Play At Work

Blue Mondays

September 23, 2015

A little while back, I wrote a post about a rather depressing report into the mental wellbeing (or lack of) of the Australian workforce.

At the time, I hypothesised that this report’s findings would be, more or less, replicated across the Western world and, sure enough, a couple of weeks later, the CIPD has reported that, in the UK, employees’ mental health is getting worse – with the CIPD’s figures showing a constant climb in reported mental health every year since 2010.

Now, we can search for some kind of silver linings here (or, at least, some indications that the onward climb might not be inevitable and could even, in some cases, be preventable).

We could take heart that more reporting of mental health issues suggests that this (still very much taboo) issue might be losing some of its stigma, with employees increasingly feeling they can raise the subject with their employers.

Having the conversation can only be a good thing.

Ruby Wax, comedian, campaigner and visiting professor in mental health nursing at University of Surrey, has recently gotten a fair bit of flack for advising that you should never tell your boss you suffer from mental illness, but I don’t think she’s saying you shouldn’t be able to, just that we’re a lot less enlightened than we might think ourselves to be, and that what people (especially employers) may say on the surface might not reflect what they really think. Or do.

It’s still not easy to have the conversation and, in some environments, as Wax highlights, not all that advisable either. Depressing, true. Honest, certainly. Changing? We can but hope.

More of a stretch, but still relevant, is surely the fact of the 2008 global financial crisis and its fallout (which is still sending shockwaves of uncertainly throughout businesses and organisations, not to mention individual households, some 7 years later).

The workplace has become more pressurised, less certain; targets have been hard to reach – and performance, and job security, have been linked to, in many organisations solely linked to, hitting them.

The Teenies (is that what this decade is yet?) have, so far, been pretty damn stressful for everyone. No wonder more people are reporting mental health issues at work.

And that’s just the economic backdrop. There are other contextual issues that would also help explain the increase.

I challenge anyone to open a newspaper and not feel slightly depressed within minutes of reading almost any story. We’re not good at good news.

And what a world we’re living in. Open a newspaper or turn on a TV (or open your Twitter feed) and, as Prince so eloquently put it in the lyrics to ‘Sign O the Times’, “Every other story is telling you somebody died.”

It’s a bit of a downer.

Then there’s the curse of our ‘compare and contrast’ social media age.

Oh, look, there’s someone you used to know having a much nicer looking life than you; there’s someone you used to work with working for a much sexier business than you, or in a much bigger role than you; oh look, there’s that person who used to be voted ‘least favourite person to sit next to at a dinner party’ – they have twenty times as many Twitter followers as you!

😦

Of course, we have to be very careful with our definitions here. Mental health issues can’t be neatly categorised. They don’t fit into nice clusters of crystal clear data. They’re often mutable, changeable and, at any level, difficult to diagnose.

There’s a very wide berth between clinical depression and feeling a bit blue. That’s not to negate the latter, but it’s important we don’t negate the former either or confuse different conditions.

A bi-polar friend of mine once explained it to me this way:

“When you’ve just split up with your boyfriend, or you hate your boss, or your rent’s gone up or the car’s gone kaput, or all these things are happening at once or one after the other, you’ve got a good reason to be depressed.

You’re depressed, but don’t necessarily have depression.

When everything in your life is actually going okay but you still wake up crying every morning and wanting to kill yourself, that’s really something else. Something chemical, mainly.”

One thing is certain though. At least one in four of us will suffer from some kind of mental health issue at some point in our lives – a quarter of any workforce.

Is more reporting leading to better management of these kinds of issues? A more open-minded (if nothing else) response?

If we could be universally certain of that, we could only take the findings of the CIPD as a positive step forward in the evolution of workplace culture.

Perhaps we can look to the example of António Horta Osório, CEO of Lloyds Banking Group, for a hopeful sign that things might be changing.

Ridiculed in the press for taking time off for stress and overwork eight months into the job in 2011, after a short break he was back at work and, by 2014, had helped steer the Group back into profit.

Okay, it’s a rare example, but it is a positive one, and one worth remembering – and worth sharing.

Which brings me to my other, final, silver lining thought.

I’ve written before about this being the age of transparency, and with that transparency comes scrutiny, envy and exposure to things we’d rather not see.

