-- INTRO --
Chris Moriarty
Hello and welcome to Workplace Geeks. Now, regular listeners will know at this point, I come up with some pithy one liner about the podcast using a quite often surreal image. Cards on the table. I'm struggling to keep that fresh. So I've asked chatGBT, and this is what he came up with. So, step through the surreal doorway into the captivating cosmos of workplace research, guided by the magnificent minds that weave its enchanting tapestry.
Welcome to the Workplace Geeks.
I'm Chris Moriarty
Ian Ellison
and I'm Ian Ellison
Chris Moriarty
And according to chatGBT we are simply the secret keys that unlock the hidden chambers of workplace wisdom leading you on a mysterious journey through the labyrinth of knowledge now by the way someone advised me it's always worth being nice to ChatGBT and always say thank you etc because you know that when the machines take over hopefully they'll remember who were polite and who weren't so i thanked you ChatGBT after it gave me all this, uh, lovely material and it responded by saying you're welcome.
If you have any more requests or need further assistance, feel free to ask. Enjoy the podcast.
Have you been up too much since we last spoke on this here podcast?
Ian Ellison
As well, you know, we've been up in Sheffield launching our new office, welcoming our first member of the Audium team.
Chris Moriarty
I even made the trip up to Sheffield, which shows you how important it must have been. So Audium Towers actually now has some towers.
So that's all very exciting. We had a photographer around. We had the photographer around. We did the boy band shots. We've done the head shots. We've done looking into the middle distance shots. The one bit of advice I would give to anybody doing that is always be close to a mirror because it was only once I looked at the final product, I noticed I hadn't combed my hair, which strikes me as being the most schoolboy of schoolboy errors.
So. There we go. AI has been quite a feature in this intro already. I'm told that there's some wonderful things that Photoshop can now do. So maybe I'll come up with some silly hairdos and I'll post them on the LinkedIn page. Right. Yeah. So I even made the trip up. Um, but talking of trips, we are still waiting people on our invite to some far flung regions of the planet for some workplace event and to talk workplace. So here I go again with my cleverly disguised attempt to secure that trip. So hello to the Workplace Geek who listened to the Catherine Templar Lewis episode in Berlin, which for some reason was the top ranking city of our listeners last time around. So we're doing really well. Over in Germany, in Central Europe, hello to the Workplace Geek in Chula Vista in California, Cape Town and Glasgow and hello to all my WeeGee family members, not that they're even close to be listening to this podcast, but I thought I'd say hello to them whilst we were there. Now make sure you, you stay in touch and send us those invites, and you can do that via a number of different means.
You can find us on LinkedIn, so just search for Workplace Geeks using Workplace Geeks hashtag that's #workplacegeeks, dropping us an email on hello@workplacegeeks.org or signing up to our newsletter for which all the information is workplacegeeks.org. Now, you may have noticed that there's no mailbag today and that's because we’re pushed for time and we're pushed for time because today we are talking to two people on our interview, which is something we've not done since our very first episode with Mark Eltringham and Matt Tucker. So it's a bumper episode. There was lots to talk about. Ian, tell us a little bit about who we're about to hear from.
Ian Ellison
Right. So today we've decided to dig deeper into a piece of work that we actually featured in part one of our workplace trends special. So we're speaking to two Cushman & Wakefield collaborators, Rachel Casanova and Sophie Schuller. Now, as always, we get them to intro themselves and tell us a bit about their backgrounds and whatnot at the start of our discussion with them.
But. Just to lead us in, Rachel Casanova is a senior managing director of workplace innovation based in the firm's Midtown Manhattan office, which I think is part of tri-states, Chris. Is that correct? And is passionate about the convergence of organisational behaviour, the human experience. And real estate and Sophie is currently responsible for leading Cushman & Wakefield's living lab, researching what really happens when we go to work.
Sophie holds an MBA from London business school and MSC in neuroscience from King's college, London, and is currently studying for her. PhD in psychoneurophysiology and workplace design at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. So what we've got in this collaborative pairing, if you like, is the sort of a blend of client facing practical reality of workplace consultancy riding in tandem with research focused academia, a match made in heaven from a Workplace Geeks perspective.
So. Why are they back on the show? Well, we wanted to go deeper into the organisational network analysis research that presented a Workplace Trends summit this April in London, because it was absolutely fascinating. We talked to Sophie in episode nine, but we haven't had an opportunity to get both of them together until now.
So this times really nicely with the release of their findings report links as ever in the show notes. Can't wait to get into it. Chris.
Chris Moriarty
Lovely. Thank you very much. So we also have a new voice in the reflection section today, where we are joined by Dr. Dan Wakelin of HCG. So past guest himself and now fully certified Workplace Geek.
So see you on the other side with Dr. Dan.
-- INTERVIEW --
Chris Moriarty
Welcome Rachel and Sophie to the Workplace Geeks. Before we dive into the report, before we dive into the findings of that report, can you each just tell us a little bit about the work that you do individually and within the Cushman & Wakefield landscape?
Rachel Casanova
My name is Rachel Casanova. I lead our total workplace consulting practice here in the tri state New York area, part of a global team, and we really help our clients who are trying to figure out how does the workplace matter? Where should their people be? What is the role of place in their organisation and how might they recruit talent to the right locations?
Sophie Schuller
My name is Sophie Schuller. I'm based out of the Netherlands working for our European business. And I lead applied research and our living lab where we research what happens when you go to work and we focus on objective measures and looking at everything from the way in which we design workplace environments all the way through to human health performance and productivity. Alongside that, I am studying for my PhD and researching the impact of buildings on neurophysiological stress and cognition.
Rachel Casanova
Just to put the two of us together, I am more focused on practitioning with clients. Sophie is more focused on the research. We actually independently of each other have been working or had been intrigued by organisational network analytics.
And so this is the merger across two countries, but is the intersection between a practitioner and research and how we can figure out the applied research and where it matters.
Chris Moriarty
That is the Workplace Geek's mantra, the whole research and practice, so that's good to hear. But Sophie, my ears pricked up there when you said living lab because I love the idea of living labs.
I always have. I've always said to people, we should have a living lab. Not fully understanding in reality what it is, but in terms of Cushman and Wakefield, what does that living lab look like? What is it? What sort of stuff are you doing there?
Sophie Schuller
Yeah, well, we share that enthusiasm. So first and foremost, Living Lab is a place which is a functional office based out of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
But it's also if you like a research philosophy. So to maybe start with the latter point, what I mean by that is any consulting practice who sells ideas and advice on how to shape the future of organisations and workplace would be remiss if they didn't spend significant time and resources to constantly research the way in which work, people, and society are reshaping some of those constructs.
So really Living Lab for us speaks to the philosophy of continuous improvement and development in essentially our craft, which is Advising clients in terms of the second point, as I said, the living lab is a physical office. And we have kitted out that office with censoring technology, with specific spatial structures that enable us to research specific aspects of work.
So to make that concrete, for example, we designed the office with a very untypical workplace design, um, concept. So it looks like a workplace cafe. It looks something between a, we work in a Starbucks with very kind of pop zigzag, bright shapes on the walls. Very not Cushman & Wakefield traditional real estate organisation.
