-- Intro --
Chris Moriarty
Welcome back to the Workplace Geeks podcast. I'm Chris Moriarty.
Ian Ellison
And I'm in Ellison.
Chris Moriarty
And we have returned, returned for a second series of the Workplace Geeks podcast. Now we last aired an episode in August. So that's around six months ago. And that's been too long, but we've not been idle. No, we've been really busy on a number of exciting new projects and there’ll be more than that in a moment. But first, Ian, how are you? Have you missed being here with the geeks?
Ian Ellison
I'm very good, Chris, of course, because you know me, I will happily chunter on about researchy stuff to my heart's content. So, it's great to be back. It's also, I think, you will admit this as much as I when you have many, many plates spinning, getting a podcast out is quite a challenge. So, it's amazing to be back and I can't wait to start getting involved with the Geeks community again and see what they've got to say,
Chris Moriarty
Indeed, and what a selection we have lined up for you in the next collection of episodes. We're looking at remote work, of course, neuro diversity, developments in workspace design, psycho analysis and systems thinking (Ian’s favorites), environmental psychology, and much, much more.
If you're new to the podcast. Firstly, welcome. And secondly, it's worth noting that the episodes aren't sequential, so you can dip in and out as you please. But we would always recommend a listen to our very first episode with Mark Eltringham of Workplace Insight. And Matt Tucker of Liverpool John Moores University. There, you'll be able to understand the reason we find this podcast up, and some of the lore including our Workplace Geeks Commandments, surrounded it all.
But before we get into today's episode, we've got a few things to update you on. Firstly, you may have noticed that the Workplace Geeks is now brought to you by Audiem. Audiem is the new business venture from me, Ian and James, it's bang in line with the Geeks mindset. It's a powerful analytical tool that makes sense of 1,000s and 1,000s of pieces of written feedback, yes, written feedback from employees about their workplace experience in a matter of minutes. So we're really, really excited about that. But alongside that, we have also contributed our very own bit of workplace knowledge to the academic debate, Ian, why don't you tell us a bit more about that?
Ian Ellison
Okay, Chris. So it's a paper that outlines and explores the framework that essentially Audiem is built on. And if we go back again to that first episode of Workplace Geeks, where we explained why we view workplace as a broad church, what we were trying to do with this paper is really explore why that's a valuable perspective. So, we know that things that contribute to the experiences that people have at work aren't necessarily just about space. They might be about people issues, they might be about technology issues, they might be about business pressures, there could be all sorts of different things going on when you say ‘how's it going at work?’, and ‘what would make work better?’. So, what we did with this paper is we used it to establish a really holistic workplace framework as we see it, and also show how lots of previous academic work and theories and ideas can all actually sit together in this really nice nested contributory way.
We called it in the paper, a holistic workplace framework. We've now given this the snappy title of Workplace Mix™, which I think Chris is kind of you riffing off the marketing mix. And it contains four themes of business, people, spaces and technology. And then it also contains their respective sub themes. So, I'm not going to go into those now because we are going to get to this in a future episode and really dig into the what and why of this. But it's worth saying at this point, it's published in Corporate Real Estate journal, you can get it there. And we'll post links in the show notes. But if you're too interested to wait, then you can see the first of three blog posts about the Workplace Mix™ on our website, and we'll link to that in the show notes.
Chris Moriarty
And don't worry listeners, you're not going to be bombarded with corporate messages from Ian and I in future episodes. We just wanted to give you a little bit of context as some of the changes that are going on. So that's Audiem. And if you want to find out more about that, either contact me or Ian on LinkedIn, or email us at hello@audiem.io. AUDIEM or you can visit Audiem.io. But with that website is our other piece of exciting Workplace Geeks news. If you visit WorkplaceGeeks.org you will find an archive of all our episodes additional resources relating to our guests transcripts of the interview as well as blogs in around the topics we discussed. So definitely, definitely check it out. And, and I promises that the last thing, whilst you there you can join the mailing list. Yes, we have a Workplace Geeks mailing list, so you'll get notified when there's a new episode see what the latest research and blogs are that we've published as well as hearing about where the Geeks will be appearing live at various industry events and much, much more. Now, is that everything? Have I forgotten anything?
Ian Ellison
I don't think so. Right? Come on, howay, let's get on with it.
Chris Moriarty
Of course, and we get series two have to an absolute fly with this workplace heavyweight from across the pond. in tell us who we're about to hear from what we're going to be talking about.
Ian Ellison
So today, Christopher, we are talking to Kate Lister. She's a leading figure in Workplace Evolutionaries, which is the sort of vibrant workplace community within IFMA. The International Facility Management Association. Kate is renowned for her essentially academic chops, as well as a specialist topic of remote work, although don't call it remote work to her face, as you're about to discover from the conversation. She's really respected, so respected, in fact that she was brought in to talk to the US Congress around the evidence for remote and home working, how to make it successful, and all of that kind of thing during the pandemic. And we really encouraged her to talk about that during our discussion. There's also a really lovely link back to Jack Nilles from episode four of Workplace Geeks. So, I think what we're also starting to do now, which is brilliant is start joining the workplace dots as we go. So, what we do with Kate is we focus on her project with Owl Labs. It’s an ongoing project about the state of remote working, which has been repeated over numerous years. And it looks at the changing attitudes and trends to the topic. So obviously, this is a topic which is very ‘of the now’. But what Owl Labs have with Kate is data pre and post pandemic. And what we essentially deal with Kate is have a really interesting discussion, which reveals all sorts of quite thought provoking insights about what people are wrestling with in America, and more globally
Chris Moriarty
Cracking. And after our chat with Kate, we'll be welcoming back James to the podcast. Now, he's been busy doing geeky data science stuff for Audiem, so we've had to drag him out from his data dungeon, his geek cave. And with that in mind, we felt it wasn't right to give him a hard time like we did last season where we would poke him for insight. Instead, each one of us will be bringing something we found interesting to the conversation in the Workplace Geeks reflection section. So we'll see you there in a bit. But for now, Kate Lister.
-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
Kate, welcome to Workplace Geeks, before we get started, the same thing we ask everyone just give us a little bit of an introduction into yourself, the work you do and perhaps where some people might have seen your name and your work popping up on their screens.
