by Jonathan Smale
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16 Feb, 2021
According to research by Ginger Healthcare, 70% of people cite the pandemic as the most stressful time of their career. In many ways this is unsurprising - Covid-19 is a health crisis of historic proportions and it’s impossible to separate the direct impact of the disease itself - bereavement, concern for our health, concern for loved-ones, financial worries and the impact of social isolation - from how we feel when we’re at work. However, there is growing evidence that suggests that organisations are adding to the direct stress of Covid by applying pre-pandemic thinking and behaviours in a new context of mass remote working. As well as impacting employee wellbeing, it potentially damages our chances of taking the positives from the biggest remote working experiment in history, and progressing on to a hybrid post-pandemic working model that is better for everyone. Even though remote working forced by lockdown isn’t exactly agile, there are many positives. Microsoft’s recent Future of Work Research Report found that only 9% of people want to go back to a traditional office-based working model (incidentally, only 26% want remote only, the rest want hybrid). These figures wouldn’t stack up if there weren’t huge upsides to our experiences of working through a pandemic, not least the time, money and energy saved by not commuting. It is important to say up front that whilst this post is focused on remote working during lockdown (so relates to about two-thirds of us), I recognise that many people are at the ‘front line’ witnessing at first-hand the devastating impact of the pandemic, combined with a real concern about continuous personal exposure to the disease. They may not be as susceptible to feelings of isolation and the difficulty of separating work from home, but the pressures they face daily are far more acute. Tough on stress, not so tough on the causes of stress One of the most positive things about the pandemic, from an employment perspective is that it has taken wellbeing right to the top of the people management agenda. It is being talked about more regularly and openly than ever before, and some of the support and resources that employers are putting in place for their workers are first rate. What concerns me, however, is that whilst there is some great attention going into helping people cope with stressful situations or deal with stress once it has arisen, there is less thought going into how the employee experience may be contributing to poor wellbeing in the first place. I’ll explore this under the themes of work patterns, leadership and inclusion, although it’s actually hard to split them because they are so interrelated. Work patterns Microsoft’s research has found that, in lockdown, we are spending on average 48.5 more minutes at work per day (so, going back to what I said earlier about time saved not commuting, it looks like it’s not us who are benefiting from those extra hours, it’s our employers). They report a 50% increase in working after 6pm, a tripling of weekend working, and 70% of people reporting longer working weeks. You could question whether the extended work day is a result of people working more flexibly, such as taking a couple of hours out in the daytime and making up for it in the evening; but the research (which is partly based on Office 365 activity data, so pretty accurate) suggests that’s not the case. What is actually happening is that many of us are spending our time in back-to-back virtual meetings, so the only time we get to do focused work or deep thinking - often our most creative and productive time - expands into evenings and weekends, leading to fatigue and potential burnout. These relentless work schedules may be partly down to organisational culture and the expectations and pressures of others. But are they also partly self-inflicted? In the same way that we used to stay late in the office to look committed, maybe we are inventing new forms of remote presenteeism? When our work is less visible, does it put pressure on us to appear more productive? And do the very habits that create the perception of productivity, actually end up damaging it? Of course, there’s nothing new about the long hours culture, but lockdown has increased the ‘always on’ element, and made it more difficult to escape work when at home because the workplace is at home. Research by CapGemini supports this, with 56% of respondents to their remote workforce survey fearing that remote work creates a pressure to remain available for work at all times. What research is also telling us is that virtual meetings are more tiring than in-person meetings, so we’re even more drained at the end of a back-to-back meetings day at home than we would be in the office. ‘Zoom Fatigue’, as it has now been named, occurs because virtual meetings are proven to require more focus and mental effort in order to absorb information. So when they’re back to back, with no time in between to recover or think ahead, it’s not good for anyone. One way of responding to all of this is to publish some rules or protocols setting out how people should behave during lockdown (do take regular breaks, do have lunch, don’t work outside these hours - that sort of thing), but this would be missing the point. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t encourage employees to have breaks or take their annual leave, but if, after a year of mass remote working, the work patterns that are damaging wellbeing have now become ‘normalised’, it’s going to take more than a set of rules to break them, especially if those setting the rules don’t adhere to them. Which brings me onto the theme of leadership. Leadership If the leadership response to the unsustainable work patterns dilemma is ‘we need to give our staff permission to take breaks and a proper lunch’, or worse still ‘we need to tell them that they must!’, it actually reinforces the sort of dependency culture that is likely to be contributing to employee stress levels in the first place. Caring for employees is good, and certainly much better than not noticing that there is a problem, but in a complex, fast-changing world, learning, personal growth and adaptability are the key to success and this is hampered if we are encouraged to always look to those in authority for the answers to everything. This parent-child dynamic doesn’t build resilience. We are learning so many lessons about effective leadership during this pandemic, not least at a global level. And the biggest lesson of all is that compassionate, human leaders who are not afraid to expose their own vulnerabilities and are willing to admit to not having all the answers, achieve the best outcomes. ‘I know best’ doesn’t work. I’m certain that on the whole lockdown has built more trust between managers and their team members, and a realisation that you don’t have to watch over people for them to be productive. That said, there is still a type of manager who feels the need to come up with ingenious new ways to micromanage. These managers may have been in shock for a while when lockdown began, but then discovered that a good alternative to watching over the team in an office is to message them every five minutes at home to keep them on their toes, whilst keeping a constant eye on their online status. Of course, for the employee, that sense that you are always expected to be