t adapt you are simply obsolete and soon enough you will be left in a corner. This is valid for people and organisations alike. The next new thing might be outdated by the time it gets out to the market. Adaptability is key.
• The new generations need meaning and fulfilling roles. It’s not enough to have a title, it’s not enough to have a job description, they expect continuous learning and to feel part of “something” that links with their values. They need to feel energised and they welcome change. We could even say change is their middle name. Don’t forget they (we!) grew up without any certainties. We never know when the new crisis will strike us or war. We know we can’t feel secure anywhere so there is a huge focus on building our skill set so it’s as fungible as possible. We take Darwin to a whole new level. You can never feel comfortable in your seat. Most of us will be itching to find what’s next.

What’s the impact for the organisation?

In a short and sweet version, I would say it’s amazing.

• If the very fabric of the organisation is embedded in the fact it will continue to change, it will be a lot easier to adapt to the next big thing, either business disruption, covid, whatever it is. You need all employees to be ready to change what they do and be ready to drop a few activities in prol of learn new things or do more of something the next day. I find a job description almost irrelevant these days. The moment you start it’s no longer relevant. I would say as opposed to a job description I would include an expected skill set and level of expertise within that skillset.

• If your employees are more demanding, you need to ensure every single voice can be heard within their own groups. It’s up to each leader in the organisation to ensure the whole team / department is learning and feel they can contribute to the company’s growth. Let’s face it, we’ll have to work until we die. It’s a lot more for us than just a 9 to 5 job to pay the bills. It’s part of our identity. If we don’t feel connected to the company mission, if we don’t understand it we might leave to a company where we feel more connected. Don’t be single minded in thinking that all that moves us is money. Yes, money is a big motivational factor, but it’s not the only thing.

• If we are to work 10, 12h a day we need to feel connected, we need to feel our work is valued and we are contributing. We need to “click” with our colleagues and especially with our line manager. If we feel we need to keep silent and just follow orders like dogmas that you must accept and just do without understanding the why, people will just leave. Especially now that the workforce is going more global and it’s a lot easier to work from anywhere in the world. There will be a point where even the whole taxing system will align to this new reality and not only will it become more common to have people all over the world but it will be the new norm. Oh brave new world. I’m really looking forward to seeing it.

And what’s in it for the employee?

Well you need to be comfortable so that you will be uncomfortable. And that feeling (a little bit) uncomfortable about doing something means you are facing something challenging, something that will lead you to growth. The more you are willing to drop the hierarchy and focus on what you can learn and in return contribute to where you’re working, the more in demand your skillset will be. Accept that everything is changing all the time and we all have something to learn every day, including from people who are fresh out of uni. You can also be sure there’s no 2 days the same and hence you will never find yourself bored. If you are, well, then it’s time for a change.

Perfection is the enemy of progress

For some reason we are obsessed with perfection at all levels in life really. The perfect score (at schools), the perfect body, the perfect looks, the perfect food, the perfect plan…

So yes, Winston is still very right. You don’t want perfection, you want it done.

Raise your hand if you struggle to start something because you believe you are no good at it? Being a public speech, the perfect powerpoint deck, a new role….

Yap, me too.

So why is perfection the enemy of progress?

As opposed to call it the pursuit of perfection, I like to think of the pursuit of improvement – e.g. like Kaizen. If you keep on trying to get everything perfect, you might loose the big picture and not get something done where the time is of essence.

I have brainwashed my 5 year old to refuse perfection. I haven’t been called at the school yet, but in essence, even as little kids we say things like: “practice makes perfect.” I told her, no, practice makes better and every day you should try to practice so you get better. Perfection is not the point. It’s the learning journey.

We are all born without being able to do anything other than cry. How do you learn something new? Well, you just go for it, you attempt to do it, you learn from what you did, you make some marginal improvements and you try again. If you get to hang up that you are not good at it you will never try and hence you will never be good at it.

I like to write, but am I really good at it? No. Do I enjoy it? Yes, so I keep on doing it and maybe at some point the words will start to flow a lot better. Do I care if I’m perfect at it? No.

I think my whole being is against perfection and in fact I love to enjoy the imperfect of everything around us. We are not even symetrical as human beings and that’s what makes us amazing!

But even I fall into the perfectionism trap, mainly at work. I remember seeing a powerpoint pack with all the boxes misaligned and different fonts all over the place. My OCD will kick in and say I need to align all those boxes. Does that actually need to be done? No.

The beauty is in the balance. How to identify it’s good enough to be delivered vs continue to try to improve it. This is where Agile is an amazing tool: what is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Get it out there, get feedback and then improve it.