Kate Lister
I've been running Global Workplace Analytics for almost two decades. And for most of that time pushing the hybrid and remote work rock uphill, although that's not what we called it beginning, primarily helping companies before the pandemic develop remote work strategies, hybrid work strategies. I hate both of those words, actually. And then, since the beginning of the pandemic, obviously doing the triage at the beginning and now more getting those standards and policies and practices in place that really optimise the solution.
Ian Ellison
If hybrid and remote work aren't your bag, what are the words that you prefer? Then just out of interest,
Kate Lister
I'd actually prefer work, let's just call it work, what is what does it really matter where it is, or when it is or whatever, but I guess distributed, that that sort of takes in everything. I mean, remote just sounds remote. You know, it sounds like an outcast, and hybrid sounds like a car.
Chris Moriarty
With that in mind, what we're talking about today, and where our starting point, I guess for today is a report that you've done in association with Owl Labs, which is the State of Remote work 2022. So just give us a bit of an idea about that project. Because it's not it's not a one off. This has been something that's been happening for a number of years, right,
Kate Lister
Owl has been doing the State of Remote Work for five years, and they brought me on in the second year. So I've done it with them for four years. I think each time it gets to be a little bit better science, we try to probe what others have not been asking. And it just got so boring during the pandemic, everybody asking the same questions, and the answers always being the same. And so as a result of collecting the research that I have, over the last 20 years, I've assembled a database of over 6,000 documents of news articles, research documents, case studies, anything I can put my eyeballs on that has to do with remote and hybrid and distributed work and workplace strategy in general. I mean, not just the remote aspects because you know, it is it is the whole thing and so unable to look at those and say, okay, what haven't people been asking? And you know, what do we need to probe.
Chris Moriarty
You talked about your career is pushing this remote work rock uphill, and you've talked about how this report has a number of years behind it now. I guess in a way the pandemic shone a light on this, like you couldn't have imagined when you know that first time that Owl ask you to get involved. So just from an energy and a kind of attention point of view. How did you feel things changing when when it suddenly became clear that remote working was the thing?
Kate Lister
You know, in terms of this report, no, nothing. You know, they they were really behind it now Owl Labs makes a little owl looking video camera that sits in the middle of a conference table, and moves the mic directionally and the video directionally and can also follow a person in the room that speaking and one of the biggest problems in hybrid meetings is that you can't see the person that's speaking. And it's muddled because you've got overhead microphones, and all those kinds of things. So they've been committed to this for as long as they've been in business. So it really didn't change. I guess what changed is that there were so many other people reporting on it. And I've done a number of other studies, we were the first out the door with a study post pandemic. I think we got it out in late March, early April, together with Workplace Evolutionaries. And that one got a lot of traction in the media, because it was the was the only study for a while it was almost a month later that some of the other started to come out.
Ian Ellison
That was a study where you actually gathering novel data right in the beginning, and you got your act together quicker than other folks. Interesting. So before we dig into the paper itself, from what I gather, from what I've heard, your expertise and your knowledge and your sort of dedication and history to all of this, what led to you being in front of Congress during the pandemic, tell us a little bit about that, then before we get into because I we cannot we cannot just casually stroll past this fact. Right? So tell us a little bit about that.
Kate Lister
That actually goes back to 2012, I think was the first time that I made it public, a telework savings calculator, telework being the old word, and it calculates the people planet and profit value of remote work, we put that on the web and made it available for free. It's been there ever since. At one point, a couple of Congressmen came to the US General Accountability Office and asked to find tools for measuring the value of remote work, you know, is this worth the government doing and they did a search and they called on me and I gave them a peek behind the curtains. And in the report, they said that it was comprehensive and thoroughly researched. And it was the only tool that they recommended for use throughout government. So, it was then when the pandemic hit that became more visible in government. And that's why they called me to come speak.
Ian Ellison
So how was that experience? What sort of stuff did you talk about?,
Kate Lister
Interestingly they wanted me to come to Washington to do it. We’re sheltering in place, and you want me to fly across the country to come deliver this? No, I think I'll do it remotely. Which I'm sure cut down on the the formality of it, and probably the fear factor, you know, being able to do it from here. But it was a heck of a lot of work. I mean, a heck of a lot of work, because you've got five minutes to talk to Congress. And then they also want you to submit a written document. So, you know, you're writing to Congress, for heaven's sakes, you got to have a you got to put some, some time into that. And just before I went on, one of the aides that had been coordinating this with me, said, ‘we can't have you read what's in the report, you need to submit what we talked about before’, because I tried to make the report slightly different. I mean, why make it the same? It's like, whoa, okay, so now I have it timed. You know, by the second to five minutes. And I've got to alter everything at the last minute, it was a bit of a kerfuffle. But, you know, they asked good questions. You know, there was a lot of briefing ahead of time about party lines, and you know what to expect. And, you know, these guys may want to throw darts at you because they don't support it. But everybody was very civilised on both sides of the house. In fact, it was somebody from the Republican Party called first and then the Democratic Party, somebody called afterwards and wanted me to speak on their behalf. And it's like, well, I'm already speaking for these guys. I mean, not because of political affiliation, because they called first. So it was it was an interesting experience.
Ian Ellison
And what impact did that have?
Kate Lister
It's been a requirement in federal government since the year 2000, that every employee is to work from home to the maximum extent possible, from the year 2000. It was at the time it was because of bird flu. And so they were worried about a pandemic. And then over the years, it became more about continuity of operations in general, snowstorms, political upheaval, traffic stoppage, that kind of thing. And so it's always been running around government. And there have always been people that supported it. And people that didn't support it. It actually grown to the largest segment of the US population that work from home, I think was about 11% of the US population, just before the pandemic was just under 5% that worked from home the majority of the time, more than more than halftime.
So those that disagreed with allowing people to work from home and government. I mean, it's a very hierarchical, it's not your, your low hanging fruit organization. We're always throwing darts at, you know, how do we know that we're saving money? How do we know that this is good for government? And so I think it brought to light out in front of everybody that this is not just about a pandemic. I mean, this makes sense across real estate portfolio, productivity. I mean, citing all kinds, I cited all kinds of studies that showed productivity, cross attraction and retention, you want to be the best and the brightest? Or do you want to be the mediocre hire, obviously, of course, continuity of operations, transit subsidies, a bunch of other things, the environment and for people, you know, so it quantifies all those different things in the in the calculator. You know, it was great to be able to get that all exposed so that you know, it's in the Congressional Record, and you throw stones at you want to, but let's see what you got.
