-- Intro --
Chris Moriarty
Hello and welcome to Workplace Geeks. The podcast is on a march to retrieve, review and disseminate the world's most electrifying and leading-edge workplace research with the amazing brains behind it. I'm Chris Moriarty
Ian Ellison
And I'm in Ellison
Chris Moriarty
We are your hosts on this most excellent, bodacious, workplace excursion, I said bodacious, before we dive into today's interview, we will first have a little rummage into Ian's mailbag. Ian, who has been in touch and what have they had to say?
Ian Ellison
We've had some lovely LinkedIn engagements off the back of our episode with Rob Briner, including but not limited to Mark Catchlove, who really enjoyed the episode, Rob Walden said “he loved this”, Nick Court, who said “Benchmarking is a sticky subject in our industry”, so it's great to hear this being discussed here like this.
Ali Khan, hello Ali, and he said, “It's’ the underlying factors of employee engagement that help’s get the right picture, and understanding how it links to job satisfaction and employee commitment. The full picture emerges where we can put a number on it”, now interesting that bit about putting a number on it, for a discussion another time.
I think what we need to do here is an extra special mention to Marwa Abba Latif, I really hope I said that okay Marwa and I'm sorry if I didn't, but Marwa did a comprehensive summary of key learning points for her network and beyond, so it was amazing to see and thank you so much for doing that, now we also got some DM’s, and some, should I say, constructive critic about this one... which is, it's really, really, totally fine, to be honest, from an academic perspective, it's nice to start seeing different perspectives and views emerge in people's reactions, because as we all know, if everyone is agreeing, it makes for a really dull conference and that probably translates to a really dull podcast series too, so, you know, we love to see different perspectives and people arguing their cases. We've said from the start, the Workplace Geeks community, it's all about discussion and debate, and learning together in a really mature and kind of “without prejudice” kind of way.
Chris Moriarty
This is exactly what Ian and I, hoped would happen, now whilst we get the opportunity to speak to these wonderful workplace brains, it really is your views and takes on what we hear, that keep the conversation going, so you can either do that on LinkedIn, in the Workplace Geeks LinkedIn group, you can use the hashtag #workplacegeeks, or ping an email to Ian and I at hello@workplacegeeks.org. And that could be on a number of things, it could be episode feedback, interview suggestions, reflections on workplace thinking event bookings, whatever, all of it in the service of growing the Workplace Geek community. Now let's look ahead to today's guests, Ian, who have we got lined up today?
Ian Ellison
Well, Chris today we have another absolute superstar of the UK HR and OD organisation development scene sometimes called the people profession, Perry Timm's, now Perry's LinkedIn banner looks like his collection of lapel badges, all sorts of kind of, incredible accolades and it acts as a shorthand for what Parry stands for ideologically, but Perry is going to tell us about this as your course.
He is the founder and chief energy Officer of PTHR, his organisation, he's got 30-odd years of experience in people, learning, technology, organisational change, and transformation, and in 2002, this year, he was ranked number one most influential HR thinker, by HR Magazine, now Perry tells us about a few academic roles as well, but what we’re particularly talking about today is a paper he co-wrote with Anna Hobson and Katie Stanley, called the state of HR 2021, compiling research, thought leadership, and emerging practices, for the people profession.
Chris Moriarty
Personally, I'm really pleased we've managed to get Perry on here, as I'll mention in the chat, I've known him for some time, and I've used him in a number of events because he never ever disappoints. Now, if you've seen him speak, you will not only remember the name and the energy, but you will also remember his phenomenal shoe collection, so, let's hear from the man himself.
-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
Perry, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast, now I've known you, I say this to lots of people, I've known you for a while but I really have known you for a long while. You were one of the first people I ever spoke to, as I joined the world of FM and stuff, but for people that haven't, and I don't believe that many of you haven't, but for people who haven't heard of the phenomenon that is Perry Timm's, just give us a little bit about you, your work and some stuff you get up to.
Perry Timms
Yeah, so I'm in year 10 of people and transformational HR, so I've been in HR for about 20 years, as that organisation that I've got now has kind of crafted its way into the future. We specialized in, I guess, optimizing how people experience work, we’ve been looking at things like self-management and much more nonhierarchical systems for a long time now, and the world has sort of collided into that space with COVID and everything else so, it's a kind of vibrant time to be doing that, and as a result of it I've gotten to write a couple of books, one about transformational HR, and one about an energised workplace, and that's literally what it says, how do we create an environment where people flourish?
I've been on the HR most influential thinkers list for about the last five versions of it, and this year, I made number one, which I totally didn't expect, and because its peer nominated, like, it's absolutely the best thing ever. A couple of TED Talks, LinkedIn learning instructor, and yeah, I pop up a few academic institutions as a visiting fellow and a guest professor, which is nice for somebody who didn't even do a degree course and left after sixth form, so, I kind of riley smile at that, I'm a fellow visiting I suppose you could say. And my kind of passion for everything really is that business can be a force for good and should, hence why this organisation I've got is now a certified B Corporation, we're also living wage, were climate positive, we signed the menopause pledge, and we're a four-day operating week, which I think we'll call on later. That's me and us.
Chris Moriarty
I've always, Perry, whenever I've seen you talk and whether we've had conversations as well, it always feels to me that you're a relentless optimist, that you always want to see the potential of what's going on, and you are high energy, and I guess what's happening now is that, some of the progressive ideas that you've been talking about for a very long time, that might have seen a little bit, off the wall a few years ago, I guess what you're saying is that with the pandemic, it started throwing up some shade on these sort of corporate approaches that we're very used to, and that's where some of your stuff doesn't seem so whacky now because it's actually, the stuff that people realise well maybe this, is the right approach and the way to go.
Perry Timms
Completely that. You're right to call it whacky, because people will often say that they'll talk about drinking Kool-Aid, and they’ll talk about jumping on trends and fads right, but there are fundamentally some things which have hit me in the call, that have absolutely settled and gone, this has to be the way, and I've struggled at times because you kind of think, why don't other people get it? It’s absolutely what is at our soulful best and what we should be doing.
But I think you have to recognise that the whole system in the way that it is, can bounce that stuff off of really nicely into niches, and then I find some people in those niches quite like being in niches, they don't want it to crossover, they want it to popularise. Now I don't think they've got any choice, because I think the bounce-off has suddenly become much more porous, and people are starting to realise what mattered to them, in a two three year period, where the world was just unrecognisable in many facets, and I could be smug about that, but I'm not, I'm just really happy that that boundless optimism doesn't keep bouncing off, it penetrates, and it permeates, and I get much more responsiveness to the things I'm saying, rather than, sounds dangerous and a bit weird.