The age of transparency is as much the age of anxiety.

The world comes crashing into our hands with all its brain-frying, depressing, anxiety-inducing intensity.

But it also places a world of other people, of other stories, of other ways, into our hands too.

We can take assurance, however little assurance it might be in some instances, that someone else is in a very similar boat to us. We can make that connection. We might even be able to take comfort, inspiration or coping mechanisms from their story.

The more we share, the more we encourage each other to share, the more we might be able to normalise the idea that there’s no such thing as ‘normal’.

And, most importantly, the more we can let others know they’re not alone. So often, not feeling alone is the first step to feeling better.

This blog first appeared on smrs.co.uk 10th August 2015
The Wasteland for English Lit, or Silicon Valley?

September 23, 2015

I’ve been heartened to read of the re-evaluated value of the liberal arts major in the tech industry.

As a ‘liberal arts major’ myself (or, in British vernacular, a BA (Hons) in English Literature & Drama), I’m glad to see my kind of degree hasn’t been completely disregarded by any industry – one could easily have been lead to believe otherwise recently.

Student numbers are dwindling. I’m not really surprised reading the Whatuni guide on studying English Literature. It does sound a trifle, well, fey.

According to The Telegraph, it neither features in the top 12 list of degrees employers look for, nor on the top 10 list for most popular degree subjects studied.

Nothing will come of nothing.

King Lear, Act One, Scene One

So, is this the final chapter for English Literature, or, at least, will it’s future be a very slim volume, a novella, as it were, on the shelf of academic tomes?

To try to answer that, I suppose I have to ask myself what did I really get from all that Plath and Post-Modernism and Stanislavsky?

Well, now I’m some twenty years away from it (though not quite yet from graduating, I hasten to add), I have to give a big shout out to Queen Mary, where I studied.

The range of their Arts faculty was incredible, and the courses we had – Greek myths, Fairy tales, Film analysis, Cyber Lit, 20^th Century Poetry (of course, mixed in with your classics, the Victorian Novel, tons of Shakespeare, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism)…we studied the world, humanity – past, present and future.

(I have to confess; I probably didn’t read another novel again after graduating for about two years. It probably took me another ten to learn to read one purely for enjoyment without feeling the need to dissect it).

Even then, there were plenty of things I had to read that offered no enjoyment whatsoever. I’m tempted to save offense and not list any of them here, but I really struggled with Beowulf, Joyce, Wuthering Heights and Thomas Pynchon (I have deliberately revisited all of them since, and still struggle – I’m sorry Cathy and Heathcliff, but frankly, I still don’t give a damn).

Chaucer and Woolf and Jane Eyre and Douglas Coupland, Dostoyevsky and Angela Carter, Wilkie Collins and T. S. Eliot, however, these I devoured, and when I think about it now, the list was endless. I can’t even remember a tenth of what I read, and that’s not including all the criticism (not of me personally, you understand).

And what did it teach me?

Pragmatically – to be able to take in a lot of information at once, to be able to zone in on the pivotal words in a text or moments in a drama; to be detective, analyst, researcher, psychologist, sociologist, historian and futurologist.

About the world: it taught me everything’s political; everything’s social; everything’s psychological; and everything’s individual.

That being human is to perceive, to interpret, to distort and to desire truth.

(And you only needed to take the Shakespeare course to get all that).

These are good lessons, good skills. An English Lit degree gives your brain a kind of elasticity that’s really helpful in any workplace. Just think of how many tiny details, incidental facts, you pick up – how many micro-worlds you can delve into – when you open a novel, step into a play.

You end up knowing a little bit about an awful lot – and knowing a little bit, a starting point, in our algorithmic world, is a very useful skill indeed.

But I think [ooh, you might be questioning whether I got a degree at all with my cavalier way of starting sentences with Ands and Buts, but I was subsequently trained as an advertising copywriter and always told to break rules] the biggest lesson I learned from my liberal arts degree, when you boil it all down (and learning to do that, distilling, was another one) was a very simple one:

Finding the right words can turn ideas into actions.