Chris Moriarty
So, you mentioned at the start of, of that work, and where this work that Congress ultimately started to notice some of your output. You mentioned telework. And the way you talked about it just arced back to one of our first series interviewees with Jack Nilles? And was his work kind of one of the influences that started that that the project that you did,
Kate Lister
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, he, he was quite the pioneer. And I did listen to that podcast, it was, it was excellent, the fact that he's 89, and still doing this. And he's been pushing this rock uphill for a lot longer than I have. I was kind of the second generation of people that were looking at this, and Jack was one of the first people that I reached out to.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so with all of that lovely background, and thank you for indulging us, let's go to this research paper, then. As Chris mentioned, State of Remote Work 2022, a collaboration between Owl Labs and your business, Global Workplace Analytics, just to get us started, do you just want to kind of just pick up the thread? Kate, tell us a little bit about the what on the why, what it was seeking to achieve, how you went about doing it? And then let's dig into the sort of the research design. If that's all right, and we'll ask you some more questions.
Kate Lister
Let's not hide behind the fact that this is a commercial company that has an interest in getting research out there about remote work, I insisted that we not lead with that. And this was one of the reasons they came to me. And I insist that it is independent, we don't try to make the numbers say what we want them to say. So they were very good about that, I think in their first report that they really didn't have that kind of rigor. And statistical validity, you know, they wanted to go with, you know, the findings, but helping them understand that, you know, know that this is not really statistically significant. And also the sample size that, you know, I encourage them to go with a larger sample size.
Ian Ellison
So you are, they're kind of they're hired research expertise, then by the sound of it. And to be fair, it's lovely, to be honest about it. I mean, we live in a world of thought leadership, right, and to claim thought leadership and to add value from that sort of perspective, you need to be able to ground your information in sort of findings and knowledge. So, you're helping them over a period of time, develop a capability, and a platform, which is robust from which to report findings from which may or may not support what they're interested in as a business. Their specialism, as you said, is collaborative technology. But the report itself has got some very rich themes, I think, in terms of its findings, which we can get into. So, what sort of stuff were you looking for, what sort of questions, just sketch it for us? And then let's sort of dig into some of the stuff if that's all right.
Kate Lister
We were just flooded with research during the pandemic. And sometimes it was research of 60 people, and sometimes it was research of 400. And sometimes was just their customers. And you know, this continues now. And it's really pretty sad, what even the New York Times and Washington Post and others that you would think put out good data. It's amazing what they'll print.
Ian Ellison
What they'll report on to make a story. Exactly.
Kate Lister
You know, part of the problem, I call myself a pracademic. Part of the problem is that the academic research takes a long time, the end of the media is about right now It's funny, I used to apologise if I was using data that was three years old, before the pandemic, now I feel exposed if I use something that's three months old, you know, so it really had to be immediate.
Before the pandemic, we asked all the typical questions of ‘do you want to’ and productivity and those kinds of things? And then everybody was asking those questions, and everybody was coming out with the same answers. So, by having that database of studies, and by working with a lot of the organizations that were doing studies and digging into the details of what they were doing, it allowed me to see what wasn't being asked. And so, you know, some of the things were how is technology working? I mean, it almost seemed bias, you know, they're a technology company to ask these questions about video conferencing. But I really think that that's going to be a huge, huge issue going forward. That's one of the reasons I've worked with them for four years, for five years is because I really believe they have a good technology solution and it's really going to define equity as we go down the road in the future of whether or not you can actually hold equitable meetings.
So I wanted to understand, and they wanted to understand what are the problems people are having with their technology and being heard. You know, everybody's dancing around the topic of manager suspicion of productivity, you know, we wanted to ask those questions, you know. Are they using surveillance technologies? Will they really favour individuals that are in office for promotion? Are the people that are working remotely worried about that? Unfortunately, we didn't have enough data to do minority segmentation. And we would have liked to because we were starting to see, I think what will be a problem of minorities wanting to work from home more, and women wanting to work from home more than if the theory that they'll be promoted more slowly or not favoured for the key jobs is going to sort of increase that gap. There's so many unintended consequences that I think are very interesting in the pandemic experience. And to debunk some of the myths, you know, I just, I'm so frustrated by some of the myths that are out there, there's lots and lots of rigorous research to prove it wrong, around culture is going to decline, is going to suffer in remote work, innovation is going to suffer, productivity is going to suffer, it's going to improve the environment. That's been kind of a sad finding. The unintended consequence that we've seen during the pandemic. It's just so frustrating for me that hearing it constantly now, companies saying that our culture has suffered, can you come in and help us with our culture? Our culture has suffered because of remote? Well, has it? How do you know, did you measure it? Or did you measure it beforehand? What do you call culture?
Chris Moriarty
Do you know I was at a panel discussion the other day, and I lost it a little bit because the group in the room were from our world, right? So they they love offices and want more offices. And we were chatting away. And there was this this sort of moment where people were asked to talk about why the office was important. And it felt like they just said, ‘culture’, I just said, prove it. Prove It, where's the evidence that that's why we need to do it. And there was this kind of this stunned silence across the table that, well, I just thought everyone was on board with the culture thing, and I’m like, we can be But show me show me a document that says that our culture will suffer, if we don't have everyone in the same concrete block at the same time, every day each week, you know, and it's just nice to hear someone else say it.
Kate Lister
On that one in particular, Gartner did a study showing that the culture has not declined during the pandemic, it was something that started long before the pandemic. And it's because we relied on those physical spaces to, you know, show all the great things that we've done in the room, rather than actually building a human culture. And absent that, it feels like we don't have that sense of culture.
Chris Moriarty
I mean, I'm going to say something that might cause a lot of HR practitioners to drop us an email, I was telling Ian about this panel discussion and my little rant. And I said, what if this idea of corporate culture, organisational culture just got a lot of momentum, because we had to get 500, 1,000 2,000 However, many people to behave nicely in the same concrete block when they're all together. Because it's really hard, like, like a school like these are the rules are going to stick them on the wall when you're all together. And actually, when you're at home, you just need to behave yourself for 10/15 minutes while having a quick chat on Teams. And you can carry on doing what you've always done. So who knows, right in hello@workplacegeeks.org if you if you want to attack me for that one, and we'll have you on the show. Anyway, Ian, over to you.
Ian Ellison
Thank you have you put your soapbox back under the desk Christopher?