And very much focused on creating spaces that would enable us to research aspects of, of going to work. So censoring technology kitted out in quiet meeting rooms enable us to really. evaluate, are we able to concentrate better in those meeting rooms? You know, we design meeting spaces to be sensory deprived so that we can concentrate better.
Or do we? Or we've designed these very beautiful and very atypical design structures, big patterns on the wall, because we feel that that would invigorate the staff more and create more of a culture of creativity. Well, does it? So really for us, this is a physical environment where we can test some of those hypotheses that ultimately end up in our advice.
We can just do that by creating evidence based and data driven advice.
Ian Ellison
So Rachel, it sounds like you are both practitioner and consultant, and it sounds like Sophie, you are very definitely researcher. But the thing that I'm interested in before we get into this particular piece of research is, is this the first time that you folks have collaborated together?
Rachel Casanova
So I have been studying organisational network analytics on a for 20 years and had been trying on the side of my desk to pursue this. Even before COVID, we had gotten to a point where we were taking some of our experience for square foot survey data, and we had gotten some licenses through Microsoft's workplace analytics.
And I was really intrigued by what we could find. Working on the side of your desk when you're a practitioner, not the easiest thing. And it was fortuitous that one of our colleagues who works in the UK said to Sophie, I know you're interested in this. Do you know that Rachel is working on this? And so Sophie has accelerated what we've been able to do as a researcher, as someone who could focus on this.
And so she has really helped bring the back end, right? Because this is a lot of big data. So that's how it really happened. It wasn't by design. It wasn't by let's go look for it. It was two people feeling passionate about this. And because of our network that we each have, we were brought to each other.
Chris Moriarty
That is such a meta answer for what we're talking about today, isn't it? Because we are talking about. The network effect here on Oh, by the way, because I thought I had this image of you guys like hanging out at the Cushman & Wakefield kind of research party and go, hey, what are you into? Hey, I'm into this stuff.
Rachel Casanova
We've never, we've never met in person
Chris Moriarty
Shut the front door. That is such a COVID answer. That is such a sign of the times.
Sophie Schuller
That's so 2023, right? We've never met in person. We are virtual colleagues and that speaks to the power of, of the network. You know what though, Chris? I do think that it speaks to a really interesting point, which is that we've never met and we've produced this piece of research.
I wonder how that research would have turned out differently if we were physically sat together.
Rachel Casanova
We haven't talked about it in a full list, but we know from a speed perspective, We have been hindered. We happen to be, have time zone issues, right? I think we calculated we're 3, 653 miles apart. It's not the easiest.
We do a lot, I think. Sophie's great at this, but we know about each other's families. We sort of have introduced our families while working from home. So we know and we challenge what it means to have to be together because we're doing this and we've done successful work. We also know, using the terminology that, you know, through the analyses that we've done, there is something missing.
Ian Ellison
Well, we are now reversing sort of up a one way street towards your research. So, we are talking about the subject matter of this very, very interesting piece of research that you've done. So, if one of you would just care to sort of take the lead, what is this all about? And tell us what organisation network is about along the way. And then let's talk about motives.
Rachel Casanova
So I'll start and I will say that the really easy way of thinking about this is think about your LinkedIn network, think about your Facebook network or your Instagram, right? And that's your social network before there was social networking that was in mass use. There was organisational network analytics, which was doing the same thing, but looking at it, how you could map an organisation and how it worked together.
So when I started learning about this, it was at least 20 years ago. Dr. Karen Stevenson hired by Steelcase. I heard her speak in person and her background is fascinating to me. So her story is that she was hired by the government, the US government to track Al Qaeda's communication networks. And you can imagine there's probably not an org chart.
For al qaeda and so her entire effort was looking at where is information start where does it go where does it stop to help map where the organisation was sort of empowered after her work she produced a study but with the Harvard Business Review. On this, one of the key things that she defines is how we build trust in an organisation.
She defined six different networks at work that people form. And she did this at the time by way of surveys. So she would ask people, who do you go to for advice about the future? Who do you go to when you're trying to improve methods? Who would you go to to talk about your weekend? So on and so forth.
Took all of that data and established, not an org chart, So much as a network chart, and she could then see quite a few things, but she was there was something inefficient, right? Because it was all based on surveys. Everyone had to participate. Fast forward to today because of the digital footprint that we leave.
We can see those networks. We can see those relationships through email since phone calls are now data. Meetings have data. And chat has data. So we can glean across those four different methodologies. We will hear people say, well, what about the conversation that happened in the hallway? The story to that is most of the time that follows up with let me send you something.
We're going to go to lunch. Hey, are you ready? Things like that. So we can see evidence of most of those conversations. The six networks that I think are really important to talk about are the network of work. Which is the most hierarchical one right that is what we call human capital that's my work network the people i go to to get that done the other five we put into a category of social capital and those five are your innovation network who do you go to to collaborate and brainstorm new ideas.
Your expertise and expert knowledge. So who do I go to when I have a question? My sidebar on that is the number of times people will leave their own organisation to go find expertise that was sitting right next door to them and they wouldn't know. So that's having this level of knowledge within your organisation to find that.
Your career network, so advice about your future. Learning network, where do you go to improve existing processes or learn. About how things are done. And lastly, your social network. So if we put those five into social capital and the work network, the one that we can, we talk about as your job description, that's your work network, very different ways that we develop these and our curiosity and what we wanted to hold ourselves accountable to is for a long time.
We've said place matters. That's where we do these things. Our interest was, does the design of space matter? Does it matter if I'm on the same floor? Does it matter if I work with people in the same building or in the same city? Does it matter if I work in the same time zone? We were doing some of that research before COVID.
When COVID hit, we had a natural experiment to say what happens when we deplete the office entirely. And how did those networks change? And then when we started to come back, we have this natural opportunity to say, okay, can we see results from that? So that's really been the premise of what we're trying to understand.
And there are people out there who study ONA, who come from HR backgrounds, who come from strategic business. We have those interests, but at the same time we are called upon to create places and how can we create change?
Sophie Schuller
I think one of the things that has changed radically in the last five to ten years is moving, if you like, from more of a social science application, asking people, surveys, observations, etc., into kind of this like, Big Data environment that we find ourselves in right now. And that is what has enabled us, if you like, to build the model and to complete the research, because it's one thing to access the metadata. Rachel, you call it the digital footprint that we leave behind. And I think that's such a great example.
When I send you an email, the Microsoft Gods know that we've been in communication. And when you piece that all together. over a larger amount of time, you build up these kind of statistical patterns and networks of how we communicate. And that enables us to do a number of things. One is it enables us to quantify previously intangible relationships that exist and opportunities for communication.
The second thing is it enables us to be predictive. Oh, we see that there are these types of behavioural characteristics or communication characteristics in this pocket of the network and it generates these types of outcomes. Let's reconstruct that in another part of the network and see if we can get the same outcomes.
And the third thing is it enables us to connect into wider datasets, which is really, if you like, the magic behind our model. So Rachel mentioned that we really look at network analysis or organisational network analysis through a lens of place. We do that by connecting the metadata, which is purely organisational and HR actually in its basis, together with presence data.