And every industry will always need people who can help them do that, right?
Please do disturb us: Disruptive Talent at Work

September 23, 2015

This week, the Twittersphere has got me thinking about iconoclasm, isolationism, individuality and cultural integration (among other things, like the size of J K Rowling’s hedges).

These thoughts have been sparked by two articles – a BBC News one on ‘disruptive talent’, and one from The Economist on the ‘Empire of the Geeks’ in Silicon Valley. And it’s the relationship between the two that’s really got me thinking.

The basic thrust of the piece on disruptive talent comes from Sir Richard Branson saying more companies should hire more “independently-minded, rule-breaking, stubborn people like himself,” and that, though those kinds of people may be difficult to work with, the opportunities they provide for new ideas and drive far outweigh those difficulties.

The second article, about Silicon Valley, is a cautionary tale that follows on very neatly from Branson’s philosophy.

Silicon Valley is full of maverick, iconoclastic people – ripping up rulebooks and inventing genius ideas that are radically changing our world and daily lives – but, the article argues, there is a danger in the isolationist (elitist) tendencies of the ‘Empire of the Geeks’ when their work output can have such profound effects on a world they don’t feel particularly connected to (or worse, feel superior to).

Are the geeks really thinking about the consequences of what they’re doing – or just doing it because it can be done (because they can do it)?

Is Silicon Valley what happens when disruptive talent is left to run riot?

It certainly makes a great case for the power of disruptive talent to create game-changing, world-shaping ideas (and ideas that lead to colossal commercial success).

And should we really worry about their isolationism if it results in new technologies we find we can’t live without? Shouldn’t we just let them get on with it and enjoy the results?

One of the suggested strategies put forward to employers for managing more disruptive talent in their organisations is, indeed, to keep them isolated.

It sounds very counter-intuitive – aren’t we all trying to create organisational cultures that are inclusive, that generate great ideas through bringing together people with a diversity of skills and experiences?

But again, should we really worry if there’s a hangar somewhere full of maverick people whom we don’t often see, who might not be all that fun to work with, but generate brilliant ideas and commercial success that we can all enjoy the results of?

My inclination is yes, we should, and worry for a number of reasons.

My first concern is the around the wielding of power.

If you’re hired in on the premise of being disruptive talent, isn’t that carte blanche to behave exactly as you like, regardless of the consequences (as long as you’re ‘innovating’ and making money)?

If you’re coming up with great ideas but not connecting with the people that might need to implement them, or concerned about how they need to implement them, doesn’t that increase the risk for further hubris and high-handedness (not to mention, operational ineffectiveness)?

And what about the power that is found in the wisdom of crowds?

Surely we should all strive to be independently-minded, to be able to use our own experiences and wisdom to draw our own conclusions about things, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to others or be so stubborn as to never yield, even in the face of new information.

History tells us power in isolation can be a very dangerous thing – resulting in despots and dictators. I’m not sure it’s any better (or less dangerous) in the workplace.

My second big concern relates to culture.

Hands-up here. For many people I’ve worked with over the years, I would probably fit their definition of disruptive talent exactly.

I’m very passionate about my ideas (and I have a lot of them); I’ve always been very outspoken (even in school – I spent a lot of time outside classroom doors); and I can be, if I’m really honest, not always the easiest person to work with (or live with for that matter!).

It’s alright for us creative types. We’re half expected to be a bit of a diva. Creatives are allowed to be disruptive talent – it’s in the job description. And, as ‘ideas’ people, it makes sense not to tie them down in too much operational or people management responsibility (but I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a bubble either).

The thing is though, you can’t be so purist as to only have disruptive talent in inward-facing research, development and design (‘ideas’) functions; we need disruptive talent in all areas of business, especially in people management.

So how does that work if it’s not such a good idea to fully integrate ‘disruptive talent’?

And even as a (possibly, sometimes a little diva-ish) creative, one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that, much as my outspokenness can be a very positive thing in moving ideas on, tackling issues etc., my tendency to dominate can shut other less confident, perhaps less definite, people down.

I’ve worked on that a lot (and continue to work on that) – and the reason is my fear of waste. I hate waste. Waste is such a waste. And how many great ideas, or important modifications, or alternative insights that could throw everything into a new light get wasted because people don’t feel they can put them forward. Particularly if there’s a more dominant presence in the room.