Chris Moriarty
Yeah, just gonna tuck it under there.
Ian Ellison
Splendid.
Back to the research paper. Just to recap then, survey based out to 2,300 full time employees in the US, those employees broad spread of demographic in terms of salary in terms of role in the organisation, there was age as well wasn't that there was a lot of reporting a sort of millennial differences to boomers, for example, but it felt like a reasonably chunky data set for our industry 2,300 in one survey, and from that, you got some really interesting thematic findings, which you sort of report on as headlines. And then you go deeper into them.
If I was going to summarize the findings in a few sort of bullet points. There's a really strong narrative about the great resignation, which sort of shines out really loud and clear. And for some people, and I'm aware that this is an over traded term now, but for some people, that great resignation is a bit of a trigger. Let's have a chat about that.
There's obviously insights in there about hybrid and remote. I think there's some really interesting ones about personal implications around or maybe personnel and business implications around well-being issues and financial issues. And then the final bullet points on my list are actually about managerial issues. You've already mentioned one that sort of the impacts of presenteeism in terms of job promotion potential, but there was also it might be a slightly dangerous one, but drawing conclusions about company size and why different sized companies are more or less likely to ask people back into the office, there might be a lot going on there. But some of it might be managerial. And some of it might not be. So those were the things so sort of great resignation, insights around hybrid and remote, impacts around finance and well-being and the sort of managerial threads that you can start to pull out if you have a bit more information around presenteeism and about company size.
So any of those resonating? Are they things that you sort of saw and are interested in?
Kate Lister
I'll be interested in hearing from you your impressions of the great resignation that came through on that, because I'm a little skeptical of the great resignation.
Ian Ellison
Oh, interesting.
Well, there was there was a really strong stat wasn't there, there was a stat basically saying either people who had had their ability to be flexible taken away, were already looking for a new role. Or if people did have their flexibility taken away, they weren't. Now that's interesting, because you have to put your money where your mouth is, but I think people had already changed the job within the pandemic. And that was sort of being framed, I think, around a resignation narrative, or actually, is it just that they lost their jobs in America and they had to find something else? Am I understanding that wrong out of context?
Kate Lister
No, I think the way that you're understanding it is correct. What I get my hackles up on are the numbers that are quoted about how many people have resigned, and just you know how this all has to do with remote phenomenon and flexibility, when in fact, the huge majority of it was in the hospitality business.
They were out of a job for a very long time. And they're thinking, do I really want to go back to it, I mean, something north of like, 80% of that huge resignation in the US was in that sector, we've always had a lot of turnover in business, we've always known and this is the other thing that I guess, fascinates and frustrates me at the same time, these numbers haven't changed for 20 years.
Ian Ellison
That's interesting. What we're doing is we're myth busting right now.
Kate Lister
Yeah, exactly. And even the numbers that we report about people, you know, willing to take a pay cut, and how many people want to work from home and how many, you know, what's the value of working from home, I could pull out of my file drawer a report from 15 years ago, that said the exact same things, not the exact same things. And maybe we can talk about that, how some of those have changed over the years, but the majority have just stayed the same.
Chris Moriarty
Looking specifically, at the key findings, there's a few that I guess reinforce what we've heard, you know, from a lot of the noise out there. So that's kind of suggesting there's there's a general kind of consensus, there's some that stick out, I mean, just to give people an idea of some of the things not to go through all 10. But just to go through some of the highlights. The main one, the one that kind of you lead with is this increase of in adoption, right? And the fact that year on year, so I guess 2021 is talking about, we're just to get their head around, you know, how we work in this circumstance, and what it's going to look like to, I hope, some organizations now starting to settle on their approach and give people some choice. And we're seeing that choice increase, which is a good sign, interestingly, on that one stat, because you said that the number of workers choosing to work remotely in 2022 has increased 24% since 2021. Do you see that number increasing at that level year on year? You know, I know you don't like to use this as predictive. But I thought that was quite an interesting jump, you would have thought that the adoption was quite quick and got to maybe get to a plateau a bit quicker. But it seems that that's quite a that's still quite an incline.
Kate Lister
I think everybody was surprised at how quickly people adapted to the pandemic and how quickly they felt productive for 20 years. We've seen that somewhere around 70 to 80% of people say they wanted to work from home, at least part of the time that halftime is the sweet spot. And in the pandemic, we saw that in the beginning 70/80% wanted to work from home, at least part of the time, and that they wanted two to three days a week. That's what all the studies have been showing. So that, you know that has not changed much. What we did see change during the pandemic was the percent of people that wanted to be full time remote, and they drew from the population of people that never wanted to be remote wanted to be fully in office. So we had kind of like a 30% that wanted to be all in office 20 to 30% that wanted to be fully at home. And then that middle ground being hybrid. But as the pandemic wore on, we saw that fewer people wanted to be in the office full time and more wanted to be fully remote. And that was the biggest increase. And then that balance wanted to be hybrid. It's like the frog in the boiling water, which is also a myth, but you don't know how bad it is until you stop doing it. And I think that's what happened to a lot of people during the pandemic. It's like, wow, you know, now that I don't have to hustle to the office and get stuck in traffic. And I don't have to deal with all those micro aggressions and the politics and being interrupted and all of that. This, I like this. But you know, I kind of like the people at the office too. And I think there's another debt yet to come where you know, that couple you used to get together with you went out with a lot of couples, and then you stopped seeing them, and you say to your spouse, you know, we haven't seen so and so for a while we shouldn't get together with them, and you do. And then you say, on the ride home in the car, oh, I remember why we didn't get together, we stopped getting together with them. It's like that when you go to the office, I mean, once you've heard Joe's fishing story for the 12th time, it's like, think we're gonna do this at home.
Chris Moriarty
We’ve kind of covered it in terms of employees, the individual sort of seeing the benefits and shaping up that how they want to do the work and their preferences. But of course, they're not the only actor in this debate. So organisations are kind of wrestling with this as well. And, you know, we've already touched on this kind of culture and worries about it. But one of the stats that I found interesting, not least, that Ian and I are in a small business and therefore, are part of that part of this demographic is that small companies were much more likely to require employees to come back to the office compared to the larger organizations. And I just wondered whether I mean, that's, that's the number at the top of it, I just wondered if you've got either through this study or for your other work, why that might be happening, what the sort of stories that sit behind a data point like that,
Kate Lister
Yeah, I pondered that, to my sense, I don't really have anything to back this up, is that there's that energy in the room that takes place in a small company, when a company that's just getting started in a company that's having trouble. And we've seen this in the past, when organisations start to get into difficulty, they want to circle the wagons, they, they feel that they need everybody fighting the good fight, and seeing that everybody else is fighting the good fight. That's my interpretation. I think also, we don't have as defined roles in small companies, you do everything you do whatever it takes, I'll sweep the floor at the end of the day. And that may have something to do with it. Also, you know, another interesting thing we found, and you said, there's, there's both sides to this, there's the company side, we're up to about 70% of companies that are offering some type of flexibility.
