Play At Work

Matthew Sinclair

Recent Posts

  • The stick that stuck

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    I’m ready to thank, after nearly 20 years, the man who made my life miserable at work when I first started out.

    It had all started out so well. I was having such a jolly time of it I couldn’t believe that this was really work – that this was what work, real work, having a ‘proper’ job, was like.

    I finally felt I was in an environment that suited me.

    Everything moved really fast and there were lots of different things going on at once – not like school with its predictable timetables and the clocks where the second hands sometimes jumped backwards; not like university with its bursts of activity and long stretches of guilty avoidance (“I really should get on with that essay and not be lying on the sofa watching This Morning…”).

    This was constant adrenalin. Constant demand. Constant change. Faces. Faxes. Photocopies. And, indeed, emails (slow ones – this was 1997).

    And here I was, six months after graduating, welcomed home into this ad agency in the heart of London, writing for a living. Coming up with ideas. Going out and meeting people and talking about things.

    I worked in a little closed office, sitting at a tiny computer table squeezed between the desks of my two colleagues (both of whom have become lifelong friends) and all three of us smoked like chimneys (and every night after work, everyone drank like fish).

    (I find it hard to believe that was what it was like. It does sound so Mad Men, but I promise this was only the 90s, not the 60s).

    I couldn’t believe my luck.

    And then I started to do a lot of work for a certain Mr X.

    Now, to protect the identity of Mr X, I’m going to try to be pretty scant with details here. He was middle management, middle aged (probably younger than I thought as I was 21 and at 21 everyone over 35 is deemed middle aged) and wasn’t what you’d call the sunniest of souls.

    I’m sure he worked very hard and took it all very seriously, but you never got the sense he enjoyed any aspect of it. Actually, later, I realised he was a very nice guy with a nice sense of humour, certainly down the pub, and, of course, I had no concept of any pressure he might be under at the time.

    Everyone else seemed to love me and love my work; Mr X had a problem with it – and clearly a problem with me.

    Night after night he’d keep me back, amending copy over and over, picking it apart, questioning every construction, every word. I’d be forced to bring out grammar books to prove a point; would read and re-read every brief, every bit of documentation, so I’d be ready with my argument for him – “But it says it right here Mr X…”

    One night I lost it.

    “You know that makes perfect sense, you know there’s nothing wrong with that and that is how you spell that. I don’t understand why you’re wasting my time – and yours!”

    And he coolly replied, “One day, you’ll thank me.”

    To which I snapped, “I won’t.”

    And I didn’t.

    Even though he eased up eventually, warmed up eventually, I could never quite forgive him for the seemingly endless nights of pointless copy massage.

    I never forgot the “One day you’ll thank me” line – an admission, to me, of the premeditation of it, the intent to waste my time (and keep me from all my other lovely chums down the pub).

    I saw it as punishment. Needless punishment. Cruelty. Directed at me, for no good reason.

    Okay, so I’d got into the agency on work experience initially because my father was an ex-client. I suppose you could call that nepotism.

    But they’d kept me on, paid for me to be trained up and offered me a full time job – on merit (my father had retired, it wasn’t like his business would be back because of me, but, fair enough, I could see some people might see that as getting something handed to them on a plate).

    I suppose I was quite loud and certainly alarmingly confident – but then, everyone seemed genuinely amazed at what I could do, and I was young and absorbed and enjoying myself.

    I was certain then it was all because he didn’t like me, for whatever reason.

    It never occurred to me he was trying to help me.

    Maybe he did do it because he just didn’t like me, but I like to think now that wasn’t the case. He was helping me refine my craft. He was presenting me with every possible way someone might like to pull apart your copy and making sure I had my story straight.

    He made me assured. He made me able to justify my work. He made me scrutinise every aspect of the information I was provided with. He made me thorough, prepared (and able to negotiate!).

    I’m not saying I whole-heartedly endorse his approach, all stick and no carrot. Had I been solely working for him, had I been a little less confident or resilient, he might have crushed me (but I sense he knew I was made of sterner stuff).

    He flashed into my mind the other day when I had some work experience students in, working on a project about young people’s expectations of work and the realities they find.

    At the time, at 21, Mr X was my definition of a bad manager – mean spirited, pernickety, condescending and kind of controlling.

    Nearly twenty years later, I really want to thank him. Maybe he wasn’t any of those things. I don’t think he was. But, whether he intended to do it or not, he made me resilient – and he made me better at my job.