Would having more self-proclaimed disruptive talent actually shut down the vast majority of the working population within an organisation, giving a sense of ‘they [the disruptors] are employed to have out-there opinions, the rest of us need to keep schtum’?

Don’t we want everyone to be a little disruptive if they see things that aren’t working or could be better? Without fully integrating all talent within a culture, you run the risk of ending up with lots of different micro-cultures (and often, no simpatico between them).

And, finally, I’ve got one other big worry about the notion of disruptive talent, and that’s about the notion of difference.

We’re all different. We’re all mavericks in our own weird little ways. And we all have to work with people who aren’t ‘like us’.

Of course, we don’t always embrace that (or even acknowledge it). There are plenty of managers who only recruit in their own perceived likeness; there are plenty of businesses where everyone seems to have been shaped by the same cookie cutter. Often that creates a sense of harmony; often, over time, commercial stagnation too.

I agree with Branson (and who am I to disagree?) that businesses need to be a lot braver in hiring less conventional, ‘safe’ people – businesses need people with passion and ideas and drive and opinions and imagination and a sense of limitless possibilities. Safe doesn’t deliver that.

But the disruptors also need to learn how to rub along happily with others too.

If you’re a complete maverick and really can’t stand to make the compromises working with other people necessitates, like Branson, you’ve got to go it alone and set up your own thing.

I think there’s a lot to be said though for getting to grips with your own ‘difference’ and learning to respect, and work with, others’ differences too.

Self-awareness is the path to maturity, and knowing you’re not always that easy to be around might help you a) rein in some of those behaviours and/or b) at least have the grace to apologise for them after the event and let others know you know you have weaknesses. A little humility can be a very powerful thing.

In the BBC News article on Branson’s disruptive talent, he freely admits that he would be a difficult employee for any boss to manage. With that mature self-awareness, maybe Branson today wouldn’t be as difficult to manage as he thinks.

This blog first appeared on smrs.co.uk 24th July 2015
Is there really such a thing as a good gossip?

September 23, 2015

We’ve not even gotten to the end yet and I’m already having separation anxiety.

I love The Good Wife, and this season has been gripping on all sorts of levels.

For those unfamiliar with the show, The Good Wife follows the (literal and metaphorical) trials and tribulations of Alicia Florrick, a lawyer in Chicago with a complicated history in practice and a complicated relationship with her husband, the Governor of Illinois.

One of the most fascinating themes of The Good Wife is its exploration of the legal conundrums of the Internet age, as well as its impact on our political systems and social interactions.

Office politics play an equally prominent role, and in one of my favourite episodes from this season, the two beautifully collided when Alicia’s firm’s email accounts were hacked into and everyone was able to read what every one else had been saying about them.

And much of it wasn’t very pleasant.

Office gossip. Office griping. Venting. Character assassination. Rumour and speculation. Judgment. It was all on show for the world to see. And people exploded – with outrage and hurt and incomprehension – resulting in stand up rows, fisty-cuffs, even spitting.

Great drama, of course. Amplified. Unrealistic? I guess it depends on where you work.

We’ve seen enough emails exposed in the media to know people say some pretty nasty things about the people they work with, just ask Angelina Jolie.

So we know it happens. How frequently, how universally? This we don’t know – and seeing the riots that followed in The Good Wife, perhaps the moral of the tale is that we don’t want to.

I think it’s telling what I’ve written above – in that everyone was able to read what everyone else had been saying about them.

Email is a multi-functional, multi-tonal platform – sometimes for formal letter style communications, sometimes for a string of emoji and a coded abbreviation only known to the recipient.

In the flow of the working day, most of our internal emails to colleagues are sort of continuous conversations that may have many gaps filled in via phone calls or, every now and then (amazing as it may sound), a face-to-face conversation.

We consider them as private as if we were on a call or seated in a corner with them. Often they are sent because something cannot be said out loud, particularly as so many in office environments are seated out in the open.

You could argue perhaps that’s the problem – there’s nowhere for people to go and vent, but I think that’s an upside down way of looking at the issue.

People will always need to vent.