Actually, before the pandemic, the Society for Human Resource Management, which is the largest human resource organisation in the world, said that 70% of organisations offered employee flexibility and where they work, but they didn't offer it to everybody. And that's the key, the Bureau of Labor Statistics did the same kind of study. But their criteria was that you offer it to all or most employees, and they found that only 7% did. Now what we're seeing is closer to that 70% is offering it to all or most employees, and there's no doubt in my mind that were we not in a talent shortage, that there would be that kind of adoption. If employees were not in such a good bargaining position. I think that we would maybe at somewhere in the 40% adoption level for organisations, and the question is going into perhaps a recession, depending on where you are in the world already in a recession. The question is, is that going to swing the pendulum in favor of the employer again? What we saw in the last recession, the last big recession that shone a light on the potential for cost savings, sort of like the solution to the problem de jours has kind of how might sales tactics have been over the last 20 years? It's like, okay, sustainability is a problem, we'll lead with that. Okay, it was a talent shortage will lead with that. Cost savings? Okay, let's go with the cost savings. And I think now that they're seeing these big, empty offices, they just can't stand these big empty offices, it's going to put even more attention on the potential for using remote work to reduce costs.
Ian Ellison
That's interesting, because certainly in the UK, I think there's a big flavor of going on at the moment is we're seeing big empty offices, and we can't be seen to have big empty offices. Otherwise, it looks like we've done something wrong. So we need to get people back, we need to three line whip people back, even if it's three days a week to fill them. And that also speaks to the system of changing real estate takes an awful lot longer. It takes an awful lot longer to change buildings than it does to change, where people are working. And so there's two different timescales sort of competing. What I also heard in what you were saying there, Kate was that kind of notion of old managerial habits dying hard to remember the narrative at the beginning of the pandemic is like, this has changed work forever. This has changed work for good. And that's a sort of very evangelistic thing to say, that's a very future focused kind of bright future. It's about change. And the reason that things don't change is because of all the forces that hold them in place and an awful lot of what you talked about there spoke of the sort of the old world and when the forces return, it gives the old world an opportunity to sort of regroup and point eight of the key findings, one in two workers, 49% feel managers view those in the offices harder working and more trustworthy than their remote counterparts. I remember doing consultancy five years ago, which surfaced exactly that fact, in a multinational organisation. And that pervasive, presenteeism has always been there. And unless you invest really heavily in leadership, and workforce, behavioral change, to reset that, to challenge that, to address it, it will always be there. And so it's kind of sad, but it's also quite realistic in that, I’m not surprised to see it because it just exists, doesn't it?
Kate Lister
There's a theory that, you know, once the gray hair leaves the workforce that'll sort of naturally go away, I'm a little afraid as the younger generation comes up, they'll have drunk the Kool Aid. By the time they're in the positions to make those decisions, they'll feel the same way
Ian Ellison
Cultural adoption, and nobody recognises that or calls it out,
Kate Lister
it was sad to see that it was 37% have added the employee surveillance during the pandemic, you know, I think it's a lot easier in the US than it is in Europe. You know, that's how, how worried they are that people aren't working. And that assumption of seeing the back of their head, highest viewership of porn and online shopping is during working hours before the pandemic. So, you know, how does that tell you? What does it tell you about the whether they're working when they're when they're on site?
Chris Moriarty
That's not a stat I expected to hear today. Ian, we need to find someone who's done that study. That would be a very fruity episode.
Kate, that's, that's been really interested in sort of hearing your experience hearing about this study, in particular in some of the things that you think are important to note within it, and what practically, I guess organisation's might want to start thinking about but just give us a little bit of a sense from someone who's been in amongst this for a long time? What do you think 2023 is gonna sound like around the remote debate? Where do you think the next snag is going to come from where you're gonna see the next kind of focus gonna drift to once people have started to get their head around that this might be a thing? What's going to be the what's going to be the topic of the year?
Kate Lister
Yeah, my biggest fear is that organisations don't go back and do the things that they would have done to create a distributed workforce prior to the pandemic, I mean, we would typically work for with a company for six months or a year, you know, putting in the training and the technology and the policies and the practices. And I sort of equate what we're doing now to when we first got cell phones, we only use them at home, or when we first got smartphones, we only use them to make phone calls. We're working in different ways. But we haven't changed the practices and the processes. And so it's going to be very easy six months, nine months, 12 months from now to say it didn't work, then because we're not measuring anything. Well it didn't work, we'll go back to the old ways. The second fear I have is this hybrid bias will drag it down, that people will listen in their own heads to our culture is declining. We're not innovating, you know, blah, blah, blah, rather than actually measuring it and just blame it all on the on the pandemic blame it all on remote work.
Ian Ellison
It's the culture and the people investment that sets this thing up for success. And your fear is that people almost use that as a scapegoat by not doing it.
Kate Lister
Exactly. Technology too I mean, I think we have a long way to go in technology. To be honest, we don't quite have the solutions that we need to things like onboarding and mentoring, even collaboration, in some ways to be more optimistic on the longer term. I think that in the US, because it all depends on what percentage of your workforce our information workers, so that's going to be very different by country, about 56% of the population has a job that could be performed at least part time at home. And during the pandemic, we saw about 60% of us employees working from home. So that number is sort of been validated. And I think where we're going to wind up is that the large majority of them going to have about 10 to 15% of people working fully from home, if they had their way, it would be more like 30 to 40%. But managers are reluctant, we're going to have about 20% of people working full time in the office. And the rest are going to be hybrid and management is going to argue over whether it's management wants that to be three to four days a week in the office, and employees want that to be one to two days and in the office. I think it's going to settle out where it always has about half time. You know, it hasn't changed in a very long time.
Ian Ellison
If people want to learn more about you, what do you do? Where to find you anywhere in particular?