Chris Moriarty
That's a nice segway into the main thing we want to talk to you about today, but as you've mentioned, we're probably going to spiral off into a few other things, if we are saying that there is a different way of working, the workforce has a new mindset and stuff, then, of course, then, the profession responsible for nurturing and corralling that workforce might have to evolve and change as well and that feels to me that the kind of natural step from what you were talking about there, to the report we want to talk about, which is called the state of HR 2021, it's a compilation of research, thought leadership and emerging trends, it was done in partnership with HR Zone, there's a couple of authors behind it, but just, just give us a little bit of background about how this came about, you know, is it something that you've been playing for a long time, did it just feel right, and just a little bit of the approach that you took, because, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of reference material in there, but it became very light document, it feels like.
Perry Timms
Let me start with a tiny bit of context in that I absolutely love the profession I'm in HR people, whatever you wanna call it, and often people will say yes, because I'm a people person, I mean, I kind of am, but equally, I'm a systems person, and I like to be curious and look everywhere I possibly can inside an organisation to find out where the energy sources and where the sort of misfires are, and so on and the opportunities. HR gives you absolutely that reason, because anywhere there's people you can go, so I would say I'm more about the sort of breadth of it rather than purely just the human beings and the souls that are involved in it, but thinking about those souls that are involved in that profession, during 2020 I got a little bit worried, a) cause most of the people I talk to clients, colleagues, everybody else, flat out trying to hold everything together when people had no idea what tomorrow would bring, let alone the next six months.
Furlough introduced and safety mechanisms and distancing and all sorts of other things, and I was kind of watching it and my professional body the CIPD absolutely stepped in and did some terrific stuff to help with guidance, almost literally every day they would publish something useful, and I would listen and I would learn and I did loads of mentoring people who were like, I'm stuck I don't know what to do, and I felt that was my only contribution part from banging pots on a Thursday night right, that was my only contribution. And so during 2020, I was just watching it all set on. Now early on in 2021, it was almost like, right we can sort of see the end to this pandemic, oh, how wrong that was, but thought leadership kept coming out, we've done this, we've seen that everybody's going to go remote technology is going to take over all sorts of things coming out, and in the first three months of 2021, I was like, now I'm pretty good at absorbing a lot of disparate information, I couldn't make sense of any of it and I thought, if I can’t, there'll be others who can't and there'll be others who are even less advantaged from their point of view of being immersed in an organisation, who don't know where to turn, they didn't want to believe that no what to back.
So I said to the team I was with at the time, how about we try and put our arms around this research and just see what really is themed from all the sources like Gartner and McKinsey and everybody else, to vendors, institutions, academic research, whatever it is, and we were up for it, so that's what we did, we literally put our arms around the world of HR kind of publications and work related thought pieces and research pieces, and I think, we set up a padlet board piece of tech where you can just grab clips and it keeps them as tiles, there was about 120 tiles on this, so we had a lot to look at. But we featured about 40 pretty chunky reports as our main thrust and then all those other peripheral views like blog posts, and YouTube clips, everything else, and we just started to see things coming out, so we quite literally started to dive in, pull it apart and reassemble it in themes, but the idea was just help people make sense of the absolute noise that's out there, that was the idea behind it.
Ian Ellison
Perry, couple of ways of thinking about what you've said there, one is kind of very classic literature review of, not necessarily fully academic stuff, but a lot of influential material, and another you might kind of say a bit of a meta-analysis, a bit of an aggregation of lots of different things, and your way of thinking about it was thematically, so how did you work out, how did you go about selecting essentially sorting the wheat from the chaff?
Perry Timms
And it was a lot of chaff, let's say because everybody suddenly became a bloody remote working expert overnight, right? So, there's tons of that don't get me wrong, however, we just quite literally, there were three of us there was me Katie and Anna are what we said is like what are we drawn to thematically so I was thinking about the profession and leadership, Katie and Anna picked their sort of areas to look out for, but we just literally divvied up the reports found what we could knew what other people were looking for, and just distilled down information that we could quite literally grab from the other person's kind of viewpoint and add to ours, but we didn't stop there actually, we then sort of crossed the other threads and had a look at the other, so it wasn't just left to interpretation, so we felt quite good that we weren't using bias. We were taking three distinct perspectives and then bringing them together and then just sense checking them as we've got through
Now what was really troubling me was how are we going to identify what's good to come out of it, but it really did start to emerge, because when one kind of big report from say one of the big four would start talking about very futuristic terminology, they would also start to talk about how they think the profession needs to get there in terms of capabilities and skills and we thought, well, this is starting to map out now. So it was quite literally from that immersive point of view and your right to use to meta-analysis, because I think we had to do that even though we didn't really know that's what an outcome might be, in order to get us something where there was a kind of flow to the end product, or at least a sensible usage of the end product, and what else was in my mind is that I've got a bias for action.
I cannot stand it when we procrastinate and, and don't get into doing things even if it's just early probing experiments, right? So, I said I don't want this report to just be a nice compendium, I want it to urge people to do things, and therefore we should help them understand what that doing might look like without being too prescriptive, so there was definitely a bit of it where we wanted to call to action at the end as well.
Ian Ellison
If I put my, kind of academic hat on, I could get I guess, if I chose to, I could get a little bit grumpy about a lack of a declared methodology or, you know, I could challenge you around that thing about bias because you sort of said we, you know, we tried to avoid it, but yeah, we declare that we had specialisms and interest, but what I hear sort of loud and clear above all of that, apart from the fact that that would make me a grumpy, easy to criticise, but lack of action, kind of, you know, approach, what you’re kind of saying there is look at speed, in motion, when all of this stuff is uncertain, this is at least an opportunity to take stock and do the best we can and create a product, create an output which is as digestible as possible for the majority. And I think that's my kind of interpretation of what you were seeking to do. Would that be fair?
Perry Timms
I would say that's absolutely spot on because, I think consumption for me was key, so if I were critical of grumpy academics, I'd say you don't make it accessible enough for people, there's, there's inordinate amounts of data out there that just sits there waiting for somebody to do something with, but it feels like it's impenetrable, and it's not usable and I wanted this to have the opposite effect of being helpful for people to test and experiment with because we couldn't wait for longtail academic research to probe all these things it was still emerging, as you said. So I think it was about a live moment, it was almost like trying to spot what the themes from Glastonbury were by being there rather than waiting two months down the line to get reactions, yeah.
Chris Moriarty
So, your point there being like, if I'm at Glastonbury, I want to know what the exciting trends are whilst I'm there and able to do something about it not, you know, two months later sat in my living room going, oh, that would have been good, I'd love to have gone and seen that band, but I guess from your point about the Big Four type research, you know, where they would sort of look at the future, then bring it back? There is this kind of parallel workstream stuff going on, I guess, where we need to, and there's a, there's a danger, we get very philosophical about this in the moment, right, but there is a danger that we flip flop between one of the two, well, actually it feels like it's the combination of the two, that's going to be what emerges as reality, which is, we're going to get on with stuff because I can't say to my Chief Exec, yeah, we're going to wait two years and see how this this pans out, I need to make a decision now and particularly if we relate it back to some property, community people that they, they've absolutely got to make some really big decisions now about leases, and all that sort of stuff so that you can't hang around. But how have you kind of managed that because it felt to me in your report that you've kind of looked at a new baseline, and that feels very, now, this is kind of saying this is what we're seeing emerging now, but then it's looking at playbooks and future systems and stuff, so, it feels like you've tried to match the two ends up, I mean, was that was that conscious? Did you did you set out for that? Or did that was that one of these things that emerged?