available, and feeling of being unable to switch-off even for five minutes is, along with everything else they’ve got to deal with during a pandemic, going to massively affect their wellbeing. The CapGemini research supports this worrying trend, with 48% of employees feeling they are being micromanaged in a remote setting (this is 64% in the US) and 59% stating that their organisation has started using work management mechanisms and surveillance technology to monitor them remotely. It also identifies a correlation between this and burnout rates, with 66% of those feeling they are being micromanaged remotely, also feeling burnt out. In his 2018 book about the detrimental impact of modern working and management practices on employee health, ‘Dying for Paycheck‘, Stanford Professor Jeffey Pfeffer concludes that ‘it is beyond doubt that lack of control and autonomy eventually leads to higher burnout and stress levels’. But the known link between lack of self-efficacy and stress is nothing new. I remember once reading that studies into stress levels of WW2 bomber crews found that it was the navigators, whose lives were dependent on the maneuvering skills of the pilot and the aim of the gunners, who suffered the most trauma on their missions because at the moments of greatest danger they felt the least in control. Whilst the consequences may be less dramatic, the same principle applies today. For years many organisations have believed they needed hierarchical structures, complex operating models and rules to dictate how work gets done. Then all of a sudden a pandemic came along and, rather than chaos reigning, we found that people could be trusted to unite behind a common purpose and get on with things, in many ways better than before because they had more freedom to act and decide and weren’t held back by the bureaucracy that was put in place to keep control. Finding that some organisations are inventing and implementing new approaches to micro-management in a remote context is therefore concerning as it doesn’t suggest a mindset shift to a more empowering style of leadership that builds trust and breeds responsibility in return. This will significantly impact employee wellbeing if it is not addressed. Inclusion Feeling valued for who you are, and feeling that you can bring your whole authentic self to work is key to high self esteem and positive wellbeing, and one aspect of inclusion that remote working can impact is our sense of belonging and connection. According to research by Michael Arena at the University of Pennsylvania, we’ve seen an average 15% increase in connections with our closest colleagues since the start of the pandemic, but a 30% drop in ‘bridging connections’; that’s connections within our wider network - something Arena refers to as ‘bridge erosion’. The erosion of networks not only limits our capacity for innovation and creative thinking, it can have a damaging effect on inclusivity, which in turn impacts wellbeing. Social connectedness is a natural human requirement and feeling a sense of belonging to the whole of an organisation and having connections beyond your immediate team are key features of an inclusive culture. It’s therefore a concern that, according to CapGemini’s research, 56% of employees say that they feel disconnected from colleagues and the organisation due to remote working. This is particularly felt by younger employees and new hires. Of course, keeping strong connections with immediate colleagues maintains good morale and can go a long way to reducing feelings of isolation and loneliness. However this becomes a problem when local ties are strengthened at the expense of wider ones, and where lack of diverse thinking or external challenge within a team leads to overconfidence, echo chambers or (worst of all) groupthink. This is particularly dangerous when it applies to senior management teams. Microsoft’s research has found that remote working favours solo work over the collaborative generation of new ideas, and also leads to a decrease in people feeling able to influence decisions in meetings, constructively challenge or express dissenting opinions. This can damage self-esteem, but also lead to poorer decisions as a result of limited inclusion and lack of constructive conflict. And whilst online meetings can be more inclusive to an extent by acting as a social leveller, those less likely to speak up in a traditional setting are even less likely to get a word in edgeways when physical cues and body language are harder to gauge. As Microsoft put it, in an online meeting ‘hierarchies become more conspicuous’. Using parallel chat can mitigate this to an extent, but the chat function doesn’t command the same level of influence as the spoken word and can detract participants from the main agenda if not used effectively. The final, and very important issue around inclusion is how your socio-economic background impacts your ability to work effectively from home. Research from Stanford University found that those with university degrees and top quartile incomes are twice as likely to have a home environment conducive to remote working. So where do we go from here? To some extent, just being more aware of the problems I’ve highlighted helps as we can be more intentional in noticing, avoiding or mitigating against them. And clearly when workplaces open up again and we can balance remote and office-based working and make intentional choices about the setting that best suits the need, some of the problems I have highlighted will ease. Wellbeing strategies need to look beyond providing support for employees at the times they feel they need it, and focus just as much on how the employee experience can act as a cause of stress. And we need to challenge outdated models of leadership and management and focus leadership development activity on open, human leadership that builds trust, agility and resilience. We can also take a more sophisticated evidence-based approach, for example by using activity analytics to support soft data like staff surveys. If we can identify the activity patterns that lead to the best work outcomes and the highest levels of employee engagement, we can seek to build on and replicate these. We can also gain more insight on what patterns are having the most damaging impact on wellbeing in order to adopt a more preventative approach. Just to be clear, I am talking about data at the organisational level and not advocating individual work monitoring and surveillance. The connection between the employee experience and employee wellbeing has been well known for some time and is not unique to working through a pandemic. In 2013 Gallup research in the US discovered that 70% of employees were disengaged at work. The same year (by no coincidence) the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that workplace stress was costing American businesses $300 billion per year, and went on to brand stress ‘the health epidemic of the 21st century’. Covid-19 has presented us with an opportunity to rethink the employee experience and change working lives for the better once the current pandemic is behind us. If we can learn from the positives and negatives of this global remote working experiment and rethink the purpose and design of our workplaces to provide what working from home can’t give us, then that will really help. Work to Be, consultancy that combines people, workplace and technology for a better working future.