    I’ll be forever thankful to him for that.

    This blog first appeared on smrs.co.uk 12th June 2015

  • Keeping it in the family

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    Over half of us (55%) would like to work for an organisation that has a ‘family feel’ and is held together by loyalty and tradition, according to the CIPD Employee Outlook Survey 2015 this week, though only 26% would describe where they currently work for as having a ‘family feel’.

    From the Ewings to the Mitchells (indeed, to the Kardashians to the Royal Family), I would argue family-run businesses aren’t represented as all that appealing in mainstream culture. The line between the personal and professional is frequently crossed (if it’s established at all), and petty rivalries, old scores and managerial favouritism are all recurring themes.

    The media portrayal of the family-run business hasn’t shifted that much from King Lear – but is there a big distinction we should be making here between an organisation being run by a family and an organisation having ‘a family feel’?

    The two don’t necessarily go together. Being a family-owned or operated business doesn’t guarantee a ‘family feel’ culture (consider Cho Hyun-ah, the Korea Air Lines Co. executive, daughter of the company chairman, and her ‘nut rage’ incident), though I have experienced businesses where the two do go very much hand-in-hand.

    Where this does happen, old-fashioned words (and notions) like ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ tend to crop up: those in charge often feel a huge debt to the founding family members who started the business (alive or dead!), and, being wired into a sense of duty, often have no problem extending that concept of duty to the wider ‘family’ of the business – its people.

    Of course, a sense of duty and responsibility to your people isn’t the exclusive preserve of those who own their own businesses. At SMRS, we’ve undertaken numerous employer brand development projects for plcs where the consistent theme expressed by the people as their USP is its family feel (a challenge in itself when you’re trying to differentiate them!).

    So, what are the cultural components that make for a truly family feel business?

    Size does matter (but not as much as you might think)

    We’ve worked with some pretty big employers who describe themselves as having a family feel (some with tens of thousands of people). The key seems to be having a distinctive organisational personality and clear value system (helped, very often, by having a leader universally seen to be an embodiment of this personality – and very often by having a polarised opposition to a direct competitor).

    Being certain of who you are, unapologetic about it and clearly committed to staying that way can overcome the obstacle of scale.

    It doesn’t matter how big the family grows, as long as you’re all clearly Ewings/Mitchells/Kardashians/Windsors and determined to stay that way.

    People like to know where they are, and often loyalty is driven by a certain amount of predictability (which I guess is how, even though no one likes them, there can be uproar the year your mother decides not to offer soggy brussel sprouts for Christmas lunch).

    Keep it flat

    A non-hierarchical operation is definitely a big part of being a family feel organisation. The flatter the structure, the wider the doors are opened, and the more ‘human’ your leaders are seen to be, the more like a family you’ll feel.

    What I think is really interesting with this family analogy is in fact how the role of leadership shifts within a family dynamic.

    Mum and Dad might have gone and bought the big new smart TV, but it might be their teenager who actually takes the lead in setting it all up when they get it home. In our house, I always took the lead as in-house style director (quelle surprise!) – if I wasn’t sure about the new fabric my mother was looking at for her bedroom curtains, the purchase simply wouldn’t go ahead!

    Happy families are, more often than not, democracies. People know who is best at what, they play to those strengths, but still give everyone a voice. The businesses described by their people as feeling like family do the same.

    And don’t come knocking if you want to be rocking

    “They didn’t last long. They just didn’t get us. They just weren’t ‘us’.”

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this kind of sentiment being expressed in a business self-described as having a family feel. ‘Tissue rejection’ is quite common with new talent, particularly senior talent, and particularly senior talent seen to want to ‘corporatise’ in some form or another.

    Flat, free-flowing, ‘power-shift-agile’ family feel cultures don’t take kindly to anything (or anyone) seen as creating red tape – even when their future growth might depend on a little more structure and discipline. And they certainly don’t like new talent rocking the boat too much in the direction of a more corporate horizon.

    This can be both a commercial and operational challenge, and an attraction and engagement issue too. That old chestnut of ‘managing expectations’ on all sides springs to mind. Family feel businesses operate with hearts and minds – new joiners beware: don’t even try to get the minds if you can’t get into the hearts first.

    Two final thoughts on the family feel organisational culture.

    The first – the nature of your operation has a big part to play. Retailers and manufacturers are far more likely, in my experience, to describe themselves as having a family feel (but I have known it in law firms too). Often this is rooted in a unity of purpose.