Perry Timms
Yeah, now it's very conscious of what I found without any disrespect to those people who are commercially viable in what they do, I could see that their commentary was leaning towards their products and services. It's like we you know, here's the future, oh and by the way, we can build it for you it's like, okay, I see what you did there, so I wanted to try and purify that a little bit by saying, but there is some real good things in what they're saying, you just don't have to buy their version of it however, some of the things that they're articulating about, dealing with here and now problems that don't box you in for future trajectory is incredibly sensible.
Now, without being disrespectful to my profession, because I don't like doing that we do have a reputation of struggling to do a strategic long term, aspiration and vision in all sorts of regards, and I picked out a very pertinent example, in the report of strategic workforce planning, which I spoke about at Workplace Trends last time we were in a room together. It's, it's synonymous with not being done and if it is, it's not been done very well, yet, it's the perfect vehicle, to break the cycle of hiring almost like refuge, and get to a position where you're on top of what your capabilities are for the future and what workforce you need in order to do that, so I used it as an urge to say, this has been around, it's underplayed and now's the time to bring it up, bring it into play and I deliberately said in that, you've got to get your leaders in with this, this is not you knocking on the door, this is you and leaders working in symphony. And that was coming through from all those big reports, they were saying, you've got to get, you know, the execs and the HR team like absolutely lined up and, and proper, I wanted to force that without saying, you know, the kind of cliches of seat at the table stuff.
Ian Ellison
If it's not too much trouble, could you take us through the headlines, just like the key, maybe the key areas and some of the key points that you know, the headline takeaways for listeners?
Perry Timms
So, I deliberately started with a what's happened almost like with slight cringe, because it's whatever, buddy, no one knows what happened, but I wanted to do a recognition of the fact that HR had stepped into a place it hadn't been so very prominent before, which was massively regarded by his colleagues and business and, and literally let loose, so I wanted to recognise that. There was a little bit of an homage and a little bit of a sense that actually, we should keep reminding ourselves that when we needed to perform we did, and perhaps there were doubts about that so that was the start of it, but then quite quickly I think it was, it was getting people to think but what now?
And I wanted to set out that we thought it was complicated before but everybody was in literally the same position and emerging out of it, it's become very, very complex, so, I deliberately built a section in there that started to try and unpack some of the demands that are coming through, and the challenges. So, digitisation was being talked about data utilisation, learning, inclusion, flexibility, and performance and experience, and it was about trying to take those terms from what we could very glibly just throw out there, into what does it mean now and what's different about what you need to think about to approach it right. So there was a sort of, I would say, it's almost like a navigating peace in the, in the now discombobulated space, you probably find yourself in, and then the call, later stage was to then settle on skills, because I think there was a massive shift, I suppose in what people expected from each other, during the pandemic, adaptability suddenly became like, highest on the agenda, and we were more terming things like well-being resilience now because of where we were, so it was almost like, what do they look like as a desired futuristic set of aspirations. And then trying to decide for people how to bring it to play, and give them a sense of traction and commitment, and thoughtfulness, so it's kind of structured in that way and I suppose, ultimately, I was trying to do three things for HR, look at their confidence in themselves, because they had shown up, look at their capability, and the fact that they've had a hard time, and it's gonna get tougher, perhaps cognitively rather than pure kilojoules, right? And then be very mindful of their capacity. Because there's a lot to do, and you need to pick the right things and back the right, lead projects, if that's the way to phrase it, so I want to try and help them do that as well.
Chris Moriarty
Right at the start there you talked about the fact that going in, things were kind of everyone was in a similar boat, and then coming out of it, everyone's suddenly going well actually, we think this is our best approach. And I guess I've never thought about it like that but you know, I've talked about it probably from an individuals perspective which when I joined an organisation, there's a series of assumptions I don't really think about, which is I'm probably going to be expected to work between nine and five or something similar, I'm probably going to be expected to get in the office, although there might be a bit of flexibility to not always be in the office. To going ‘Oh, hold on a second, I can, I can maybe shape this a little bit more around me as an individual’, now that's, that's where my head was at, but what you're talking about there at an organisational level, that might be several hundred people thinking, I can shape this around my very individual set of circumstances. So are you saying as well, then, the one of the challenges that we haven't faced yet, is that at a professional level, an HR practitioner, an HR leader, can't necessarily knock on the door, of a peer and go, hey, ‘what do you do?’ Because they go, well, ‘we do what's right for us’, it might not be right for you so from a skills perspective, it strips back some of the norms and goes actually, this is a core set of competencies that you need to have at your disposal to make sense of what's right for your organisation.
Perry Timms
Yeah, I do see that Chris, and I'll call it fragmentation because I don't think it's fracturing, but I think that's happened because I've been working with clients and quite literally when I talked to seven or eight business leaders about how they do what they do, I've got seven or eight different versions of it with lots of nuances even within the seventh and eighth. And they're trying to create a consistent approach and I've actually said to them, don't do it, it's futile, you know, create your strategy as something where you will be responsive to what's coming from those teams, but you will hold a much bigger space, knowing that that helps you serve your organisational purpose, to the point they've gone, oh yeah, but a look at the purpose, hadn’t I? Because that might be different now and so it's like, wow, what do you mean by that? And I'm like, well, we've suddenly got the opportunity to branch into international markets because of remote work, and we couldn't before, so okay, so that's an itch you can scratch or an aspiration you can set out, but people need to know that because you'll need to assemble people towards that and they will have their own version of flexibility and how they do that. So I think it's, it's literally given people a headache in trying to like, corral and coalesce that, when actually, they probably should just go with the energy. I talk, because I was kind of gifted the phrase by somebody else about high and low entropic states now, and that's what we're seeing, we're seeing very sort of dispersed things that would talk to chaos, but I think we're going to have to live with that, we can't squeeze it back.