Are you in or out of the office? Which office? What type of building characteristics do you have? What type of workplace characteristics? Who else is in that office? What are the work attributes being undertaken in that environment? So layering on is only really possible if you like at this scale and speed by using big data technology.
Ian Ellison
So how do you measure organisational network analysis and how do you get us past the concept to something that we can actually talk about changing, for example?
Sophie Schuller
Yeah, well, in today's environment, it's much more straightforward than it previously was. So we use metadata. That is the digital footprint that we leave behind, as Rachel said.
Anytime I send you an email, the Microsoft Gods know that we've sent one another an email. Every time we're on the same call, even if there's 50, 000 people on that call, every time we IM, every time we are sharing a document or working on the same document, we leave a digital footprint behind. And when you connect...
That collaboration or communication patterns across groups of people and whether that's teams, organisations, buildings of tenants or occupiers, etc. And you connect it with demographic information, normally HR information that can be around gender or age or tenure, job description, level in the organisation.
You create a pattern of networked connection. You essentially create people structures across organisations and quantify those people structures. You can then interrogate that people structure via a number of metrics. You can do a time series analysis, which is you can compare the network before an intervention and after an intervention.
So that could be compare the network in an old office, move people to a new office, and then compare the network. And the premise being that you can evaluate some of the implication of moving to a new office in changes to that network. But the more detailed way of measuring organisational network analysis is to interrogate it based on four main statistical premises.
The first one is looking at network density and diversity. That's really looking at, um, how many different types of people are you in either first degree or second degree connectivity to across an entire network. So Rachel and I are great examples. We don't sit in the same team. We don't even sit in the same country, but we are, if you like, connecting across different parts of the network.
So this is a diverse connection. The second is levels of fragmentation within the network that's called betweenness centrality. So networks typically have varying degrees of fragmentation and hierarchy. So if I sit in HR and that has nothing to do with finance, sitting in a completely different building, those two networks would visually be separate on a network graph. There will, however, typically be a connection pathway between those two. And normally that's synonymous with hierarchy. So my boss might speak to their boss who will, in some capacity, connect down into finance. So that's a measure of fragmentation. The third is a measure of closeness.
So that's really, if you can imagine kind of the size of the pie, is it a small pie or is it a big pie? And really closeness is an indicator of how cohesive networks are. So if it's a small and very close network, then information disseminates much faster. Everyone has a much more egalitarian position within that network.
And the last statistical measure is a measure of influence. Influence is always a bit of a misnomer in terms of the naming convention, because people think it's synonymous with Seniority and hierarchy and largely it's not largely it's synonymous with other types of social attributes.
Rachel Casanova
And so aside from what we found, I think our interest and excitement is to bring a vocabulary and a conversation to this that enables us to have a different kind of conversation.
And so we know I think influence is getting easier because we now what an influencer is. These are people who just have followers, for some reason people are following them and that is exactly what influences, that is exactly what leaders and organisations are looking for. People to bring passion and compassion and just bring people together for this greater good in the case of most organisations, it's some sort of product, service that they are trying to create.
And the question is how do they do it? And is it working? This is, to me, one of the, the problems that everyone wants the answer. Should we come back or should we not come back? How should we come back? Well, we believe that this is the MRI that starts to discern it's working or it's not without even having to speak to anyone.
And I think that is one of the benefits of the way we can do this now that organisations or technology captures 12 months of history. At all times. So this is not research that has to be moving forward. The day you start tracking this, you can see 12 months of history. Since we've been doing this for three or four years, we've actually had the opportunity to do before COVID, during COVID.
COVID to Recovery from COVID recovery from COVID to somewhat of a more normal and it's helping us and we think organisations can be well served to see that trend line. It's also not a one time factor. So if he was talking about this comparison, a survey is one day could have been a good day, a bad day, a rainy day.
This is tracking and sort of taking out the noise and seeing the trend line reality mining.
Ian Ellison
So you talk about the data let's just be really really specific here is this data about a particular organisation over time is it data that started with one organisation but now you're talking more broadly.
Sophie Schuller
So in practical terms, we went to our back office, Microsoft Viva platform, and for a single part of our business, we, um, through these licenses, downloaded the communication patterns of 550 colleagues over a one year period, and that was during COVID period, if you like, we then sliced that data set together with HR attributes, which Rachel mentioned, so it enabled us to be able to interrogate the communication patterns of different employee groups that can be people who started during COVID.
It could be people who have been in the organisation for 20 years. It can be women, it can be part time people, people in service line A versus service line B. And we hypotheses or questions, if you like, that we structured the data around. During this period, of course, we are going through phases of either complete remote working, everyone, everyone working at home through government lockdowns, or here in the Netherlands, we had something that looked like a semi, full return to work. And in the Netherlands, the business is very focused on in person collaboration, not necessarily through policy, but just through the structure of the business. We're very people focused organisation. So we have these two time series within that 12 month data set where we could look at practically close to homeworking for the entire year.
Group or practically in person working. So the three questions that we looked at is, does it matter from an organisational network perspective, going back to those four networks that are those four dynamics that I mentioned. Uh, network diversity, influence, fragmentation. Does it matter if you work together, yes or no?
The second question that we looked at is, does it matter how we communicate with one another, the nature of communication, formal communication, informal communication, emails versus meetings, et cetera. Does that have any benefit or any influence on the overall network dynamics and for whom? Again, looking at it through these HR dynamic lens.
And the third element was, if we're looking to invest, we've got a hundred dollars and we want to make sure that that a hundred dollars gets us closer to, towards the kind of elusive high performance workplace, high performance team culture, should we invest in people or place? And those were the three hypothesis, if you like, that we really structured around this data set.
And when we put all of that together in a single model, it enabled us to. interrogate against those three questions.
Chris Moriarty
Drucker that said something about culture eats strategy for breakfast, that sort of, that sort of vibe we're gonna, well look, I, so the research poses three key questions, you've already touched on them there Sophie, so let me ask you Sophie, does whether we work together matter?
Sophie Schuller
Well, what a great question, Chris. And from our research, yeah, yes, it does matter. Um, so our research found that when we were working remotely from home, our organisations, if you like, were incredibly hierarchical, meaning that I reported to my boss and they reported to their boss, etc. And if you happen to be More junior or less tenured within the organisation.
You are way down the bottom of the network stream, purely receiving information. When we came back together, what we saw in our data was that the closeness off the network analysis. If you like massively increased, suggesting that we became much more cohesive and the betweenness centrality, which really is this measure of fragmentation massively reduced.
So the effect that we see when we come back to working when we compare those two data sets, we come back to working physically together is fragmentation massively reduces. So people are once again. Talking to one another at all levels of the organisation, and the second thing is that the total group shrinks, the pie shrinks, meaning that the steps between communications and knowledge flow is much shorter, so we are much more cohesive unit when we are physically working together.
The other finding is that the degree centrality also increases, and that is this measure of network density and diversity. Again, if you think about it, working from home, we're working in a hierarchy. Let's say I'm in HR. I'm just speaking to my HR colleagues. Maybe I'm dabbling out into my kind of business partnering relationship every now and again, speaking to someone else, but I'm in my service line lane.