Kate Lister
Yeah, probably our white paper page, we have dozens of free white papers, we try to make everything that we can available for free. So it's Global Workplace Analytics slash white papers. And certainly, I would encourage them to look at the page on how we can help you create a better hybrid workplace environment.
-- Reflection Section --
Chris Moriarty
James, welcome back to the podcast. How have you been? How was the winter break for you?
James Pinder
It's fine.
Chris Moriarty
Just fine. It was just fine. Well, last time we spoke to you….
James Pinder
I was on a blacksmithing course and yeah, it's good, really good. I would highly recommend it to you both. Very cold though, because it was about minus 10. Man, we got laid out in the Peak District. So but yeah, it was good. So maybe the three of us could go and do a day out there at some point
Ian Ellison
Workplace Geeks team building
Chris Moriarty
What have you got the on the list for your next rustic trade that you want to teach yourself? I assume this is so one day when the apocalypse comes that you can restart the community in a field in Yorkshire and have all the requisite skills to
Ian Ellison
Sort out with hinges. Sort out with hinges Chris
James Pinder
Might be more useful trade to know than, say data scientists something like that.
Chris Moriarty
When, when all of the internet crashes
James Pinder
Societal collapse
Chris Moriarty
Exactly, exactly. So look, before we get into societal collapse, quite big deal. We were talking to Kate. So we've just heard from Kate. Now, typically, in the first series of this, we would ring you up and interrogate you with what you thought about Kate. But we're going to do things slightly different this season, we're all going to contribute our thoughts and opinions to the debate. So, we've all been tasked with coming up with one thing that we thought was particularly interesting. And then we're gonna go and dive into it. So, to get us started, because I know he's actually done some homework for this. Ian, tell us a little bit about what you thought was the most interesting takeaway from Kate's interview,
Ian Ellison
There's a few things that I would happily talk about. But the one thing that really stood out to me is when we started talking about the findings of the report, Kate used a couple of phrases, and that she almost used them in passing, she mentioned statistical validity. And she also mentioned sample size. And she talked about them as if they were a piece of knowledge that really needed to be embedded for people to be able to make sense of data. And she talked about it being a skill which the team needed to develop to be able to produce better outputs.
This is one of those areas that some of us might have heard about, is super important across all sorts of workplaces data, full stop, but it made me question just how much people generally know about these sorts of ideas. So, I did a bit of digging, and I've done a little bit of reading, and then I scared myself because I went into a statistical rabbit hole. And I'll happily admit, I’m by no means any form of qualified statistician, I can barely pronounce the word, let alone understand what it means. You know, I went digging around it, you sort of find words like statistical validity and statistical significance, confidence intervals and confidence levels. And, and if I was going to sort of come back out of that, and rather than just get bogged down in definitions, and James, I guess you can be the test here as to whether I know remotely what I'm talking about. I guess what this is all about is for a given sample, a given population. And that might be America as a population with however many millions or billions of people are there. Are there billions?
James Pinder
Millions? About 350 million? But let's should we should we Google that while you're talking?
Chris Moriarty
Yeah, I'm on it. I'm on it.
James Pinder
I'm slightly out 331million 332 million.
Chris Moriarty
What’s 20 million amongst friends.
James Pinder
18 million actually, amongst friends.
Chris Moriarty
Yep. Welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast. If you're doing a GCSE maths, I suggest you go and find someone who knows what they're talking about
Ian Ellison
So if you've got a given population of people, and it might be the size of America,
Chris Moriarty
Which I'd think off the top, my head is about 331 million.
James Pinder
Wow Chris, your general knowledge is amazing.
Ian Ellison
Or it might be the number of people in your headquarters building. It might be 2000 people or whatever. If you're going to do a piece of research, and you get a number of people responding, but not all of them responding, what you need to be really mindful of is how representative can you claim those findings are. So if 1000 out of 2000 people respond, can you say that the findings from that dataset are representative so that you can draw broader conclusions. And what I learned the notion of statistical validity and significance has actually been around since the 1700s. But it sounds like it was worked on in the sort of 1920s and 1930s, by particular academics. So, you start talking about 95% or 99% confidence levels. And this is all really about, fundamentally, it's about how many respondents you need to be a level of sureness, I guess, in sort of really weird English.
I guess the one thing that I got from this is I mean, I'm sort of demonstrating it, right? It I'm not a statistician. I can barely say the word. But I know that these things are important. But these things have kind of transferred into common kind of workplace language and knowledge. And so people use them. And there's actually a call from a bunch of academics to say we've got to stop talking about statistical significance because it's now so misused even by particular academic journals, is so misused as to be dangerous and divisive. And there's quite a lot of proper kind of statistics and this, which if you don't know it, you really can trip yourself up.
Chris Moriarty
It's fallen into, from my experience in like talking to organisations or picking up data and doing data and all this sort of stuff. I mean, it really is just how many people responded, that's the thing that people are obsessed with. And what percentage of the population is it, regardless of statistical validity is just simply numbers.
Ian Ellison
But that's the point. So they get obsessed with that they get obsessed with that, but I guess the point is why and what does it allow you to claim in terms of the quality of the findings,
James Pinder
To try and take this back to a bit more of a practical subject? If we think about why this is important, there’s different levels isn't a new talked about the US population? But if we take it back to sort of
Chris Moriarty
331 million
James Pinder
Point 9 million I think, Chris,
Chris Moriarty
I mean, let's call it 332.
James Pinder
But yeah, so if we think it's sort of surveys that people do in organisations having a sample that is representative, let's think of it in sort of basic terms. If there are certain groups in that population that aren't represented, then that's not a representative sample, is it? So if there are certain teams or certain types of people within that organisation that are either not represented at all or underrepresented? Is this a true reflection of what's happening across the organisation? Can I talk…
Ian Ellison
Generally, or specifically
James Pinder
Yeah, so that that's one thing. The other thing is why this is important, I guess it's human nature to try and generalise findings, isn't it? We do it all the time. It happens all the time on LinkedIn, you know, we take findings from one context, one situation and try and apply it to the other. And sometimes that's okay. And other times, maybe it's not depending on what that original dataset is.
