59 | Scott's Thoughts ... on building blocks for future working success.

Hi there and welcome to the first episode of what we've entitled Scott's Thoughts. If you've better ideas on what it could be called, then please do drop me a note in the DM below. Why am I doing this? Really, it's, I suppose, to maybe bring some thoughts, some thinking, some provocation to you. To think about things maybe a little bit differently. Very, very short films, maybe 5 or 6 minutes, a couple of times a month. As I say, just to get you maybe thinking a little bit differently, plant a seed that maybe otherwise wasn't there. A lot of organizations right now are going through this whole future of work thing, that term I hate, the new normal, and what that might look like. Vodafone came out this morning saying they were doing a 60/40 split of home time to office time using digital hubs and that kind of thing. So it's a really interesting time for organizations to work work out how do we take the goodness from the situation, which, let's be perfectly honest, has been a bit crappy at points over the past 12 months. There has been some really good stuff too. And I think the challenge for organizations now is working out what the good stuff is, and trying to bring it with them on the next stage of their journey. That's interesting. I was chatting to Denis Doolan this morning, a former podcast guest and Chief of Organizational Excellence in Special Olympics. And we chatted through 3 things, 3 areas that we thought were kind of quite pertinent when it came to the whole idea of organizations moving on to whatever that normal operating rhythm is going to look like. The first one that we both agreed very much on was the whole idea of managing work time. You know, we've got the Irish government now— I'm based here in Dublin— we've got the Irish government talking about legislating the whole idea of letting people work from where they want to work from. We've got big organizations talking about implementing the right to disconnect. None of that's going to work. None of that will work unless the culture lets it work in the organization. It doesn't matter how many times we put on emails, "If I've sent this to you after 7 PM, that's because it suits me timewise. If it doesn't suit you, please don't respond." We could put that on all our emails forever, but if you get an email from the CEO at 20 past 8 at night, you're going to respond. What does that tell us? It tells us that a couple of things. That first of all, we need to see that change happening from the top down. It needs to be leaders through the organization living those guidelines in organizations. And moreover, it needs to be all of us calling each other out, sending back a note to say, you know, we said we wouldn't send emails after 7, or actually just not responding, not feeling that pressure to have to respond because it's somebody more senior in the organization. Second one was trust. That I think many leaders and organizations still see work as a little bit like the scene out of Scrooge, with Scrooge up at the top table and all of the people in their team sitting down in front of them at small desks working away. That's gone. We know that's gone. That was gone on March 13th, almost a year ago to the day. And we've not had that since. And what leaders have had to learn is that we have to be much more about outcomes and not outputs. We have to be much better at setting objectives. We have to be much better as leaders at setting direction and letting our people find the best way to get there. But of course, not all leaders are going to be comfortable with that. And that's absolutely fine, because that's been the style they've had for 30 years. So we could say, well, let's get rid of them out of the organization. Or we could say, well, they're just not fit for purpose for this new world. Or, you know what, look at the flip side of the coin, we could support them to build on the strengths that they do obviously have, and help them try and bridge those weaknesses that are maybe there. Maybe we need to start treating them a little bit differently and bringing them on a journey. As I've said a few times now, you know, we talk about people leaders. You know, I see people leaders as people too. They also have, you know, some of the challenges and issues that we have on teams. The third piece then is the whole area of socialization. And I think it's one of the biggest things that we've seen over the past 12 months is the lack of social contact. I'm very lucky. My wife's here, my 3 kids are here. You know, I can go for walks around the block with a friend occasionally when I'm allowed. That's great. For people that live on their own, they don't have that luxury. For people that live in shared houses, they don't have that luxury. So that whole idea of socialization, and actually what Des and I talked about last night, connectedness, is really, really important. So as organizations, what are you going to do to try and get people feeling more connected when physically we just can't do it? We talked a lot about sports and social. How do sports and social organizations in big companies do that? How do they make people feel connected when we can't actually physically connect. And it's okay sometimes because, you know, if you've worked on a team with lots of people for a long time, you know them, they know you, they know how you operate, you know how they operate. But take all that away and put yourself in the shoes of a new joiner. Put it in the shoes of somebody that's just joined your organization. We all know them. It's been a year. We all know people who've gotten new jobs or gotten new roles on different teams and big organizations. They've never met the people that they worked with. And in the context of new organizations, you know, we've never been really particularly good at onboarding. Really, when even when it was face-to-face, we've not been particularly good at onboarding. It was very process and procedure heavy, much less about culture and purpose and values and leadership and what you can expect from us and stories and what it feels like to work here and bringing this to those new joiners and not just this, the heart, not just the head. So, you know, for me, thinking about what it is we can do more of to try and drive that connectedness is really powerful. So there were 3 things that, as I say, were in my head that we spoke about, that whole idea of managing people's work time or letting them manage it and calling out bad behavior. Thinking about trust and how we can help to build trust within teams, how leaders can build trust with their teams and vice versa. And from a socialization perspective, what organizations can do to really help people feel that sense of connectedness. The question is, and it'll be the same question at the end of all of these little films, what are you going to do differently? What can you do perhaps in some of these areas to make the experience of your people better so that as an organization you're more successful. You're not a charity. You're out there to be successful, but your people are at the very, very heart of that success. If you don't know what questions you should be asking, then we do. Get in touch, drop me a DM, put a note down there, or get on our website, inspiringchange.ie, and we'd be glad to help. We'd love to help out. We love it. Thanks for your time.