Ian Ellison
You said do you wanted to kind of draw attention to and it sort of unfolded throughout your thematic analysis, you wanted to draw attention to the confidence, the capability, the cognitive capability in particular, and the capacity of the HR/OD profession, with a view to coping with this new future world of work. What’s really interesting, what you've articulated there is almost identical to what I think Chris and I probably experienced over in the workspace part of workplace if you like, the physical environment, part of it. So you articulated that for the first time, or maybe, maybe not the first time but with more prominence and more expectation than ever, you've got HR stood there going, okay, all of a sudden people are interested, and that is exactly what happened when it came to buildings and spaces and the decisions that we might need to make in the short term and then in the long term. And I remember having all sorts of conversations about helping people, it's all good and well to have the limelight, but, are you capable of standing in there and, delivering is almost like the first thing to spot is the parallel, but then to extend that and almost to sort of dig a little bit into some of the things you've been saying, so far, Perry. We've seen with our consultancy that we make the most workplace impact for an organisation, and I say we as a collective we, when you get the space people sat around the table with the tech people, sat around the table with the HR/OD people, plus the comms people plus the change people, and it's not rocket science, but almost the big penny drop has been that we have strength together, and conversely, when we see organisations struggling and asking for help, it's more often than not that they're still trying to do things at arm's length from each other, but all deliver to the Exec. So, one thing that I wasn't sure I saw in your report, was that kind of recognition of strength and collaboration, or did I miss it? And did you have it in there somewhere?
Perry Timms
No, you didn't miss it, I think what I obsessed about was a coalition between leaders and HR, not HR being subservient to leaders and not HR feeling like it's got to take the lead and be the kind of lead wolf, alpha with, so yeah, that that is now a very good point because just talking about the entropic state, a kind of low entropic state there, is exactly what you described. Change comes tech facilities, HR all around the table going hang on a minute, what can we do together that absolutely permeates through the whole organisation, both in its performance, its assets, its people, its future, its vision, and its adaptability. So I did miss that trick, yeah, and interestingly, probably, I missed that trip, because nobody else picked it up either. I can’t remember any of those big four reports that said HR link arms with FM please. Didn’t come in, didn’t come in at all, it was all about leaders and HR in cahoots, right? That’s where they were focusing on, on everything, though so that I think is perhaps where that’s come out, but I absolutely love your, view of almost like, you know a magnificent seven kind of thing coming in.
Ian Ellison
Chris and I, along with James Pinder, wrote a paper recently where we were trying to get to the bottom of what workplace experience is, and there's a bright bunch of stuff out there from the Good, the Bad to the Ugly, but generally non-academic, but the best stuff we could find on it was kind of, you know, it only could legitimately become workplace experience when it was talking about the different facets of workplaces, being people and cultural, being spatial, being technologically and actually needing to be united in service of doing good work. Up until that point, it was only a facet, so it's interesting I think a lot of this is also about the bubbles we live in, and what we see is in and out of scope for our research.
Chris Moriarty
It might also be connected to your earlier point, though, Perry, where you, you talked about the some of these reports, and certainly the academic ones won't fall into this trap, but it might be influenced somewhat by the organisation's you research, not having an FM advisory practice, so therefore, why would they be focusing on it? But maybe that's a, that's a nice way of getting to when I mentioned we've known each other a long time and you're one of the earliest collaborators I had from, outside the FM world, was a project that you and I were involved with, and Ian I think you got involved with remotely didn't you with the Workplace Conversation, which was a an attempt to between BIFM as it was Institute of Facilities management and CIPD that you've mentioned to, collaborate on this thing that we call workplace. Now, my there might be a multitude of reasons why that didn't lift off in the way that maybe I was ambitiously hoping, but my sense of it was, there was decent engagement from the facilities community, there was decent engagement from that section of that community that were considered themselves more workplace orientated and therefore more, I guess, how do we describe that? More sensitive and aware of things like culture and all the other bits that we talked about. But there was limited involvement from the HR community, now, that could be for some very practical reasons, like awareness and communication, but I just wonder whether, what we have experienced over the last couple of years, as much as it's focused on teams in estates and workplaces and work space and HR is saying, you know, we've got to deal with something very present and immediate, has it developed a better appreciation from each side of that kind of fence I've described for, or hold on a minute, you know, if you're if HR responsible for this bit, then let us work together because I heard that anecdotally, but I just, I wonder from where you sit, do you see these teams almost through circumstance have to work closer together and does that give us a bit of hope for some of this cross-contamination of thinking that Ian’s described?
Perry Timms
I would say, again, from experience working with clients and just ear to the ground, that things like an estate strategy, did become much more the parlance of the HR team, because, they were trying to calibrate where people would be. So organisations with big headquarters were now saying, ooof, hang on a minute, we can't expect people to come back and maybe neither should we, but what else have we got in the estates portfolio that services that so with branches, and so on, and so forth? So, I know that's been talked about a lot and of course, that has to include both aspects to it, because you got quite literal, geo locational stuff going on there, and intentional, and, I suppose supervisory and safety and appropriateness of all that, so I know it's happened there because I heard it several times.
I think it reared its head in the absolute sort of usual savings conversations, didn't it? You know, the nip and prune and tuck and offload type stuff, so I know it happened there, what I would say I've seen in smaller but quite powerful ways, is people can but what do we actually need the space for? People are actually asking those questions from both perspectives, and what I'm seeing is a little bit of under sophisticated let's just put some zones in here and they're in some soft furnishings, to genuinely people going, but what's the flow of work and people and space, we need then? And that's where I've seen the conversation elevate to a very nice level, and then actually that puts some real pressure in a nice way on the techies to go, how do you service there, so if we have got remote and hybrid type meetings and learning environments, and town halls and so on, it cannot be second class citizen stuff if you're at home, and it cannot be that we have presenteeism and people just barging their way into promotions or career paths or favour, just because they're in the office all the time. They've been asking some quite good questions like that, where I've come across it, and some of the solutions I've seen, like United Utilities, actually at Workplace Trends was a pretty imaginative and nicely done way of kind of minimal cost and experience-based utilisation of space, so I still don't think it's prominent enough, though, Chris, I'd say it's still behind the curve a bit.
Chris Moriarty
It’s interesting to hear you say that because I guess you're right, we probably and we have to always be careful us folk that, that frequent conferences and webinars and hear best practice. I remember Peter cheese at CIPD once saying to me that the goal is not best practice, it's common practice, and that's always sort of stuck with me this idea that actually this sort of stuff that we look at and conferences if it doesn't become the norm then all it is, is people talking in conferences, but what I guess my kind of hot take, I've done this a few, few of my sessions with people I've been working with where I've said that FM, estates and the like, that's going to end up being absorbed into talent strategy, because it's going to come down to we need to be competitive to get the talent we want in. The expectation now from this talent, is that we have flexibility in where they work, they have flexibility in how they work, they have flexibility in when they work, they also have got high expectations about when they're in there, in those environments, what we provide them with that, you know. So suddenly, it's gone from overhead to a source of competitive advantage, I guess that's, that's my sort of idealistic dream.
Perry Timms
I'd agree with that, and people are probably sort of prospecting a little bit about what is the future of, right? For functions like ours, and I think you're onto something when there could be an elevated space that we occupy quite literally a sort of arena rather than a physical space of people experience if we want to call it that, right? Because if we're looking at optimised performance, but if we're also looking at absolutely deep-rooted connection and belonging, safety, camaraderie, all those things, as a way of people testifying their allegiance, not just to the brand, but to the reason the brand exists, then I think there absolutely is a space we should be in together to do that, and so I've done some work with the City Council to create an elevated space beyond verticals, and it's helping them tackle complex social issues.