What we found is that when we work physically together, we. Started to communicate with a lot more different parts of the network. The diversity of our everyday communication radically changed. And we know from wider organisational research, this is associated with increased creativity, faster rates and innovation, better problem solving, more high quality products, et cetera, to market.
So we could see these improvements in organisational outcomes. Happening when we compared working fully from home versus working fully together.
Chris Moriarty
One of the other findings from that kind of first question as well, you touched on the role of influence. And it being driven by a sense of belonging and I thought it was really interesting to talk about the role of influence being a good thing.
It positioned influence, I guess it's saying the influence is improving and that's great. However, and you might have a really good answer for this. It's not always great, right? Because there are some people that are influential. Perhaps we would like them to be less. Influential in the business and that might have been a little bit easier when they were stuck in their spare room for two and a half years.
And now they're back in the office staring apart. So do you look at that at all in terms of the, the kind of trajectory of that influence and whether that's positive or negative? Almost like I can imagine like an electric circuit board with power going one way or the other.
Sophie Schuller
Yeah, of course. And I mean, you are who you socialise with.
I mean, I think it's quite a well known concept that it's not your friends or even your family that actually have the biggest idea on shaping your values and the way in which you approach the world. It's the people that you spend most time with. And that in a modern day, Situation is the people that you work with.
So if you work with people who feel this enormous sense of belonging and that network is positively charged, then of course you are much more likely to also be positively charged. That's, that's a great outcome. However, if that network is. negatively charged or is representative of some aspect of cultural value system that you don't want within your organisation, community or society to extrapolate it slightly, then, of course, that is something that happens in in network effects.
I mean, that's how we see, for example, I don't want to, you know, give more attention to it. But the Trump effect, for example, on Facebook during the previous US elections, that's how it spreads, you know, Um, or any of these, you know, conspiracy theories, that's how they spread. They spread through network effects.
You are who you socialise with to bring that back to our research. So we took a very scientific approach. So we studied the sample and the population at hand, to be honest, I was. Nervous to then look to see if we could evaluate what does this influence represent, because of course it could represent fee earners.
It could represent seniority. And actually when we correlated it. We did our correlation analysis and we identified that it was not only correlated with belonging, but it was correlated with a sense that the most important value of the organisation is that everyone feels a sense of belonging. It was much more kind of a group think, if you like, a group.
So I think one of the most amazing pieces of this research, and I will call out again, it is this sample, this population, and we're in the process of extrapolating that to different populations to see if the construct still stands. But in this population, that sense of belonging really rang true, but we already knew it.
We just were able to, to provide evidence to corroborate it.
Rachel Casanova
I think what intrigued us about influence and not taking a stance on positive or negative is that that's where the organisational culture is distinct from the value of place and. With 25 years of experience, I'd say not every organisation is a good, healthy one.
We don't necessarily get to sell for it. We're just saying these are the people who are influential. These are the types of people, these are the attributes. And now it's up to an organisation to use that. In the most beneficial way it could be about who we hire and who we fire So there are times we've heard stories of someone who was incredibly influential in a positive way, but wasn't doing the human capital That they needed to do right the job description wasn't satisfied.
They get let go and it can have lasting impacts on the trust of an organisation because that person mattered to so many other people. So it's really just about distinguishing where that is, not if it's good or bad. The fact that the sense of belonging for all people was a positive says the only way that happens is with some sort of respect or recognition that people are different, but we all belong to this something else.
Hmm. The other thing, we don't believe there is an end state. We believe this is all about journey. We believe this is all about testing, and if there was ever a moment, it is now.
Sophie Schuller
So there are easy, simple, inexpensive ways to try different things, and I think that is so important because for me it's not just about getting it right, it's also about getting it wrong and quantifying the things that.
Can trip organisations up and that's why we really approach that type of research on ourselves because of course, if we're delivering a project for a client, we want to be the knowledge expert in that space. The problem is, is that society and the questions that are being posed within the real estate industry, within so many industries at the moment are accelerating so fast, it's not that anyone has ever lived through this.
You can't go to someone who's already got the expertise, which is why we really. Take this culture of research first. So we're kind of two steps ahead. Making all the mistakes, finding the edges, finding the limitations, so that when we get to advising clients on this, we've got lived experience.
Chris Moriarty
So, question number two. Does the way that we communicate matter?
Sophie Schuller
Yes, it does.
And actually, this one was such an interesting... such an interesting finding. When we looked, if you like, at the informal versus formal impact of communication on that return to office, what we found is that for every email or meeting you send, it detracts from the positive impacts that were generated as a result of working together.
So what I mean by that is for every email or meeting that you send or attend, It reduces your network diversity and density. It increases the fragmentation of the network, and it reduces the cohesion of the team. So these formal methods of communication are actually reducing some of the benefits of working together.
But what we also saw Is that every informal method of communication such as IMs or a phone call, one to one phone call, it increases those organisational network effects. So it increases network density and diversity, it increases cohesion, and it increases a sense of belonging. And we found this to be Just so interesting because of course, during this period, everything was around mobilizing the organisation to get up to speed as soon as possible and modern management theory is based on, you know, one person managing five person managing 50 people.
So it's very hierarchical. So mass communications and emails and meetings. That was kind of the norm. But what we found is that where we had pockets of people taking that time to do a one on one call, send an IM, which We're finding in our subsequent research is really a proxy for either much deeper friendship based relationships, which maybe we can touch on, but also is likely to translate into face to face interactions for every more personal interaction that people had it massively increased all of the organisational network dynamics, which in the end results in a more cohesive, effective company.
Chris Moriarty
What I found really interesting about this is the kind of societal reflection about the difference between a formal email versus a society now that is, it's instant messages every part of our life now, right? Now, I find them terribly distracting and like draining because my phone doesn't stop buzzing.
But in an organisational setting, actually, we're seeing that they're quite powerful, right?
Sophie Schuller
Yeah, indeed, but is it the methodology or is it the content? My hypothesis is it's the content. So what I mean by that is it's not the fact that it's the speed and it's in my pocket and I can just boom, boom, boom, boom, short sentences.
It's the content of what is in those sentences. So I, if I'm sending you an email, it's likely to be, you know, dear Chris, uh, further to our conversation yesterday, please, especially if you're English. I mean, it'll go on and on and on, but if I'm sending you,
Chris Moriarty
I hope you're well, well, that's the, that's normally how an email starts.
Sophie Schuller
Apologies for sending this so late, but if you are sending an Im, it's likely to be, hey, Chris Binging, or even in some cases, just the link, just the link to the shared document.
Chris Moriarty
An emoji, much like, more like emoji or an emoji in an IMM or a gif. I like a gif.
Rachel Casanova
And to give you a real practical example, I was working with a law firm on the West Coast who, you know, it's so you're a first year, a second year, you're an associate to a partner and it's, you know, no matter how good you are, you're a second year, a great person, but you were still a second year.
I was meeting with a second and a sixth year associate. The second year said, well, I get an email from the partner who says, pick up these red lines. Let me know if you have any questions and I never know when to interrupt them because they always seem busy. They always look busy. So I just go and do it.