People won’t always get along and they certainly won’t always see eye to eye at work. In lots of ways, that’s a good thing – different angles and perspectives can shift things into new directions, can cover more bases, reflect more appetites.

People will always say things they don’t really mean.

Often for dramatic effect, or comic effect, or because they know their audience will know they don’t really mean it in that context. Rarely, at work, does “I want to kill them!” indicate true malice aforethought.

Having said that, I don’t think office gossip (or whatever else you want to call it) is inevitable.

Internal communications, used in the right channels, at the right time, in the right ways, can stem a lot of the flow of certainly rumour and speculation.

Open, and frequent, conversations, between everyone, and at all levels, can dispel myth, clarify intent; connect people to a united purpose.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it, but we often get in the way of ourselves.

There are organisations, though, independent of size, where you do get the sense there’s very little back-biting, and it always comes down to the one basic principle: it’s a business that talks. A lot.

In The Good Wife, committed as it is, I think, to dramatic authenticity, the fall out of opening their firm’s Pandora’s box has taken many forms.

Some relationships have been repaired, some perhaps only on the surface, and some have been terminated, but, overall, most have benefited by at least knowing where they stand or having the opportunity to clarify it in the aftermath.

Employers can strive to make workplaces happier places with more open forms of communication. It’s in their business interests to do so. Just think how many working hours are lost in ‘he said, she said’ dialogues.

But it’s down to all of us to choose whether honesty really is the best policy and whether, when people do talk, we’ll listen.

This blog first appeared on smrs.co.uk 17th June 2015
Whatever happened to the Australian dream?

September 23, 2015

A rather depressing report on Saturday from BBC News on the poor psychological and physical state of Australia’s workforce.

Two thirds of working people claim to be stressed out (some moderately, some majorly), and nearly half of them (41% to be exact) so distressed they’re considered to be ‘at risk’.

This was a ten-year study, far reaching in terms of scale and sectors covered. And, of course, it fits into a global pattern in the Western world. We work too much, don’t do enough exercise, preach work-life balance yet fail to live it – oh, and don’t eat enough greens either.

It’s a gloomy picture, all the more so set against the sunny climes and dispositions of Australia. Having spent a bit of time there, I’m amazed the picture is quite as bleak as it seems to be, but then, Australians tend to make the best of things. They’re the very model of shaking it off.

No worries.

What’s sadder is it wasn’t going to be like this.

The flock to the land of the young and the free after World War II (particularly from Britain) was a flight to a better way of life, one with more warmth, more light, more space.

I remember all through my schooling in the eighties there was always at least one kid a year whose family where making a break for it to the other side of the world.

We always envied them. This was the era of Charlene and Scott and Summer Bay and a beach always featuring somewhere (definitely a more inviting looking world then our equivalent cramped cobbled streets and dreary London squares).

So what happened?

All that hope and optimism, the resolve and courage it took for all those people to uproot themselves and take themselves so far away from everyone else they knew in search of a better way of life.

How didn’t it help the new Australians and their offspring resist the Western pandemic of work addiction? We thought they all finished by five and headed down to the beach with an Esky.

Of course, like the rest of us, how could they be immune to the constant on of our new technologies and our cultural glorification of business leaders with vast salaries and seemingly impossible schedules?

This is what 21^st century success looks like (combined with domestic arrangements worthy of any interiors magazine and replete with perfect partners/pets/children).

It’s a lot to live up to. Especially when, in my experience, it’s really, really hot a lot of the time.

Maybe it’s time for Australians to reinvigorate that initial Australian dream of success – a slower, gentler, ‘no worries’ existence. A more balanced one. Perhaps they could remind the rest of us of how it can be done. How it should be done.

Perhaps this report will encourage their employers to reassess their role in alleviating the pressure people clearly feel themselves to be under. To relinquish their expectation of people’s enslavement to technology; to invest the time to get to the root of what’s frying the brains of their workers under that fierce Australian sun.

With slipping productivity, if nothing else to incentivise them, it would be a worthwhile investment but, more than that, don’t we all owe it to ourselves to find a better balance when our luck is so much greater than so many others in this world?

If we can’t find a better way, with so much on our side, so many opportunities to do things differently, and with more potential to do better things as a result, who can?

The starting point surely is a little imagination…