This is a complex social issue, and it needs elevating, and I think we will become less detached to our particular verticals or specialisms, we will hold them as our professional base, but we'll be spending time in that, in that kind of arena because we have to. I think that competitive advantage is exactly what you're describing. Because people now, from what I've been able to pick up from anecdotal and sort of pulse research, people are saying, what is the way you work then? What's my expectation of when I need to be or not? Because I'm in Leeds, and if you're in London, I only want to go there when it's absolutely optimal. You'll get the best out of me every other point in the week or month, but when we come together, what are we doing? And how does that work? So yeah, I think people are asking lots of quite deep philosophical questions are very practical questions, and we need to answer those.
Ian Ellison
I got a question about the future of work, if certain organisations start to embrace the future of the work the way you see it, and the way that you clearly declare it in this report, what will the outcomes of that will be in compared to their competition? Will we start to see some organisations just literally excelling through their people practices? What will be the differentiators of success? If people start to embrace the things, you believe so passionately in?
Perry Timms
I've taken the last few months to do a lot of research, as much as I possibly can into the whole economic field, how companies are valued, and assessed as having value, and where people sit in that particular equation, and I think the systems we've got now are incredibly lacking about all sorts of intangible things that people create within, right? And you could say the same about facilities because it's still about square inches and the softness of a seat and all that it's like, no, no, no, hang on a bit. There's much more, how do people feel? What does it make them do? And why did they want to come and huddle in that space? Why is it so important to them? So I think there's all these things that we thought of as a bit ethereal and not quite measurable, that I think we're getting to a point of frustration, in that we know they matter, so therefore, let's find a way to measure them, and let's find a way to bring them to life.
So my optimism before, was that people would feel the sort of spiritual urge that I had and we just want it to happen and make the processes that doesn’t work, because the economic system just pushes it out of the way. Now, I think we’re starting to almost if the economic system are flames, we’re starting to get some foam on top of that, to suppress those dangerous flames, and enable us to then start making progress, but I think we’ve got to be really cute, clever, and, you know, link it to sustainability in how we do all this. Because I think we’ve got to tune into the signals of people in systems who would be perhaps the last ones to comply with a much more liberated working way, to kind of go, but you know what, this will make you more bottom line and more sustainable and have happier shareholders and stakeholders, and government regulators, and the planet, and you can see them going, really? How do I do that then? Because, you know, I’m kind of dumbing it down a bit, but I think that’s the language we have to talk to, it isn’t just how we can say that your people will be more loyal, they’ll be like, okay, what does that get me though? And we have to follow that trail right through, so I think there’s something about how we make the case for that future to happen.
Now, I've already started some work, to try and bring together a lot of those disparate voices who are trying to say the same thing, but through their different lens or brand, to say, let's make a bigger noise, a bit of a thunderclap, because I think there are people more receptive to it than before, the Business Roundtable declaration of 2019 it's about stakeholder value, not shareholder value. CBI report about purpose led businesses are more profitable and sustainable, some of this stuff is coming together for people to start listening to, and I think if we can amplify that, I think we can get over the edge and start to see this stuff become more imbued and actionable, and when people start seeing what it does, as in reducing harm to the planet, increasing care and duty of people, I think they'll start going I don't know why I didn't did it before, but I don't care because it's working now. So again, that's a quite long-winded answer to what I think the future will need, it'll need the economic equation, slash departure from trickle down capitalism, to start to permeate and exist,
Chris Moriarty
I was in a workshop not so long back, and they were talking about a piece of work that Fidelity the financial institution had done on the value of organisations that embraced sustainability, the ESG stuff, and they've said they're more valuable. And so you've got the you know, sustainability and economics, you've got people, and societal kind of business performance and value, and what you're saying is all these ideas were kind of, they were kind of fringe ideas, and all of a sudden, because the landscape has been shuffled, it's like these ideas might have their time now, and something like sustainability, of course, there is literally a burning platform with it that is, is keeping people kind of focused on that, but there's other elements of it, that you've talked about there. So you're trying to corral that into a this is all part of the same gig guys, which is just a better world of work, where we could all benefit, you'll get lots of money, and you'll be happy, but we'll have loads of satisfaction and enjoyment and joy, and we'll be happy and everyone will be happy, which is a nice idea.
Perry Timms
You're so right, I used to think about me just being a tiny dot, in amongst the massive universe, it's almost like what difference can I make? And then it's like, well, but if I can connect some of the dots, like literally, that's how it goes, and I've been trying to use a sort of community lens for a long time to do this. And even our collaboration, Chris back in 15 when we were talking about FM and HR coming together, I could see that as being two dots coming together and I still think there's a stronger link, but you're right, it needs a bit of reinvigoration which I think is now, but I think when we get a lot of dots connected, and we kind of illuminate up, then people will notice that they are starting to notice and I think if you're looking for signals, and you're just about to step into the workplace, they're very different signals to 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And what you tune into and what you want what you aspire to, and I'm not generationally stereotyping here, because I hate that, but the signals are different, the choices people are making are deeper and richer, perhaps than they were in the past.
Chris Moriarty
You're an organisation , PTHR, I know you're a smaller organisation, and some of the enormous guys you'll talk to as part of your work, but you are living and breathing some of these things, so you've got the B Corp, accreditation, certification, you're Living Wage, you mentioned these things at the front, so just, I guess, from a Workplace Geeks point of view, where we like talking about collections, synthesis and articulation of, of evidence and data and stuff. How are you approaching needs? Is it that you believe in them? And therefore, you do them? Because they're the right thing to do? Do you do them because you think that's going to make you a more effective organisation? And I use the word effective rather than profitable or anything like that, so that you can take it any way you want to take it, is it a bit of both? How are you kind of monitoring? Like, is this, is this doing what I hoped it would do? How do you guys’ kind of look at that?
Perry Timms
B Corp the big one, right, because I've long admired what B Corp stood for, businesses are full force for good, and I think my sense of that was, and this was a long time ago, so it's amplified now a disappointment in politics, like supposedly standing for what it stands for and it's complete charade, isn't it? And I think it's almost like, well, who's screwing it up less? Well, I suppose business is screwing up a bit, but it might have some good intent, and it's got reach in it, you know work is such a big part of people's lives, so what, why not? And so, researching companies who have taken that pledge and where it's gotten them, we entered into it before the pandemic and started to look at the criteria, shall we say, to assess, and we knew we were up against the big thing, because this is very deep, very rich and very searching. Sso I think at that moment, Chris, it was literally like what a belong to the club, because it's the right club, that's what was behind it, but when you get into, and you take the B labs assessment, whoa, it really tells you where you light, and naive and ignoring and strong and so on, so it was a kind of real soul search on whoa we have got enough there or we do loads there, but we don't capture it, we don't evidence it, so I would say it's a massively good test on that word effectiveness, right, that came through.