And the sixth year said, really? I used to get called into the partner's office. We would sit and go through those red lines and know, and I had an opportunity to ask those questions at any time. And, and they know they've learned now that. A partner in that same firm said, I know our young associates don't know what our prior young associates knew.
There is a lack of knowledge. There is a lack, lack of practicality. And so it's like a real life example of what we're seeing that that familiarity and ability to just have a dialogue, which is kind of what that teams or chat. Is, is a dialogue, not a formal communication. We see it in real practice that it's indicative of that trust, that relationship, that ability to real time get feedback and keep going.
Sophie Schuller
Essentially what you're doing is building pathways between people. And the more you walk that pathway, the more it is ingrained. And I might build that pathway based on my love of Star Trek with a colleague. And it might translate ultimately to us getting the year end accounts over the line. But it's the importance.
And actually, to be honest, from my perspective, it is what organisations are. It's pathways between people that build capacity for knowledge sharing. It might not even be the content. It definitely is probably not the method. That is just a means to an end. It is how often you are walking that pathway between different parts of the organisation that build capacity to share, exchange, build, and develop.
And what our research shows is it matters whether you do that online versus in person. It matters whether you do that via a Teams message or whether you do that via an email. And it, it matters for how many people you, you do that with and we'll get on to the results of whether place matters. These things matter and I think what our research is starting to do is to quantify what matters when.
Chris Moriarty
You've touched on it there, Sophie, about place. Does it matter? And this is, I think of all, you know, all of this is really interesting, but the thing that really kind of fired me up was this idea about the spaces that we provide people and how, you know, what that looks like and new workplaces and the employee experience and how it links to some of the people factors.
There's actually something from the first finding as well, that talked about individual employee experience versus organisational. benefit. And I thought that was really fascinating as well.
Sophie Schuller
So the data set for finding three was a population, same population, but they were based across nine different office locations, all of which varied massively in terms of urbanism, quality, two story buildings, 50 story buildings, um, et cetera, et cetera.
And what we did is we looked at the workplace characteristics, we called it, and that is a combination of physical design attributes, layout, um, proximity to social infrastructure, whether that's public transportation, outside green spaces, restaurants, et cetera, and the building quality. And we looked at that in correlation and combination with employee experience.
And what we found was that when you ask people whether they feel a connection to organisational cultures and values to the organisational entity workplace really matters. So the newer, higher quality offices for every increase in newer, higher quality offices that you receive, people feel one step closer to the.
Organisational brand values and alignment. So workplace really matters when you're trying to foster connectivity to the organisational entity. But what we found is when you ask people about their interaction with their teams and managers, their day to day, the work network, if you like to go back to Karen Stevenson's model of work networks, when you ask people about their experience day to day with teams and managers, the newer the office.
The more it reduced people's experience of managers and teams. So they were negatively correlated. So what that told us is if you want to invest in the success of teams and you want to increase the experience of an individual with the work that they do, workplace is not necessarily the place that is going to garner you the best outcome for that you need to invest in teams and managers.
Ian Ellison
I think what is really interesting about that is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You sort of need both, but it feels like there's a cautionary tale in there. There's a academic, I think, working out of Hong Kong called Dr. Richard Clayton, who talks about the myth of organisational monocultures. And if you aspire to everybody thinking the same way about this organisation, number one, you're on a high road to now, and number two, it's potentially very, very dangerous and it feels like your punchline is almost.
Invest in shiny new space at your peril or invest in shiny new space to the detriment of investing in good management and you are at significant risks. Would you perhaps talk to some of my observations and see how close I am to where your thinking's gone off the back of this one.
Sophie Schuller
If your organisational culture and the people that are responsible for leading it sucks and you have a culture of overwork of pressure of stress, it doesn't matter whether you sit in the best building in the entire world, your culture and the experience of work and therefore people's capability or motivation to create that pathway between one another is thank you.
Not going to be improved by a nicer sofa. If however, and I hope that there are very few of those organisations that, that exist, and if they do, they exist in pockets. But if however, what you're trying to do as an organisation is to cultivate a culture. That is aligned to your vision and mission at an organisational level.
So the culture, which is really bottom up, as opposed to the vision, which is really top down, if they meet in the middle and your office is the physical manifestation of that, then that will garner positive responses if they don't meet. So that your expectation of the organisation is, wow, this is a gorgeous building and a great workspace, but you're working with some of the most viable people in the world, then your experience, of course, isn't going to be improved by adding one more pot plant to the environment.
It's really a people. Managers and team issue that you need to focus on.
Rachel Casanova
Yeah, I would just from the field, right? This is about incongruence and again, not a vocabulary word that most people are walking around using, but when I walk in and I expect something out of a job, out of an employer, because I see it in that physical manifestation and my lived experience is so different.
It hurts and the office is a tangible thing to talk about. So it's easy to say these are our aspirations. I don't know that I think they have to meet in the middle because they can be aspirational. But if the distance between aspiration and lived experience is too big, that's hard for people to manage.
And we're very critical of our organisations right now. So one might say that those who invest in their workplaces, Are places that are also investing in other things. Yeah, but if not Creating this great place of the aspiration without the commitment to what it takes to operate that kind of organisation Will create more dissatisfaction and now we have access to it Like you look at the sites like indeed and glass door and you see the reviews A great cup of coffee doesn't take over when you Asked me to work all weekend every weekend or you didn't do fill in the blank, right?
Sophie Schuller
The other thing that I would say, the scientist in me is compelled to say, again, this was the findings on this population and what we're in the process of doing is replicating it across different populations. And the reason why that is important to call out is that industries and organisations, of course, have distinct attributes of culture.
So what we want to be able to do is to replicate these findings in different industries and organisations to see whether the construct still stands.
Chris Moriarty
Now, let's say for instance, someone's listening to this today and they're sitting there going, yes, that's, you know, my boss is right demanding that we find a way of increasing it.
And we don't really want to go down the prescription route. We want to compel people. And you go out and you look on LinkedIn and people will say to you, it's cause we've got rubbish spaces and we need to build better spaces and that's going to draw people in. So what that person might do is that, okay, we need to see how rubbish our space is.
Let's do an employee experience survey. Let's do a workplace experience survey. Let's get people to take a load of scale questions to tell us which bits we need to fix and which bits we don't. We might even get a good score. We might even get an award for such a thing, but what I'm getting here is there's more to it than that.
Right. And in fact, it might not even be a positive thing. It might not even be a positive thing. It could actually be a negative thing.
Sophie Schuller
So let me talk about my most favorite finding from this piece of research, because you're 200 percent right. So. My research background is objective measures, not to say that there isn't benefit of self reported measures and surveys, but there's a lot of limitations, right, in terms of recall bias, in terms of, as you say, Rachel, was it a good day, bad day, a rainy day?
So it's not by any structure an absolute. You're measuring the perception of a construct, you're not measuring the construct. So the reason why I think that is really important is because a lot of organisations that we speak to at the moment are in this like pursuit of perfect employee experience scores. They want the clickbait headline that says employee experience went from 71 to 94%. That's what they want. And what our research showed is when you compare those four organisational network dynamics and network density, closeness, fragmentation, influence, etc. And you compare that with certain aspects of employee experience.
