Making workplaces human
Leaders in Conversation is where we explore human-ness at work with big-hearted leaders and conversations that build clarity to help solve some of today’s business challenges. Last week, we spoke to Simone Fenton-Jarvis, who is the Workplace Consultancy Director at Ricoh UK
How do we create the right workspace for everyone to flourish in a post-Covid-19 world? What will workplaces look like in a world of social distancing and dispersed teams? Does the workplace even have a future and what can be done by leaders to create the right physical and virtual spaces for their people?
These questions and more were the focus of our conversation with Simone Fenton-Jarvis, Workplace Consultancy Director at Ricoh. She is passionate about creating people-centric workplaces — a passion that drives not only her work at Ricoh, but her roles as a Fellow of IWFM [Institute of Workplace & Facilities Management], Vice-Chair of the IWFM Workspace Group and Mentor for “30% Club” — a campaign group of Chairs and CEOs taking action to increase gender diversity on boards and senior management teams.
“People have evolved. We’ve gone from being cogs in the machine to driving this sense of engagement and experience. It goes back to the industrial revolution. Ultimately, we’re trying to come out of the habit of going to a place to do work,” she told us. “There are many different ways of defining what the workplace is. For me, workplace is all about process and technology, with people at the centre. People should always be at the centre. They shouldn’t be separate but embedded in everything”
Referring to how organisations have implemented a scale of change that would normally take years in just a few weeks thanks to the Covid-19 crisis, she said people have demonstrated that they are resilient and capable of adapting. However, she warned that employers need to be mindful of “agile guilt”.
“We think we need to be checking our emails at all hours of the day and working until 10pm just to show our colleagues or managers that we working. But this doesn’t mean we are being productive. It just means we are working lots of hours. It’s created a blur between the two spaces: are we sleeping in the office or working from home?”
Taking account of our circadian rhythms and working when we feel most productive is one way to resolve this. “Just because the world says 9 til 5 is the way doesn’t mean this is right for everyone. I know I’m most productive for innovation and brainstorming activities in the evening so I will take a few hours out during the day instead,” she says.
Having a designated workspace in the home is also important. “Sitting on the sofa with your laptop on your knee and then putting your laptop down and expecting to go immediately back to normal life is not going to work. You have to change your space if you are to feel like you’ve finished work,” she says, referencing how she has seen people go for fake commutes which involve a walk around the block as a means by which to mark the beginning and end of the working day.
Other suggestions for creating space between work life and home life were to use bookcases to divide up rooms, or shutting the door of the room you have been working in and physically leaving it. Having a new morning routine that allowed for some time to exercise, meditate, read and prepare yourself mentally for the day also helps — rather than just getting out of bed and sitting straight away at your desk.
We discussed how this aspect of working outside the normal 9 til 5 may be one of the more significant changes that will come out of the crisis. The 9 til 5 was originally driven by the fact that to interact physically with their colleagues, a team needed to be in the same space at the same time. Coupled with this, there was the need to measure how many hours people were working. But with online working all this has changed. Hasn’t it?
Not necessarily. Some companies are still trying to cling onto analogue working practices in the digital world. Fenton-Jarvis referred to companies which have been tracking how long their employees are online, leading staff members to come up with inventive ways to give the impression they were still at their desks, even if they weren’t.
“We’ve seen a few funny situations where people have actually fastened their mouse to objects that are moving so their screens don’t freeze. But there is something fundamentally wrong if that is the extreme that people have to go to. How we measure work should be based on output not on hours. I could spend 60 hours doing one thing and say this is what I’ve done, or I could do 60 things in three hours. There’s a big difference between knowledge workers and task workers. It’s not one size fits all. We’ve got a bit obsessed with measuring productivity but what we should focus on is the output of the organisation,” said Fenton-Jarvis.
There is conflict within the British working population at the moment, according to various reports we have seen. On the one hand, 65% of Brits don’t want to go back to the office. But at the same time, people are missing the ability to connect and be creative with others — the lack of human connection is having an impact. What could organisations do to help their teams cope with this?
“Imagine being on-boarded in a new organisation where you can’t just go and speak to people. It’s that accidental learning or bumping into people and relationship building that is missing. We’ve got to put some kind of structure in place that allows this still to happen,” she said, suggesting that tools such as Workplace from Facebook can be useful. “That’s where technology can really start to kind of bring people together like it has done over the last three months.”
The crucial thing is understanding what the workplace for, she says.
“If we don’t know what the workplace is for then there’s an argument of why have we got it? The workplace should be a destination that people want to go to. The office shouldn’t be to go into between nine to five where you stick your headphones on and hope that nobody distracts you for the next three hours because you’ve got a report to do — that should be being done at home. Organizations that say we could never work from home as it just wouldn’t work have an issue with trust. It’s not that it can’t be done because technology can allow most kind of knowledge worker jobs to be done from home — it’s that they don’t trust their people to do the work. That’s where the presenteeism then comes in as well because people know that they’re being watched.”
So, what do employers need to think about when considering the workplaces of the future? Ultimately it comes down to the purpose of the business, she says. “What is it you’re employing people to do and do you need them to be in a physical space or a virtual one. It has to be an adult relationship that brings trust and empowerment into the workforce, and which has compassion for people. Everyone’s needs are different. The sooner we start appreciating that and embracing this, the better it will be for everyone.”
The full conversation can be viewed here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/568134280499380/?ref=bookmarks
The next event is Episode 5: creating inclusive cultures in online spaces
In this episode Vimla Appaddo, author, speaker and acclaimed service designer talks about the value of developing an inclusive culture and what that looks like in a digitally dominant workplace.
Tickets via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creating-inclusive-cultures-in-online-spaces-tickets-111106406252