Now I know IIP, I know certain ISOs and other criteria, and this one got us really quite captivated about what it was telling us we did’'t quite have or should have and could do more of, so it was really good for that.
The four-day week one came about completely instantly, because during the pandemic in 2020, and we were trying to rescue the business, because we lost loads of it, we were just flat out tired and I knew Andrew Barnes’ stuff in New Zealand, and I knew about this concept, but even before that, and I've talked about this before, I was at a hackathon that Leeds City Council ran that had lots of people from across Leeds, not just for the council, and we were all talking about why aren't more women in leadership positions, and I was hosting that session, and during that session, it just dawned on me that a five day leader role and a three day head of function role just don't fit, and that's perhaps too much of a barrier, and it got me thinking I asked the question, why do we still have a five day week? Why who says? It's been burning in my mind, I think since then, so when I got the chance to go, hang on, the way to do this is to break the week down. The team actually did say, but we've got more work than ever to try and rescue the business, that seems nuts and I can remember myself saying I did something the day before, that I should have only took me an hour, I was at it for about five. I said that's not good, I'm not feeling that I'm optimal or doing anything to the level I'm comfortable with, and the only thing I can think of doing is regenerating. Bear in mind, the Energised Workplace was a book that was about to come out, so I knew that was an issue. The other thing I think was interesting about where we pinned is that I deliberately led the conversation but the team went for it to punctuate the week, Monday, Tuesday on Wednesday off Thursday, Friday on and people said, don't you want to do a Friday or a Monday? And I’m like, I don't know about you but a long weekend is lovely, but it's also a kind of slower start. I said I'd love to catch my breath and the team were kind of like okay, well let's give it a go, so it's kind of my intention and their experiment and within about eight weeks we absolutely knew it was working because we just had a different va va voom, about us
Chris Moriarty
Effectively you're talking there about two days sprint's like yeah, you only ever worked two days consecutively, I mean, is there any wiggle room in it? And this is, I guess four-day weeks quite a hot topic, isn't it? Because its keeps coming up and there's just this sort of mental barrier that we're like a bit like you're you talked about your team even came to the like, I had a can't work, it can't work, it can't work, but it clearly is working right?
Perry Timms
I, I'm not so wedded to the fact that, and the reason we went for a Wednesday is an indication there, that everybody kind of goes right Thursday's the new Friday, there we go, it's like hang on a minute, you just squeeze the weekend a different format. I'm not so pro that, and people say yeah but it's not flexible enough and I get really arsy about that, because I'm like, you've never looked at our version of flex, it is absolutely the most nimble thing ever. So I put in a bit of a shift yesterday, but I know I've got a couple of hours in the bank, I'll trade it for another time when I know I can get away with it, so I probably have the least defined pattern out the whole team, but one of the team can't get childcare on a Wednesday, but can on a Friday, so she's traded it we honestly we don't care. Most of the time we're shut on Wednesday, but we weren't round it, and you'll say, well, that's okay for you because you're small and all that kind of stuff, but every minute counts, if you know what I mean, but what we've got is really countable minutes now.
Chris Moriarty
I mean, I guess the only way of finding out is doing it, and experimenting, and I guess you would, that takes us right back is a lovely arc there, isn't there about, you know, the report that you wrote, which was let, yeah, we keep asking questions and we can keep redefining the problem, we can keep finding more evidence, and then counter evidence and doing all this sort of stuff, we can do that, but actually, we won't learn anything, we won't find anything out until we just roll our sleeves up, crack on with a bit of guidance behind us with a bit of knowledge behind us, and learn as we go as long as we're capturing it, and going back to your B Corp kind of example. We do, do that we just don't capture it and evidence it, well, let's make sure we're doing that good stuff, because I guess there is a tendency to think about four day weeks is Monday to Thursday and have Friday's off, but if I knew that there was another organisation doing it slightly differently that might make me go, well, why don't we try what Perry’s tried, let's, let's try and put this sort of tent peg up in the middle of on a Wednesday and shift all the work either side of it, and let's see if that works for us, document it, capture it and talk about it,
Perry Timms
We're pretty obsessed about impact, so we want to know what the impact is as in an earliest possible opportunity, so we will talk about a kind of sentiment feeling impact initially, we will then talk about how much we've got now that we can say whether it's a kind of performance impact and whether there is any kind of metrics and hours. So, we've taken to recording our hours not because we want to check up, because we want to validate it, and it's purely for that we don't look at all, at what people are doing as a checkup, we might do it for client saying, are you sure you billed us for the right hours?
We've now got evidence for that that's refutable if you want but, but it's just helpful to know where are we spending our time? What the four day week and the punctuation forced us to do, was to look at all the things that we don't always take account of that are wasteful and stretched out and a bit too long and so on, so we're brutal on meetings now we rarely get together unless we know we absolutely have to because it's good, and so we use a lot of asynchronous methods of recording stuff and doing it in a relay and so on. But what else we've done is we have realised that actually, that time could be social, so we just do social stuff with no guilt at all, we will all log on, have a little chat about what's inspired us in the week, what we're up to whatever, we just do that because it's good human stuff, and one hour per week, at 2pm on a Tuesday down tools learn something. We hardwired that in as well, because we were worried learning would be pushed aside and we didn't want that to happen, so we have literally generated, you know, kind of 50-odd hours of learning per person as a hardwired thing. And it works a treat.
-- Pinder Ponder --
Chris Moriarty
Right James, welcome back to the gang, you've been busy doing other things. Have you enjoyed your little break from me and Ian, or have you missed us immeasurably?
Chris Moriarty
Anyway, so James, have you had a chance on your break to listen to the interviews we did with Rob and Perry? Have you had a chance to catch up?
James Pinder
I did, they were excellent, yeah. Two really good interviews.
Chris Moriarty
Good, well, I'm glad that that you're happy with what we've done for you in your time off. Let's dive in, so what we're going to do is we're going to do a bit of a Pinder Ponder across the two of them, right? We're going to try and connect some dots and bring the whole conversation together. So what was it that that struck you about, either of the conversations or some ideas maybe with them combined? What was it that struck you about the two interviews we've had over the last two episodes,
James Pinder
Three things, shall I focus on the first?
Chris Moriarty
Yeah, it's an amazing place to start the first one, you do that.
