A Fish Can’t See Water
There’s something just a little too formulaic about the imposition of hybrid workforce models that redistribute the weight of reality in favour of virtuality.
It’s not the integrity of productivity and efficiency data. Nor is it the fact that the virtuality imposed by the pandemic through confinement has left most of us inadvertent champions of digital transformation.
Instead, it’s a willingness to reject the underlying importance of the social and cultural patterns that shape business. The value of human connection. What anthropologists call Incidental Information Exchange and Sense Making. What most of us call the Corridor Conversation.
They’re the environments where people don’t just bump into each other, they bump into other sources of information. Where otherwise linear decision-making models are indirectly challenged through what we inadvertently hear from others. Where an organisation’s decisions become unconsciously collective.
In her excellent new book, AnthroVision. A New Way to See in Business and Life, Gillian Tett contests an over-reliance on the economic and business modelling tools used in organisations for the past 50 years. Most startling about such a proposition is that Ms Tett is the US Managing Editor of the Financial Times.
In her defence, she falls a long way short of dismissing the value of economic-science. She does however put forward a compelling argument for a need for a better integrated approach to decision-making in which tribal patterns of people behaviour are cast against the operational and financial modelling tools on which businesses have become so reliant.
It’s far from a whimsical idea to sell more books to people and culture teams. In the past 18 months, there are few organisations that have not been forced to reinvent areas of their business. But it highlights the fact that those that have been successful, have tended to embrace a mindset transformation too.
Today, an appreciation of a wider eco-system matters enormously. Not just as a business, but as an individual. Organisations need to find a way to embrace the value of rituals and symbols within.
Giving employees the opportunity to be remote, forever, helps no-one. In fact, it only serves to create a greater disconnect between how they, and their employees, see the future of work. If, as has been broadly acknowledged, the social contract between employer and employee has changed, then there is an even greater imperative to share and understand mutual expectation.
That cannot be determined remotely. When it comes to employee sentiment and organisational culture, incidental information exchange is not a survey. It’s a far more human experience that captures the implicit as much as it does the explicit.
For now, most organisations have adapted to a hybrid workforce model that accommodates the needs of employer and employee. But for all the positive reports of productivity and efficiency, we’ve yet to see what impact it has on long-term culture and innovation needs. Finding a way to facilitate tribal patterns of behaviour that help people make sense of things will be a key factor in determining if the hybrid future is here to stay.