Let’s address workplace phobia

Opinion

If we are genuine about the benefits of getting people back into the workplace, we need to be more honest about why people still have such a profound aversion to it.

When WPP CEO Mark Read announced that he wanted to make working four days a week in the office mandatory, he must have anticipated a certain level of resistance.

Presumably that is why he didn’t consult with staff to help pave the way. He probably anticipated that it was a topic that was never going to achieve consensus and just decided to issue the directive.

I have watched the initial fallout work its way through from dismay about the way it was communicated to a full-blown petition from employees demanding a change of heart and a significant drop in WPP’s share price.

It is fair to say that many senior leaders are talking about it, both in public and in private, as there is much to discuss. In fact, all the arguments are so well-rehearsed that it may explain why Read and his senior team probably felt they didn’t need to listen to them all over again.

Pros and cons of flexible working

On the one hand, we have the undisputed value to creativity, team relationships and productivity that comes from people gathering together.

As a people-and-ideas profession, marketing has always benefited from collective intelligence. While the pandemic demonstrated it was perfectly possible to work with teams dispersed in their homes, it was suboptimal and led to genuine concerns over mental health and wellbeing.

Ironically, working from home favoured senior executives: able to enjoy their relatively larger homes and gardens, and grateful to no longer be required to spend big chunks of time on planes and in hotels.

But we all agreed that working in isolation was bad news for workplace culture and an utter nightmare for many working parents who lost the delineation between work and home modes.

On the other hand, the majority of people were more than happy to bank the time and financial savings by no longer having to commute and everyone accepted that a lot more jobs could be delivered remotely than previously believed possible.

Flexible working and hybrid models were no longer simply the preserve of parents or those with enlightened bosses. Add into the mix the more online community-savvy attitudes of a new generation coming into the workforce and the pendulum swung in favour of changed expectations from employees. Namely, abandoning old-fashioned notions of presenteeism and embracing progressive cultures of flexibility and trust.

Workplaces weren’t working

As I observe the profound resistance of so many WPP employees, I can’t help wondering why there is such dismay from people who don’t have a particular reason for needing to work from home, but just hate the idea of going to their place of work.

I suspect many senior leaders are guilty of rose-tinted glasses and have perhaps forgotten how unpopular many workspace changes already made in the lead-up to March 2020 were.

Certainly, if you visit many modern offices, they look beautiful, with a variety of workstations, cafes and even gyms. And I can only imagine the frustration of company boards as they oversee the considerable investment that continues to be poured into these under-utilised buildings.

But the truth is that, in a pre-pandemic world, attitudes to the allocation of space had already undergone a quiet revolution. Executive offices were removed, people were no longer allocated their own desks and everyone was asked to be “flexible” about sitting in a different place every day.

And if we are honest about it, this approach was not a universal success.

Teams found they were no longer sitting together. Shared spaces were so noisy, people started wearing headphones to block out the sound of colleagues talking. Too often, people came into work to find there was nowhere for them to sit at all and they had to work in a nearby coffee shop.

Remember all that excitement about Starbucks being “the third place” and seeking to give people another place to settle in apart from home and work?

Teamwork and privacy deterioration

When companies were making major savings by constantly changing the ratio of employee to desk, people had little choice but to suck it up.

I certainly experienced the impact of this when I was at Aviva. The loss of my office in favour of a locker and competing with everyone else for a place to plug in my computer was, for me, much less an issue of loss of status but the loss of a meeting room for my team.

Spontaneous gatherings of my team to talk through work issues became increasingly difficult to do. Time was wasted “trying to find a room” and conversations about quite commercially sensitive or personal issues were being held in an open forum.

I suspect that the combination of these changes not having fully settled and the stress they induced not being properly acknowledged makes many people develop a phobia about significantly increasing the time they spend in the workplace.

Many phobias begin because of a bad experience. Let’s face it, people were already finding their offices stressful places, which were not conducive to productive individual or team working, long before the pandemic.

Productivity gains are not a certainty

The inconvenient truth is that many people felt they had already been detached from their teams when they were forced to be flexible about where they sat at work. The constant change in location was disorientating and brought no tangible upside to the quality of work.

Quite the opposite, in fact. People were already increasingly working from home on a Friday to have the time and conditions to get more done. There was a positive trade-off for the individual of a regular quiet place to put their laptop versus their loss of creativity and other undoubted advantages of being with their team.

People being in the same building won’t necessarily restore collaboration and an uptick in productivity if the conditions aren’t right.

Workplaces that work

It is worth consulting people on how to make offices better places for doing work. A rethink is surely required on how to design spaces that enable people to sit and work together in their own designated area, and with enough desks to accommodate everyone.

Teams need a sufficient number of meeting rooms in which they can talk to each other face to face and in private.

If we are genuine about the benefits of getting people back into the workplace, we need to be a bit more honest about why people still have such a profound aversion to it.

Giving up the quiet and certainty of a familiar workstation (even if it’s the kitchen table) to commute into a noisy office and fight for a place to sit is not a great trade-off.

We need to make workplaces more fit for purpose if people are to relearn the upside of being together and collaborating in person.

Jan Gooding is one of the UK’s best-known brand marketers, having worked with Aviva, BT, British Gas, Diageo and Unilever. She is now an executive coach and is also chair of Pamco and Utopia. She writes for The Media Leader each month.