James Pinder
So, one thing that stood out to me was in Rob's interview, he talked early on in his interview at noise and signals, and guess that's nice metaphor really, I mean, he was talking about in HR, you know, being able to sort of cut through the noise and really understand what's going on. And then later on, he talked about, you know, fashions and people looking for new things, and I think there's even a discussion about rules of the game and who sets those rules, but overall, this sort of, this sort of discussion about the industries we work in, and all the noise that's generated by people with vested interests and incentives, often to try and sell you things. So that that came through in Rob’s, but it also came through in Perry’s as well, and he talked about its thematic analysis, and I guess the process he used for doing that, but also, within that discussion, he was talking about, again, lots of noise, and, you know, lots of things being pushed out, particularly during the pandemic, and locked down around work and all of those sorts of things and trying to cut through that and work out well, what's actually useful, as from a practitioner point of view, what's, what's useful, and what isn't, and what is what has substance and what does not, so I thought there was a nice linkage there, you know, the approach the sort of thing, the discussion from two different perspectives, but there was a definite overlap,
Chris Moriarty
It does feel like it's two responses to the same challenge, which is, we are presented with lots of stuff on a daily basis, and there's some terrifying stat about messages that we see each day and all the rest of it, and particularly with the emergence of social media, as a source of news and views, right? You know, it's the game has kind of changed slightly, whereas you might go to a publication in the past, or you might go to a specific conference, you know, the amounts of stuff that is coming at us is constant, and it felt to me that Rob's approach is to arm people with the skills and the mindset that's going to help them sort the wheat from the chaff, which is fast becoming the most common thing we say on this podcast, but it felt to me that Perry's response was to almost provide a service to the profession say, look, you probably haven't got time for that, so me and my team have done that, and we've kind of tried to filter out some of it and pull through the common themes and, and what you think of them now, I'm sure there's arguments either way, on what the best approach is, but that felt to me like it's almost like a difference in mindset, which says, on one hand, let's arm people with the skills to do this themselves, and Perry's view, which is, these guys are busy, they haven't got time to do this, we'll do it, and we'll, we'll try and serve, will serve up a kind of a, an overview that they can digest more easily.
James Pinder
Yeah, and it's not that those two things are mutually exclusive either, you can do both of those things, but I guess there is, there is a difference there.
Chris Moriarty
You know, just looking at some of the feedback that we've had from Rob's episode, which obviously, we've had the benefit of a few weeks is that, it is somewhat controversial is quite a challenging position, right? Because it is a challenge to thinking, even, and what I kind of took from Rob’s one was, some research outputs and reports that you would actually, wouldn't think to challenge because of the institutions that they've come from and the credentials of the people that wrote it, but he, it is a challenging position. Whereas Perry's is a bit more, kind of arms around it, lets you know, let's take the good stuff, even he was, he was sort of made the case for reports that were quite clearly commercial in nature to say just because they are don't discount them, you just don't need to buy from them, you can take the good stuff out. So he's very kind of open-minded to viewpoints, whereas Rob takes quite a defined hardline, and what should be considered good and useful evidence for decision making so, you know. I don't know whether practitioners are going to sit there and listen to both ends of that spectrum, if we're sort of, you know, creating a spectrum in our mind's eye but, and go well, which side of that should they lean on? Is there a way that both approaches can be sort of blended together to help people, navigate the noise that we're talking about
James Pinder
Whether it is a spectrum, isn't it because the way I was thinking of it, and I guess this links on to another point that was going to raise but there's almost like, I'd sort of envisage it with two axis utility and, and robustness may be something could be useful, and useful in the timescales you need it, and it can still be robust but, there is a tension there as well, isn't there? There can be tension, should I say, , you might need to make a decision really quickly, and you might not have the time to go and do the research, or the data collection in the way you'd like to, so you might have to make do, or make do with, with the information you've got, whereas if you've got lots of time, that might not be the case, and so I think there is, they can be in tension, but I don’t think they always need to be, but often they are in it in an organisational setting where people are under pressure, there often limited time, and limited resources,
Ian Ellison
Everything, talking about things which we say too much of, on this podcast, critical thinking, I think I'm the broken record on that one, but just the, from Rob's perspective, encouraging critical thinking skills, and from Perry's perspective, sort of trying to do it on the fly, like you said, James, but introducing just that criticality. What I was pondering more, though, was just how much in some respects their approach is, spoke to their characters, just demonstrates that when it comes to social science, it's really, really hard to take the person out of the research, because Perry is, by his own admission, a relentless optimist, and that flavours the way he does work, and Rob is a much more realist, potentially pessimist, that's the way I sort of picked up on it.
Chris Moriarty
Pragmatist, is he a pragmatist?
James Pinder
Rob, if you can just write in, please and tell us what you think you are? Thank you
Chris Moriarty
Tell us what you are. But I yeah, I get that, and I suppose as well, in the kind of multi layered contextual kind of way, it will also depend on your personal character, and it will also depend on the culture of the organisation and what's valued, right? Because there will be some organisations that are very analytical in their nature, therefore, evidence, and the robustness of that evidence is crucial, there will be others, and to your point, James, that are working in very fast paced industries where they value gut instinct, there might be organisations that value kind of fail fast mindsets, and are much more inclined, to do something that is, probably not as robust, but certainly make sense and trust people with their gut instincts and their intuition. Now, I suppose I kind of pause halfway through that, because I was kind of mindful that we don't want to sort of say that Perry's was rushed, because obviously, it took him a very long time. But what it's more about the sources of information he was willing to include in his study, versus Rob, who I think takes a much more rigid threshold doesn't he? For what he would include in that.
James Pinder
Yeah, and even in those, you know, this situation described then where you might be in a fast-moving industry, you might have processes and systems in place where you do have the evidence at hand because you've prepared, and you've got the data, I guess it's if you're in that sort of industry and have that data and information, which some organisations don't, or maybe it's spread all over the place, or it's stuck in spreadsheets where people can't get to it, then that's when it becomes a problem, isn't it?
Chris Moriarty
So what was your, what was your second thought that struck you when you were listening to our interviews?
James Pinder
So, the second one was around something that Rob talked about, which was around measurement, I guess, ultimately, and it also cropped up in Perry’s, and I think he talked about employee engagement, and one of the problems that he saw with employee engagement was the multitude of definitions that exist around what employee engagement actually is, and that's before we even then get to how do you measure it? So, if we define something in a different way, or if we're three of us have got three different definitions of what something is, how can we then go and sort of measure it in a consistent way? Yeah, that resonated to me, because, you know, one of the exercises Ian and I have done over the years with students, master students when we're doing quantitative research methods is, getting them to define a concept, something like employee engagement, and then measure it, and that's a really tough challenge until you're asked to do something like that you don't realise actually how tough it can be, because coming up with a working definition is difficult.