Can you imagine if they’ve spent years and years finding the perfect mobile phone before they released it out there in the market? By the time it was out, it would be outdated and not relevant anymore. You need to keep on doing and trying and fail to get better. To even know where you are good at one must try. If you really want to improve a skill don’t worry if you’re good, just try every day until it comes more naturally to you. Some people might learn something faster than others, but it shouldn’t deter you from try.

Nothing like experimentation to drive progress. So many things were found out of mistakes in the pursuit of something else: Post-its I’m looking at you. Timing is more critical than perfection. Get it done and see what happens. Try something new and see how you feel about it.

And to me the most important is stop talking and start doing. I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve had about: “we need to do this”, many meetings go on and nobody has even started to do anything! Do, then talk about it. Try, see what happens, see where it leads you, then improve it once you have some feedback over what you found.

Just keep moving forward. It’s the journey that matters and what you find on the way.

Are you still relevant tomorrow?

When we were growing up, most of us wanted to have known jobs like doctor, lawyer, fireman, vet, you name it. But then as we grew up and started to work (and pay taxes), quite a lot of us found it difficult to explain to our parents what we do. I can’t explain to the kids nor my parents what I do. I think my daughter would define it as “my mum works on her computer.”

Even from when I started working until now there’s a lot of new roles that have popped up, namely in AI, data scientists, etc. I even have a friend who works with drones, not for playing (and those are fun too), but that’s his job and a few others that do “social media content”.

This week my husband called the insurance company and it took them a while to figure out which of the options allowed would describe his job.

The roles are moving faster than we do, we might need things we didn’t even know we needed – mobile phone and Alexa I’m looking at you – but now we can’t live without them.

So how do you stay relevant?

• Always learning – There’s no way around it, you have to keep an open mind and continuous learning. If in the past it was all about continuous improvement (and that remains relevant), continuous learning is even more relevant. You need to think not just on the skills required for your role and how to develop in your role, but any skills you might need tomorrow. How to find what’s relevant for you? Well look around to the new hires, which skills are they bringing? What do you think it’s missing in your company, in your industry? Allow time to dedicate to learning and it can be anything from getting a certification from just reading a book or shadowing a colleague that does a different role than yours
• Skills, Skills, Skills – As I wrote here in this space, it’s all about skills. Forget job titles and see yourself as a walking basket of skills. Some you already have and might be an expert at it, others you need to improve (part of the learning bucket), others you might want to drop because they might not be as relevant anymore or you simply might not like them at all. You need to continuously assess what’s relevant for you and which skills you should develop. With the relevant skills you can flex around what’s next for you role wise. The more skills you have, the more flexible you can be. It will always be a dancing game of being an expert at something – which in some specific areas you really need to be – versus being very flexible.

• Be open minded – I have worked with people in the past that believe just because they have more experience they know it all. If you are not willing to listen to those around you and accept new ideas, no matter how radical they seem – you won’t evolve and stay relevant. A new grad will give you a brand new perspective on the world, same as someone from a completely different industry than yours. Be open to different views.
• Surround yourself with people that inspire you – Most people think that they have to search for really senior people because they will help them grow in their careers. Whereas that might indeed work, I would say it’s even more relevant to surround yourself of people that inspire you for whatever reason, could be the receptionist that is an amazing painter in her free time, to someone who is really good at seeing patterns in data, anything that pushes your boundaries and inspires you to think differently and improve yourself. Diversity is the key to it all. If you only mingle with those that think the same way you do, you will never learn anything new.
• Be authentic – In a world full of automation and where most people end up trying to be the same as someone who is successful, are to be authentic and bring your true self in everything that you do.

Some relevant articles

• Careers of the future
• Cool future jobs
• Jobs on the rise
• Forbes: How automation will impact future job markets

The Great Resignation

Historians will be pretty busy trying to understand what exactly happened in 2020 and 2021. 2020 was THE year the whole world stopped thanks to the pandemic, and then 2021 continued with lockdowns. When people spend more time at home and not being able to hide behind their all mighty business, they had time to do something they weren’t doing much: to think. (We are all guilty here)

To think about the priorities, to think about what they really wanted to do in life in general, especially as everything could just vanish pretty quickly. Who are the friends you would see yourself going in lockdown with? Whom did you contact? And on the professional side: Am I doing the job I enjoy doing?

For many the answer was NO! And enter the great resignation. And no, this is not just something that happened in the states, where everything is big and GREAT. No, really, it was all over the world.

Disclaimer: To be able to resign without thinking of the financial implications is quite a privilege. Still some people concluded they would rather downsize their lives and enjoy more what they had.

Anyway, back to the great resignation (and by the way I do believe this is a trend that will continue throughout 2022), the same way Londoners realized they wanted more space rather than being in the city center in a shoe box, there was also a big rethink about what people really wanted to be doing.