Like, do you feel engaged? Do you feel that you've got employee experience? The right knowledge to be able to go about doing your job, et cetera. Does it feel comfortable in your job? What we found is that those constructs are negatively correlated. That means if my network density and diversity is increasing, my employee experience self reported might be going backwards.
And that is important for two reasons. Number one is that makes total sense. Of course, if I'm stepping outside of my comfort zone, that's probably going to feel uncomfortable. If I'm engaging with a completely different part of the business as I build a more diverse network, it's likely I'm going to stumble across people who do things differently than me.
Who think differently than me, and that's what I want, but in the beginning, that's going to feel really uncomfortable, and I might not feel like I have the knowledge they have, which is going to be reported in my self reported employee engagement survey. So employee engagement is going to go down. The second reason that that matters enormously.
Is that when we engage with clients and they talk about wanting to improve employee experience, we always challenge them. Do you, or are what you're looking for is the balance between the stretch that people are really looking for and need in order to grow, in order to develop, in order to learn and their experience going through that process or their facilitation of going through that process.
And of course, the organisational outcomes, employees. Happy employees are, uh, engaged employees, are productive employees, but the motivation for organisations to support employees in that endeavour is, of course, not just entirely altruistic, but it's because our organisational benefits. So, as a result, if you're trying to play the employee experience game by getting 100 percent score, it's highly likely that you are not only taking away from your own organisational performance, you're also limiting the growth opportunities and development opportunities for your employees.
Rachel Casanova
We have not seen anyone measuring organisational health the way we're measuring individual health. And we're not a bunch of individual contributors doing our own thing. And I think that's the point where this negative correlation is so important to us. Happy people in a company that's not making money is not going to be a company very long. This is not a social altruistic project.
Ian Ellison
So is that part of your future work? You have alluded to several times about not just seeking to validate findings or test whether findings are replicable beyond this sample, beyond this case study, but are you finding new questions and seeking ways to answer them as you go?
Sophie Schuller
Yeah, definitely. I mean, the evaluation of hybrid. So not just does it matter whether we're physically together or apart, but also who is together. Are there key individuals within the team or the social structure or the organisational structure that play a pivotal role in facilitating some type of organisational dynamic?
You know, everyone knows someone in their organisation or their social network that's a fixer. You know, you have a conversation with them and they're like, Oh, you should speak to blah, blah, blah. Now, maybe that individual on a personal contribution level is not very good as you said earlier, Rachel, but in terms of their importance at a total group structure, it's incredibly important.
And for me, I feel so passionate about this because we talk about productivity and cultivating workplace experience at a very individual level. I, as an individual, cannot carry my whole team, which for me suggests that productivity is a group. output is a group process. I might contribute to it with a certain measure of productiveness, but producing things, it takes a village of people.
And I think Rachel, you mentioned it earlier. We're really starting to speak to organisational health, group intelligence, how healthy the team is working together. And I think post COVID the notion of team success is kind of lost its way a bit. So that's one aspect that we really want to investigate in the next Piece of research by evaluating what we call the hybrid effect, who's in and who's out and in what combination and what effect does that have?
The second aspect that we are really looking to dive much deeper into is traditional business outcomes. So for example, My hypothesis, I'll put this out there now and then probably come back and disprove myself in one year's time. My hypothesis is where you have organisations that have a high degree of home working, it probably doesn't have much impact on revenue per se, but I bet it has a huge impact on EBITDA, meaning that we are more inefficient.
When we work from home on mass scale and take Rachel and I, as an example, I seriously believe that this piece of research would have been completed in half the time, and maybe we would have found more outcomes had we been together. So by reviewing more tangible organisational metrics, such as revenue and EBITDA, organisational performance measures or HR performance measures like.
Number of sick days, staff attrition, average staff performance, average time it takes staff to move between grade levels. And to correlate, is there a difference between those who typically tend to work from home or those who typically tend to work in an office, and the combination of both? And is that something that is reliant on yourself or other people?
You know, during COVID, we talked about the onboarding fallacy, where people were being onboarded. Totally ineffectively and that as a result of kind of starting in an organisation with no social infrastructure and no capacity or capability to build that social infrastructure leaving, can we see that through organisational metrics such as staff attrition in that example by correlating it with these organisational network dynamics?
Chris Moriarty
Rachel, as a final thought on this, what would you say to someone who's listening now to say, look, if this has sparked a bit of interest, apart from going to the, you know, to show notes and downloading the report immediately, uh, and reading the report, what would you be saying to them? What's my action plan?
What do I do next?
Rachel Casanova
It's a great question and an important one. One of the issues that has happened in the past, one of the reasons that I was frustrated working on the architecture real estate side is that we uncover a ton of problems that our clients are not responsible for fixing. So they'll do their best, but for every 10 steps forward, they may, there may be seven steps backwards because other people aren't on board.
So that's the first thing that I would tell them. They have to do not to mention that to get access to this data we need participation from HR and we need participation from it so we have to see this as that problem and look at best we get. Beyond we say get us to the executive who all of those people report to to see this as a multidimensional problem but we're not trying to go over anyone we're just trying to say that you have to you have to look at this problem and solve this.
With everyone coming to the table for the same reason.
Sophie Schuller
I think the other thing is that we're seeing these multidimensional problems being solved at the same time as if you like real estate is shifting from being an economic asset and one that is, you know, keep the air conditioning running and do it for less money to a social asset.
So I think the entire industry is also shifting towards this idea that real estate shapes people. And then we shape it. People start to understand now the social value behavioral change that occurs within space when you shape space. And that, of course, for a bunch of people who study bricks and mortar is very exciting.
Rachel Casanova
Yeah, and I think another thing that that person is thinking about is they have an operational responsibility. Right. They have a zero-sum game. Spend the budget. Don't spend more. Keep the lights on. And we're, we want those people asking the question why. And I think we're spending an inordinate amount of time getting executives to establish these policies and what we should do and so on.
Even if you can't go the direction of doing your own research for your organisation, you can take some of these findings and say, let's let people act. And let's respond to it. That evidence based design is a little bit, I don't know that that real estate is going to shape people as much as I think.
We're seeing evidence of behaviours, lean into them, take some of the findings that we have, start asking why of your own organisation. We want to come back this many days. We don't want to come back that many. Why? I think we also have to get comfortable that we've always leased or owned real estate for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, yet we always had an inefficiency that if we were a production facility, we have two days that we don't use it at all.
And from 5 p. m. to 6 a. m. it goes unused and no one questioned why are we paying for real estate all the time when we only use it from nine to five, relatively speaking, right? That may be just that we need to get used to. We're spending it for the three or four days. And be okay with that, but I think we're digging into a problem that is not actually the right question and we're not going to solve the right answer if we don't stop.
How do we get them to return? Forget it. Like, let's look at behavior. Let's react to what's happening. Let's find the people who are choosing the behaviors you want that might elicit some of the reaction, the findings that we have and lean into it. And operate there this doesn't have to be a major research project this maybe this doesn't have to be everyone in the room the the whole idea of return there's a negative connotation to that entirely let's sort of leave that and figure out what it is that we want our organisation to be able to do and start practicing from there.