But then when you say, right, come up with some indicators now, sort of things you do does in your organisation, then you can see it can be really challenging sort of exercise, so, I thought that was interesting because, well, again, it resonated, but it's also something in organisations, or in business, we take for granted these, these terms, things like employee engagement and other terms, productivity, we sort of take, we use them, we take them for granted, but we also make assumptions that other people are using those terms in the same way as us. And often that's not the case, and we know that, we know that from when we use the term workplace, so yeah, Rob talked around those, but it also cropped up in Perry's interview as well, when he was talking about some of the things that cropped up during lockdown and the pandemic, some of the sort of issues that sort of came out of hybrid working about how certain things make people feel, I think he was talking about spaces, you know, why do people want to use this type of space or huddle in this type of space. But essentially, what he was getting at is, some of these things aren't quite measurable, or the more, more difficult to measure that, and I'm sort of quoting him here, but it says, but we know that they matter, so let's find a way to measure them to bring them to life.
So again, this sort of coming from a slightly different direction, but this challenge of measurement, I guess, and how we go about measuring some of the things that are more difficult to sort of capture, and, I guess the risk is if you don't then you focus on measuring the things that are easy to measure, even if they're not important.
Ian Ellison
I think I'm a little bit torn on that one, because, what I've witnessed with lots of academics is essentially bun fights about what the right definition is, and that can be to the detriment of progress, and it can be to the detriment of really doing anything constructive, other than, other than arguing internally. I get the frustration, and I get that it fundamentally floors things if we're talking about different stuff, but I am incredibly weary, equally of spending so much time trying to nail something that you actually knocked the stuffing out of its value, and I don't, I'm not suggesting a solution to that but, I get the frustration.
One of the other things that Rob was saying was, you know, this thing isn't new, so why are we pretending it's new, which is actually more about emperor's new clothes, and organisations trying to parade new solutions where perhaps there's nothing really that new about them, so there's sort of an embodied frustration in there isn't there? But, the definition thing, it sort of fascinates me on an ongoing basis I mean, in episode one of Workplace Geeks, we declared workplace to be a broad church almost as an antidote to that so that we didn’t have to keep arguing that our view of workplace was this and somebody else’s work view of workplace might be that well if you applied that to employee engagement, perhaps you would broaden, in a way that allowed you to explore more, I don’t know. But would that get you out of the definitions war? That would limit your ability to progress.
James Pinder
Yeah, see, I, I'm less concerned about the definitions war, I just think it's, it goes if nothing else, it goes back to critical thinking, and what are you talking about? Are we, when people are throwing these terms around, are we talking about the same thing? Or do we know what we're even talking about? So, it's not about whether one definition is right or wrong. But we haven't talked about the same thing. And often were not, we know, we know that from the conversations we have.
Chris Moriarty
It reminds me of a project that I was involved with, a long time ago in 2007, when I worked at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, they wrote a paper, the research team there wrote a paper that proposed that modern marketing had to redefine itself, because up until that point, at that moment in time, they'd been using a definition from 1976. Right, so in late 2007, 2008, you sort of digital marketing starting to take off, you know, different business models are starting to emerge and stuff, so there was a, there was a project and review it now, the definition that they had at the time was the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements, profitably. Now, that, I quite like that definition. Full disclosure. There was often a criticism about the word profitably, because there was people in the public sector saying, well, that doesn't quite capture us, Now, that is kind of a common problem with definitions, isn't it? Because the more you try and tighten it, the more you exclude people, and then you leave it loose, and then it doesn't make any sense because the proposed new definition was, buckle up and take a deep breath. The strategic business function that creates value by stimulating facilitating and fulfilling customer demand. It does this by building brands, nurturing innovation, developing relationships, creating good customer service, and communicating benefits, by operating cuts customer-centric, by operating customer centrically, no, it's centrically. By operating customer-centricity, I'm going to make it up, yeah, definitely.
By operating customer centricity marketing brings positive return on investment satisfy shareholders and stakeholders from business and the community and contributes to positive behavioral change, and a sustainable business future.
They stuck with the original definition in the end, there was a big Hootenanny about the change, I guess my point is, and the way that Princess Leia, warned Emperor Palpatine, in A New Hope, is that the tighter you clench your fist and more systems slip through your fingers, and there is this kind of challenge with definitions. The kind of point I'm making is, is definitions, if we go down the Rob track, then you know, we shouldn't measure it unless we can all say that we are measuring the same thing. Now, maybe he means from a paper point of view, from a research point of view so that we don't make bold claims, I think that was really what his main issue is that employee engagement equals this or does this, you know, a kind of a tangible causality. So, do we abandon it? Or do we take the kind of Perry approach that says, look, we kind of intuitively know, roughly, even if we're slightly varied in our articulation of it, because at the end of the day, people like to use words in different ways, it's a very, you know, it's a very creative way of expressing right? You know, we use words that we think best represent how we feel about a topic. Is it more about, being able to kind of talk about the feeling, that the sort of the space and finding a way to measure it, that's right for us, not necessarily a universal measure across all organisations,
James Pinder
What I think’s interesting about that bit of discussion there, we've sort of got bogged down with the definitions, but the bit, the latter bit, which was about the measurements but Perry’s thing, about some of the hardest to get to stuff, we've not really talked about halfway, because I think that's really interesting, in terms of it may be challenging, so sort of tried and tested ways that we go about measuring things in the sort of areas were talking about.
Chris Moriarty
Have you got a third point, James?
James Pinder
No
-- Outro –
Chris Moriarty
And that's that, and not just for today, but for this little run of episodes. When Ian and I started, we didn't think we get as many interviews done in this little sprint as we did, because we ended up with 14 in total. Now we've recorded in spare rooms, we've recorded in co-working spaces, and we've even recorded live on stage. We've spoken to workplace research royalty, emerging leading thinkers, experts in real estate, workplace design, technology, sociology, organisational development, and more.
We've talked about saving the planet, we've talked about hybrid working, before it was even hybrid working, co-working secret sauce, active working, photo-based feedback, telecommuting and the role of evidence.
We've considered all of them for their contributions, both in terms of how organisations support their employees, as well as the wide range of research methods and skills that are brought together to unlock those insights. Now, personally, I've learned a huge amount, and I hope that you guys have to.
Ian Ellison
Hang on a minute, Chris, this sounds like the end, but I didn't think we were finishing what's going on?
Chris Moriarty
Fear not people, this is not the end of the journey, Ian and I are going to take some time off, and come back fresh in the autumn, where we’ll be interviewing some amazing brains on how the world of work and workplaces are evolving along with our understanding of them.
And we'll also have some exciting news from us on a new project, and we'll even interview ourselves, if that's the thing, about some research we're due to have published in the coming weeks, so watch this space.
Before we go, a final quick reminder that you can still use the promo code for Sam Conniff’s Uncertainty Experts cause the code is geeks, and that will get you 20% off that's valid until October so you might not be able to use that by the time we come back to the airwaves, and just because we're not dropping new episodes doesn't mean the conversation has to stop. Find us on LinkedIn, talk about the show using #workplacegeeks and drop us a line at hello@workplacegeeks.org. And if you have time, as it would mean an awful lot to us, remember the three R's, rate, review, recommend. See you all again soon.
Ian Ellison
See you all again soon, folks.