And yeah, it kind of cropped up in the in the podcast recording when chatting about the great resignation inverted commas started cropping up a bit in the UK. But actually, in my mind, it was an example of taking a phenomenon that was happening in one country and applying it to another even though the contextual factors in the US very different. In terms of how the US economy works, its geography, the labour market, and just the nature of the labour market. So when I talk about this, when I'm doing my research methods teaching, often it's like bringing it back to practical terms. So, if you're, let's say you're doing a survey in an organisation, thinking of it in those sorts of terms, what are the things you need to think about in terms of getting a sufficient response that you are able to generalise across the organisation or being mindful about how you check whether your sample is representative.
So, having that sort of information about the organisation itself, and maybe the size of teams or other demographic info that you'd need to sort of compare against? So yeah, I guess it's very easy to get caught up in statistical terminology and concepts. But I guess for a lot of people listening to this podcast, it's about well, well, what's this mean, in practical terms? And what are the things I need to think about?
It's interesting, because there's another podcast that, you know, I've listened to, and Chris, you might listen to called People I Mostly Admire that's hosted by the economist, Steven Levy, obviously, not as good as this podcast, and nowhere near as many listeners but you know, one of his arguments is that statistics should be taught in schools a lot more, and people should have much better knowledge of statistics, not necessarily maths. You know, he makes the distinction there. But statistics, because actually, we're encountering them every day of our lives all the time. And having a better general understanding of working with data. And being able to make sense of data is a really important skill that probably a lot of people don't have,
Ian Ellison
I guess what I'd get from that is statistics is closer to critical thinking than pure maths and abstract maths, right. Critical thinking and statistics, in our world with all the sorts of things we see reported go hand in hand.
James Pinder
Well, yeah, I think he talks about I mean, the US again, the US education system may be how they teach certain subjects is probably a bit different to the UK. But he were saying, I think it's yeah, this is just remember, you know, he talks about algebra. And actually, some of the things that people learn in maths at school, actually, how often do they really generally use them in the rest of their lives, whereas some of the sort of statistical concepts and ideas and skills in most people's jobs or in most day-to-day sort of things would be useful? So, you know, I agree with him on that. And I just, it's an interesting thing. So what's interesting is those sort of definitions that we've, you know, alluded to earlier, they can become a little bit threatening can't they, so how do you make it accessible? How do you make an accessible subject?
Ian Ellison
And you can get there, you know, there are simple tools on there. You can get calculators, if you're looking for a particular level of confidence about your findings, how big is your population, what's the sample size you're aiming for? Because we all we all know that rule of thumb that the more people that respond to a survey, the better, but at what point can we say now we've tipped into an area where we can be really comfortable for these findings are representative.
Chris Moriarty
So that kind of leads into something that I have nothing I declared from episode one. All that time ago that I found really interesting about it was listening to Kate. Essentially talk about working with communicators, with marketing teams, who and you know, we were very clear about this on the podcast, there's a reason that commercial organisations want to do research. There'll be things like position yourself as a thought leader. It's about creating a conversation with your market. It's about learning from your market. And I think sometimes we do organisations a bit of disservice when we think, you know, they just do this simply to put something in our LinkedIn feed, they actually do learn.
And that's good practice, they should be talking to customers and listening to their needs and adjusting their offers as a result. And Kate made that point. But it does just make me smile when I look at all this stuff, because I've been on the, on the communicator side of the fence. And I know exactly what these organisations are trying to do, and it's get cut through. But I guess to your point, James, the ones that are doing it, irresponsibly, and I'm not saying anyone involved in this project was on this wavelength. But there are organisations that will put stats out. And I guess what we're saying is because of the kind of general skill level of statistics, it kind of exposes a weakness in people that we see these headlines and dive in without going well ‘hold on’. The only one that really gets any sort of traction was how big was your survey? And the example everyone always uses as these shampoo adverts with nine out of 10 people would recommend us a survey of 80 people and you're like, well, that's not really big enough, is it? That's the only one that really gets any sort of attention, as opposed to people really critically, and I like what you're saying in that this is kind of the critical thinking for the the numbers as opposed to the message. Why you saying this? This is now about how we responsibly use these numbers, at the same time, as recognising the challenge that even researchers would recognise, we need to get people to read this and people are drawn to big n umbers that suggest something is happening that might be of interest to you.
Ian Ellison
Well, it's more than drawn to it. It's drawn to because of another thing, which is absolutely, it is part of who we are. It's human nature. And it's very hard to guard against it. But one of the classic biases of confirmation bias. So if we believe a particular thing, and we find a fact or a number or a statistic that supports it, then it is grist to the mill, it is fuel for our argument, we rarely try and find the counter argument and understand the balances. So yeah, I mean, it's treat this stuff with caution, right.
Chris Moriarty
So it does make me think of the book, when I did my MBA, and we were doing statistics. And we had to sort of go through all that sort of stuff. One of the books that we were pointed towards was How to Lie with Statistics by Daryl Huff. But basically, what he talks about as he goes through all this stuff, is all the little tricks that you can use to make something look more interesting or position an argument or reaffirm some of those confirmation bias. And my kind of take when I read it was that nothing he says in there about the tricks are wrong. The data is rarely actually misrepresented in a technical point of view, it still says what it says. But the positioning of it and the theatre of it can sometimes make you think something without really going into it. Like just for example, looking at one of the chapters, it was just sort of talking about how if you represented a graph, for instance, and went on one axis went from zero to wherever your point starts, it looks kind of boring. So I'd say what we'll do, we'll start higher up the axis, and we'll get really jagged lines. And that will really show something. And it made me think of as I was looking at that anyone that makes arguments about climate change, they kind of they zoom in like a microscope into the little bit, the 100 years that they want to prove their point. And you see this on Twitter, a lot of people say should we zoom out now and just see the overall trend for for centuries upon centuries? So you have to have your wits about you. And that's tough, right? Because we're bombarded with stuff because the PR agencies, the organisations know and you know, for you go right back to Mark Eltringham, he’ll atest. Most headlines that really, really strike a chord will have some sort of percentage something in it. That is the that is the dish of the day. People love a statistic in the headline.
James Pinder
Yeah. And you know, it's interesting, because that book is a classic in that area, I guess. But it's interesting, because have you heard of Tim Harford Chris? He’s an economic journalist and yeah, he's a radio broadcaster and writer but his most recent book called Data Detective. He talks about Darrell Huffs book. It's kind of where he starts is book. His argument is it's quite a pessimistic take on statistics is painting quite negative picture. What's interesting is Darrell Huff subsequently sort of work did a lot of work for the smoking lobby in the US so it's quite an interesting it's worth having a read because it's interesting where he went….