-- OUTRO --
Chris Moriarty
Dan welcome to the reflection section and do you know what this is exciting because I think although we've had guests on the reflection section before you're the first. Interviewee turn reflection section guest or the first person that we've we've spoken to and gone, do you know what we like the cut of his jib?
He can come back and reflect and it's not completely unrelated to the fact that you are a doctor as we established in your episode How is being a doctor sitting with you because last time we spoke to you was quite a new experience, wasn't it?
Dan Wakelin
It was, I'm definitely getting used to it. I was away a couple of weeks ago and I was desperately hoping that we wouldn't have an incident on the plane where somebody asked for a doctor because my partner was threatening to put his hand up and go, yes, he's here.
Chris Moriarty
And you know, it would have been mortifying. Have you got an activity based working issue?
Dan Wakelin
Exactly. Do we need to rearrange the seats in this plane?
Ian Ellison
Can I ask a question about being a doctor? Did you hire the floppy hat? Did you buy the floppy hat?
Dan Wakelin
I hired the floppy hat. Yeah. I don't have very many occasions to wear it.
Ian Ellison
See, that was one of my ambitions, right? Cause we've established on this podcast that I don't have a doctorate.
Yeah. They got floppy hat, right? It's not like a mortar board. It's floppy. And I promised myself that I was going to buy one and wear it for special occasions, like sitting on the toilet and stuff like that. I never did. Cause I never got there.
Chris Moriarty
So if you're invited back to a graduation, you've got to wear the garb, haven't you? Again, you've got to go back, change colours, so you'd have to hire it again. I'm with Ian, I would have totally bought it.
Ian Ellison
I would buy it. I would get it bought, Dan. That's what I do, Dr. Dan. Get your floppy hats on. How much does it set you back?
Chris Moriarty
To hire? What's a floppy hat cost? I, I don't know. No, no, no, to buy it.
Don't know. What did it cost to hire? About 50 quid. So what do you reckon? That's going to be, cut 100 quid, 250 I reckon? Yeah, get one bought.
Ian Ellison
I'd say get one bought.
Chris Moriarty
We're good for it.
Dan Wakelin
You'll be fine.
Chris Moriarty
Yeah, alright. We know people, we'll get you one. Maybe we should get Workplace Geeks floppy hats for all our guests.
What, graduates of Workplace Geeks? Graduates of the Workplace Geeks Academy.
Ian Ellison
Doctor, I'm a Geek. Yes.
Dan Wakelin
I've never seen that merch before, that's a nice idea.
Chris Moriarty
Well, thanks for mentioning merch because purple books are still available. If anyone would like one write into Workplace Geeks, that's a hello@workplace geeks.org.
So Dan, you've had the chance to listen to our conversation with Rachel and Sophie, as is the time on a tradition in the reflection section over to our guest. What was it that that you thought was the most telling contribution from the work that they talked about?
Dan Wakelin
The thing that really struck me about their research was that the conversation that they had about moving towards big data, and it really struck me because it was so different to my own research and to the conversation that we had about that.
And it got me thinking about how. Useful that big data can be, I think, so if he talks about reality mining, um, I love the term and I wondered as well, whether there's a value to be had here in bringing those two types of research together. So we've got this fabulous, huge pool of big data, which is great, very objective, tells us an awful lot about what's actually happening.
Ian Ellison
So when you say this big pool of big data, you mean the metadata that exists within the Microsoft, for example, tools that they were using all of the 365 metrics that Microsoft automatically grabs through its, I think it's called Viva now, but the platform that's basically saying these, these are the use statistics which allow us to generate these trends of what's going on in your organisation.
Dan Wakelin
Exactly. And how interesting to be able to extract all of that data. I wonder, is there a place for perception still? Because that, you know, still has a bearing on our lived experiences, right? Our perception of what's happening. So is there a place for this fascinating, really insightful, big data, metadata, and something a little bit more fluffy, something that explores perception as well?
Ian Ellison
What you're essentially talking about there, Dan, is the interplay between objective and subjective data, and you're putting them in the same place and saying, it's not about them fighting it out, it's about what mutual value can we unlock by paying attention to the both. But then it's amazing that we, we sort of almost then go, because we did it in a conversation recently, Chris, when we were talking with Esme, we kind of, I think you used the word fluffy, there's almost, you use phrases which then undermine the importance of it.
But what you're essentially talking about is the value of objective and subjective to give us richer insights, because neither gives us an absolute picture by itself. Exactly.
Dan Wakelin
And we talk about that as the pulling together of perception and reality, you know, and that's so powerful, actually, to be able to see both of those things together. Super interesting.
Chris Moriarty
It's a really interesting juxtaposition. And I think that's going to be the biggest word I use today. Wow. Juxtaposition. To your point, Ian, it's kind of like we apologetically talk about subjective stuff, right? Because we've been conditioned that it's substandard to the objective stuff.
And fluffy is the go to word for it, right? HR quite often has to deal with that all the time and mainly because it deals with a lot of the subjective. What I find interesting about what you're talking about, Dan, is that almost, in a way, it would be as interesting to draw a line between perception and reality, almost like quantify it.
You know, we can almost get to a point where, despite people doing this, they often believe they're doing that. Now we sometimes talk about that as a, we have to be careful. Therefore we've got to go reality mining, but actually imagine getting to a situation where we can go, we can almost predict reality through perception and vice versa.
And we know which part of that equation we've got to adjust because. I'm of the school that perception is reality to an extent. Nice. The reality almost doesn't matter, right, to a lot of people. You're battling the perception, not the reality. And I think for a lot of change managers out there, I'm sure they will talk about, we can show people all this data in the world, but if they think this, that's really the bit we've got to change, not, not the reality.
Ian Ellison
There's an academic, I don't even know where, what field you'd say he's from, but surname is Vaclavik, Vaclavik, something like that, Vaclavik. And I've got one of his books back there, I think it's called The Invented Reality, talks about first and second order realities. And it's a really nice way of showing the interrelationship.
So a first order reality is that this room is 20 degrees. A second order reality is whether it's... Too hot, too cold for me because perception is reality. And once you get your eye in with workplace data, there's loads of that going around. So there is a fact, and that is a first order reality, right? A first order fact, but a second order fact is then what it means to me.
And that's the bit you're talking about, Chris, perceptions as realities. And actually all of a sudden you can see that they have a role to play together.
Chris Moriarty
And then you know what you've done as well is that you've reminded me of a project that you and I have been involved with via our, our parent company, Audium, who are sponsors on a project coming out soon.
So we're recording this tail end of September. So in the next few weeks, this will be available. But something called the Workplace Data Census, which we did in partnership with the workplace event, that's a sort of yearly look at what sort of data it is that workplace professionals are using, why they're using it, how they're using it on one of the lowest scoring.
Sources of data is exactly this stuff, the kind of Microsoft analytics, the, what are people doing and how are they communicating? And it's just really interesting now with Sophie and Rachel with Ben Weber before this kind of link to weak and strong ties has been this really crucial metric family is going to have such a bearing on so much of the stuff.
People like you are doing in your organisation and other sort of change managers are doing and workplace consultants, however you want to frame it, that's the bit out there. If we talk about reality mining, it's like an untapped quarry that, you know, guys, go and have a look because these guys are starting the show.