Flexibility

Throughout lockdown – where possible – everyone had to work from home. Companies had to make a huge shift to web based technologies to ensure everyone was online and getting the job done. Meeting room meetings moved to video calls. The office suit was replaced by a presentable shirt and comfy trousers (and slippers). And then as the world started to open up, companies started to ask everyone to be back in the office. A good example of that was JP Morgan (Forbes article here). Then you had companies like Deloitte that said employees didn’t had to work from the office (CityAM article here) – as if consultants worked from the official office anyway…. so I actually took this one with a pinch of salt.

Anyway, people realized they could work from home and enjoying flexibility such as having time to exercise, take the kids to school, sort out the laundry, while at the same time maintaining the productivity (or increasing it) and loosing that didn’t felt right.

If you have 2 good equal companies and one of them allows you flexibility and the other doesn’t, which one would you choose? It’s a no brainer really.

Flexibility is a sword that cuts both ways. If you want flexibility from your employees you have to give flexibility back. If you want to retain your key people, well I would suggest burying old fashion ways of “controlling” employees by seeing them (I wrote about it here). Also, some empathy would be good. Just because you enjoy being in the office, being in your suit doesn’t mean everyone enjoys the same, or even if some enjoy, maybe they can’t afford it (enter the world of childcare or carers in general).

There’s a life outside

For a lot of people it was also about: do I even enjoy my job at all? A lot of people developed hobbies – or enhanced them – and realized they could try to make a living out of it. Even if that meant less money, it meant being in control of when to work and where to work from. (And here’s me wishing I had hobbies that made any money!)

Then for sure, the family side. For a lot of people I know, it was really important to finally be able to take the kids to school / or collect them. To have lunch at the table in your kitchen. To be able to stop working and enjoy family time or even to have time to finally exercise on a daily basis (which for me was only achieved during Lockdown 1.0). Before Covid, I rarely managed to take my daughter to / from the nursery, but now I am doing it on a daily basis. It means the world to me and her. Without working from home and with the long commute would be next to impossible to do the same.

Whatever rocks your boat, I’m pretty sure you’ve found something you enjoy that you could do more of.

So what does it mean for companies?

For companies in the long term, will be quite binary: do they offer flexible working? Yes or No:

• If you want to retain your employees as opposed to having to hire more expensive ones without the same knowledge, offer flexibility (in its true form)
• If you want to attract the highest talent (e.g. new grads or experience hires alike), you have to office flexibility. If you don’t, I’m pretty sure your competitors will. There’s more to life than just the income.

What does flexible working even mean?

• Flexibility of hours – In its highest form it means employees should be working towards goals they need to meet. It’s up to them how they meet them. In a lighter version just means there’s some flexibility of when to start the work, when to stop and which breaks can be done in between.
• Flexibility of location – (this discounts any tax implications of working outside of the country). If there are critical meetings which demand an in person meeting, by all means get together in the office, but for everything else it’s up to the employee of where he’ll get the job done. From the comfort of his bed, to a hipster coffee shop, take your pick (note, certain roles might now allow for coffee shop meetings due to the confidentiality of the information being shared in conference calls). It still looks nice to work from a coffee shop though, although expensive in the long run.
• Flexibility of roles – here I should say, embracing a skill based approach – in essence it means allowing employees to move horizontally and take on completely different roles where they could still use the same core skillset. (I wrote about the importance of skills from an employee point of view here). How is this even related to the mass resignation? Well it is. Many employees might feel they are not developing or are not given opportunities for development. Allowing (and even encouraging) changing roles would benefit one’s development as well as the company itself by utilizing diversity across departments (even if they seem unrelated). An HR guy, an IT guy and a procurement guy walk into a bar…. this could be a good conversation by the way.

What are the benefits for the company to embrace flexibility

As we have seen with the pandemic, people are working more from home, not less. If you give flexibility, you get flexibility back.

One thing that always puzzled me, was why companies never consider existing clients? Yap, I mean clients, like they always have massive discounts for new clients and totally forget the existing clients? This encourages clients to shift to also benefit from a new client discount. Same is valid regarding employees. Companies don’t always make the effort to keep the best people. They think just some random salary increases will do the trick and given the employees are there they will always stay or if they leave it’s because they are not worthy. No joke, I felt this in the past myself and this was also the view of the CEO of a company I worked for many moons ago.

What is the cost of recruiting? I have also been in companies that would give me a fee for bringing candidates from my network of contacts (as it’s cheaper than paying a recruiting agency). So how about companies make the effort of keeping what they already have?

And the cost of training someone new? I don’t enjoy spending time doing KT. Nop, not a bit. The existing team rarely has the time to properly train new hires, which means eventually some of the valuable information just vanishes. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to allow people to move roles within the existing organization or allow them some flexibility? You might not even have to spend a penny on it!