    Though admittedly rather grating, this Pilgrim’s Cheese ad is a fine – and rare – example of a multi-functional, multi-site employer connected by the same end goal (customer delight, of course!).

    Lastly, a word of caution to those seeking to work somewhere with a family feel (again, this is a story I’ve heard repeated time and again): disloyalty to the ‘family’ carries a heavy price. For all that camaraderie, agility, sense of belonging, recognition, passion and fun that they offer, when you decide it’s time to move on, the response can be harsh.

    As someone put it to me, “Even though I wasn’t going to a competitor and there wasn’t a logical next step role for me to go into, the minute I resigned it was very much ‘You’re dead to us’. That really hurt.”

    Of course, it’s a bit short sighted too – enlightened employers know great talent should always feel it could bounce back into the fold. But then, that’s the thing about families – each is unique, and, ultimately, each makes up its own rules.

    This blog first appeared on smrs.co.uk 4th June 2015

  • Work: A paradise of play?

    IMG_5885Is the future of work the promise of a paradise of play?

    The upside of Paul Fleming’s recent article for BBC Viewpoint suggests it might be – only it’ll just require us to totally rethink everything we think about work (and, especially, productivity).

    The concept of Play@Work has been a long held belief of mine when it comes to running a creative department.

    A lot of great ideas are the result of people messing around.

    Being silly. Thinking beyond the possible. Putting something ridiculous out there and then refining it into something meaningful. This is often how great ideas are generated.

    The imagination can’t be driven by process. Creativity can be harnessed by a creative process, no doubt – there are ways in, there are ways to stimulate – but really imaginative solutions happen in the head where seemingly unconnected things make new connections (or when two heads, or more, make the unconnected connect together to create a new whole).

    What sparks those connections might be found in a weighty briefing document – they may also be found by seeing an apple fall from a tree or the trail of a plane streaming across the sky. And, as creative managers, we have to provide our teams with all types of stimuli – the info, the space to think, and the time to play.

    The challenge is how it looks.

    Many moons ago, no one thought anything of a creative team spending the day concepting in the park. When I worked in Soho Square as a creative, I didn’t own a pair of jeans that didn’t have a grass stain on them. I had a permanent tan. And I knew all the dispossessed souls of Soho who’d inevitably find a patch of grass on a sunny day to pass out in.

    But then, this was the nineties. I didn’t have a work phone. There wasn’t an expectation I’d respond within the hour to any email. I couldn’t get an email unless I was at my desk. (No wonder it’s tempting to look back and see my Soho days as a golden age).

    Things change. Fast forward a couple of decades and, even though I know better, I still sometimes get that little twinge of ‘what are they doing?’ when I walk past someone’s screen and see them on Facebook (even though I’m encouraging them to do that, to keep ahead and source insight and inspiration from all channels, particularly social ones).

    It just doesn’t look like work and I can’t tell, at a glance, whether they’re investigating a client’s page (good) or just looking for a recipe for dinner that night (okay, but not so good and not if you’re spending an hour comparing the merits of quinoa to giant couscous).

    As for concepting on site, that too doesn’t always look like work. We’re very lucky at SMRS to have some great spaces to play in, but getting in a room and watching videos, scrawling things up on the wipe-clean walls or lying back on a bean bag (yes, we do have them!) and doodling something on a notepad doesn’t always, at first glance, look like work at all, let alone hard work.

    It is. It’s really hard work. It’s intense and emotional.

    It requires logic and soul-searching, honesty and courage. And sometimes the little break into silliness or a natter about the weekend fuels the next spurt of creativity (back to Fleming and his short-burst spurt working dynamics).

    But, if even an experienced Exec Creative Director can sometimes – in the grip of deadlines and always trying to deliver above and beyond – lose sight of the very thing he promotes as vitally important, Play@Work, it’s going to take a awful lot of soul-searching, change and will to get our heads around the very concept of a paradise of play at work for all, let alone to create the conditions for that to happen and thrive.

    The real upside? This is an ideas economy. Ideas are what we have to sell. We have to, as a commercial imperative, create new working environments to encourage greater creativity. Play has to be our priority in order to survive.

    I’m not so sure about paradise, but I do think – if employers learn how to facilitate productive play and employees learn how not to exploit it – something better really can be within reach.

    This blog first appeared on smrs.co.uk 24th May 2015