There is a link and it's really important.
Dan Wakelin
I think part of me thinks, why wouldn't you make use of this wealth of data that we've got available to us? You know, what Sophie and Rachel were talking about. Was incredibly insightful and I think lots of organisations could benefit from that level of understanding.
And then there's also a part of me that thinks, gosh, how do we even start, you know, these guys are super clever and know what they're doing and how do we share that with the industry so that actually we can all tap into that data in our own organisations and, and understand what it is telling us what is the story that it's actually telling.
Ian Ellison
That sort of supercharges the thing that I wanted to talk about. So the thing that really struck me was when Sophie was talking about essentially a sort of concept of a living lab and she was making the case for any organisation professing to be able to advise other organisations ought to have learned.
Rather than just be essentially offering advice, the implication being you, you have to know your, what's the phrase? Know your onions. Yeah, I think you've used that before.
Chris Moriarty
Yeah, you can. You've gotta know your onions, right? You can slot in any vegetable, uh, or produce you want in there. No, you onions. Onions is the most popular, is the one I use.
Ian Ellison
So that got me reflecting on, you know, so there are a huge amount of what they're talking about, if not all of it is basically based upon their own internal learnings from a bunch of different experiments. Now, this then goes to the thing that you're talking about, Dan, which is this is all now available to us.
If you are a 365 subscriber, if your organisation uses Microsoft 365 or. M365, as I believe they call it in Microsoft. And you choose to have these metric tools switched on. So whether it's workplace analytics, whether it's Viva, if you switch it on, you have the ability to learn stuff about your own organisation to make you better.
Why then don't we? Well, I wonder if there's two sides to this. One is capability from a quote unquote big data perspective because That's foreign to us, right? And foreign makes it scary because if we do it badly, we might look crap and we don't want to look crap because that's human nature. But then the other side to that is there is such a culture in tech of showing and sharing and really open sourcing insights. There's so much help from Microsoft about how to get the best of this, and it's presented in a very altruistic way, but what it fundamentally does is makes Microsoft so embedded within their tools because they become invaluable to you, you become entrenched. So it's hardly altruistic, right? But they have so much resource to be able to give you so much help to be able to get it.
Good insights, then we've really got no excuse not to, other than getting off our own backsides and putting the effort in to learn more because it's literally there in front of us.
Dan Wakelin
I wondered if I could move as slightly away from that piece. Of course. 'cause I, I was really pleased that you brought up the living lab, Ian, because that was something else that was a very interesting takeaway for me. It's a term I've heard a lot, but actually it was the first time that anyone's really ever articulated what that means. I found that so interesting that, that Sophie and Rachel talked about this kind of physical space for research and a philosophy of continuous improvement.
I've never heard it described like that. And that's something I'm definitely going to go away and think about more.
Chris Moriarty
One of the things we talk about an awful lot in these projects is how difficult it is to take something from theory into practice, and it sounds to me that something like that living lab and the culture that surrounds it and stuff is almost like a, you know, I always think about this actually in Harry Potter when Dumbledore's like pulling thoughts out of his head and popping it in his little bowl, it's pensive, right?
It's almost like an organisational version of that because core wonder if, and wouldn't it be cool if, and it's like, Do you know what? Rather than disrupting the core business, let's pop that idea over there with those guys. I mean, I guess it's R& D departments to give it, you know, sort of a really boring thing, but almost culturally and systematically being able to pick up ideas, test them, test them in the real world, test them in a safe environment and pop them back into the operation.
I guess it's the knowledge worker. a version of a R& D department. I mean, manufacturing, engineering, science, you know, pharmaceuticals have R& D departments because they need R& D departments. Wouldn't it be great if more organisations were able to say, here's the thing we do as a service, as a people service.
We go and test those out over there and they come over here.
Dan Wakelin
A lot of people have heard about the Hawthorne effect. That's basically the notion that people who are in a research environment might alter their behaviours simply because they're in a research environment, right?
So, if we're in these sorts of living labs and we're testing and trialling things, how do we isolate for that? How do we do that in such a way that we don't end up creating the answers that we expected to see?
Chris Moriarty
Not the first time we've heard about the Hawthorne effect on the Geeks, Esme brought it up before she's really interested in that I mean it's in the context Actually, it's a nice link to something that Sophie talked about in terms of ploy experience scores and stuff like that you know when you're presented with a scale and you're asked to tell people how You feel on that scale is there an element of Hawthorne that's saying, actually, if I really, I care about this thing, but they won't listen.
If I'm balanced about it, I'm going to get a really bad score. So they really know I'm angry versus someone goes, my job might be on the line here or all the rest of it. It's almost like someone filling in the answers. Can I go, why are you asking? Why, why are we doing this? Oh yes. Cause I know I'm in a lab environment interesting. We'll look in the interest of brevity. My kind of final thing that I kind of reflected on was. There's an obvious one and a common one, because this is another example of a hidden thing, a hidden metric that's under the surface of what we perceive in work, that is having a correlated and causal effect on the outcomes of work, right?
Which I just think is the theme of this series of Workplace Geeks, when you think right back to people like Sailer, people like Ben Weber, who are looking at all these levers that have always been there. But we haven't had a way of measuring it, right? So that's the first thing is that I think what Rachel and Sophie have offered here is another in a kind of catalog of things that we've talked about this series where there's hidden metrics that I think everyone who, who is involved in this game in one way, shape, or form should be thinking about how they can pull it.
But what I actually really like about this is that on the surface, two people Coming out of the one of the world's biggest property organisation saying the product that they sell is important is a bold move in that the obvious criticism is of course you would say that but they have almost diligently gone past that so they will prove it to you.
We will prove it to you with science, not with a survey that we've done. We've asked nine out of 10 cats and they've said, we have used some really, really heavy hitting science in the ONA and we've brought it to our world and we've proven it and we'll continue to prove it. I think that's really exciting.
Ian Ellison
You said the word prove. I would say explore. They explored it and they found particular patterns. And Sophie's actually at pains to point out that that doesn't mean it's right. It means we found a pattern and what we need to do now is, with other willing clients, see whether this is a pattern which replicates, see whether it's a pattern which is specific.
The point of scientific research isn't to be right, it's to learn stuff.
Dan Wakelin
And more than that, I think, so they've done... This piece of work that says workplaces are important. Okay. But actually they've said it's also not the be all and end all, right? Look at the two of them. They told us they haven't met.
Absolutely. And they've conducted this piece of research in a virtual environment. And so what that proves is it's not everything. It's super important, but it's not everything.
Chris Moriarty
So look, that was, that was the reflection section, Dan. I know that this is a kind of a, a sheep dip into a workplace geeks episode versus what you're, you're used to, but how did you find it reflecting on something like that?
Dan Wakelin
Really interesting, really grateful to have been asked to come and reflect with you guys. It's been super interesting hearing about Sophie and Rachel's research and uh, yeah, love it. Thank you.
Ian Ellison
Well, you can only come back next time if you wear the floppy hat for us next time.
-- OUTRO --
Chris Moriarty
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Speak to you next time.