Ian Ellison
and deployed his ninja skills basically. Yeah, exactly
Chris Moriarty
Rebranded himself as Darryl Puff.
But that's that's in a kind of a roundabout way, the tobacco lobby and any sort of lobby group, I guess, is probably the pinnacle of any sort of example of what we're talking about here, which is, you know, look at this, don't look at that. Years and years and years ago, there's a little bit of a backstory years and years and years ago, I did a piece of, of research, and I came up with a nice number, then we just reported on concerns with parents about advertising to children. And the lobby for the advertising groups, they attacked us and said, you know, we were, you know, we were misrepresenting, we were painting a darker picture of what parents really cared about. And to prove that they did a survey where they asked parents what their chief concerns are, right? That was, that was kind of the thing, and it was like health education, this, this, this, this this, and look, look where advertising is, it's right down on the 13th, or 14th thing that parents care about. And our kind of counter argument is, yeah, but we're not responsible for all that stuff above us. We're responsible for this. And therefore that's, that's what we're that's what we're looking at. And these days, I've just read a book called Hooked by Michael Moss that's looking at the food processing companies. It's all the sort of thing where they're using and borrowing from science to kind of show you what they want you to see and deflect from what actually is going on. I mean, I am I'm pausing now, and again, because I'm just wondering whether we need to run this section of the podcast past our lawyers, because we've started accusing people of stuff. But as an example, as the case studies for education purposes, don't come after us.
James Pinder
In the edit, Chris, you just need to drop the word alleged in there before each of those assertions.
Chris Moriarty
But that's the point isn't it is that the statistics can be used positively or negatively, but with great statistics comes great responsibility.
Ian Ellison
And on that note, are we still talking about my topic? Are we segwayed? into somebody else's topic?
Chris Moriarty
No, no, no, no, we talked about mine. So James, tell us a little bit about what you took away from it.
James Pinder
I guess, building up on what you talked about. And I guess it's very easy to also dismiss that sort of commercially funded work like that as not being valuable. It's kind of baby out with the bathwater, isn't it? We're bombarded with lots of surveys and, and research like that, which is, you know, maybe got commercial motivation behind it. But it doesn't mean all of that work is worthless or not to be trusted. Is it? So, I think there's a risk of sort of knee jerking and saying, Well, you know, just because there's this has got company behind it funding this, there's an agenda. Now everybody's got an agenda and everybody company's got an agenda bit doesn't then suddenly mean that the research is worthless, does it? So, I think there's, there's a tension there isn't there also risk that people sort of straightaway devalue stuff. And this goes back to the point we've been talking about, which is being more aware, and thinking more critically. And that I guess, also, depending on the type of research, having that basic knowledge of statistics, or at least, what makes valid research or not, and being able to sort of explore that and take a more critical view of that.
Chris Moriarty
I think what we've got here in this example, with Kate and Owl , is what I would consider best practice, right? Which is to find something to research that is not specifically about your specific thing, but is part of a wider debate that you're involved with, right? So if they just come out and said, people are struggling to work from home, and they've all decided that their solution would be camera that pointed at people their meetings and like an owl, you would probably take that with a pinch of salt. But what they're actually talking about is the general trends of remote working the general trends of how people want to work some of the challenges that come with it, there is some bits about tech, but it's not specifically about their tech. And that does position them as a thought leader in the topic, as opposed to the thought leader for a particular solution.
James Pinder
It can put in statistics and findings like that, and those sort of numbers that people throw around, I guess the way Ian and I see things like that when we've used them with clients in the past is their conversation starters, aren't they. Just because a particular survey shows that everybody else is doing this, it doesn't mean that you should be doing this does it? But if it starts a conversation about your situation, so hybrid workings, the classic one, isn't it the minute X number of companies have X proportion of their workforce working in this way? Well, if you want to sort of take that finding and have a conversation in within your business or with your clients about that's great doesn't mean that's what you should do. Because your organisation's different every organization is different. But if it prompts an interesting conversation about ‘should we think about how we're working?’ and ‘what's the appropriate way that our folks should be working?’ then it served a purpose. hasn't, it doesn't mean he's slavishly adopt what everybody else is doing, just for the sake of it.
Chris Moriarty
No. The other bit that I thought about when you were talking about commercial research, it goes back to that book I just referenced Hooked, were in that, I mean, they're looking at the food industry. And they're amongst the I mean, their R&D budgets are mind blowing. And some of it, it's certainly to serve a corporate agenda. Because at the end of the day, if they are providing the resources, it has to be something that they care about, now, whether that's to further their own profits, or to build their own knowledge, whatever the reason is, it's got to be aligned to their objectives as well. But what's interesting during that book is that there'll be a sudden trend towards looking at the role of protein, in hunger, suppression, and all this sort of stuff. And you know, whether that fills up quicker, or whatever it might be, and they'll throw money at it, and they'll get some, you know, the best in the business to look at it. But there was a few stories in that book where the direction of travel changed. So, the budget was cut, and the research was stopped. But in the first instance, that looks like oh, you know, that's a waste of time and effort. But what you then see in the book is that later on, people came back to that research, because it was all published, it was all available. And people were able to still take that and people set up their businesses up off the back of it, they, they then built their own research and studies off the back of it. So it's kind of knowledge is never wasted, just because it was funded by a commercial organisation, right? As long as it's done by reputable people. You know, and you look at that and go, okay, I can build on that. It's, it has value has an intrinsic value.
Well, James, you better go back and code some stuff, because that's what you do now, go back to your geek cave. Ian and I are gonna go out and talk to more people. When we're ready, we'll come and knock on the geek cave, put the Pinder Sign up and get you to come out into the daylight so that you can come and talk to us.
-- Outro --
Chris Moriarty
So there we go. We're up and running. Next time out. We'll be talking to Nigel OSeland about his book Beyond the Workplace Zoo, so keep an eye out for that. Or if you don't want to risk missing it, why not visit our website and sign up to the Workplace Geeks newsletter visit workplacegeeks.org.
You can get in touch in the usual ways by emailing us at hello@workplacegeeks.org or by searching for Workplace Geeks on LinkedIn where we can continue the discussion after each episode. Remember to use the #workplacegeeks and tag us so we can connect you with others in the community. Don't forget to subscribe rate and share episodes that would be lovely. And well. I think that's it. Speak to you next time.
