Some plain truths about humans that organizations pretend are myths —to the detriment of sales and souls.
I recently ran across an article about how little attention we pay when research doesn’t surprise us. When it confirms what we already believe, meh. That creates pressure on scientists to generate unexpected findings. They aren’t alone. Every time I sit down to write an article, I dread that I have nothing unique to say.
But none of us has anything entirely unique to say. Presenting something that has been said before is inevitable. Even most US patents are awarded for “improvements” to existing things, not for pioneering new creations.
Well-confirmed, longstanding beliefs matter. And even though our firms are building products that will defy precedent, our organizations thrive most when doing what has been proven to work.
So, this essay contains stuff you already know —or at least suspect. But like so many important truths, they are probably forgotten in a dusty corner of your mind’s attic and are not embedded in your daily practice.
That’s normal.
Think of how many pearls of wisdom we neglect. Is your diet 50% vegetables and fruit as per the dietary recommendations? Do you floss every day or limit your alcohol use?
Odds are, you’re ignoring something you know.
For what follows you have a choice. You can read and simply nod through it all. Or you can consider where, in your organization, there is room to do better.
Do parts of your current structure, culture or process violate these principles? Could you change something in how you work, lead, or manage to improve in these areas?
If you read that way, everything will feel new—and you may create new ways to optimize your results.
Where’s My Manager?
Employee surveys are common but usually shallow and not very revealing. To learn something beyond what the surveys provided, researchers analyzed data they could extract from shared software (like email servers and IM platforms) and correlated it with survey responses. That led to some interesting insights.
Here’s what they found about the Unhappiest Teams:
- Their managers took the longest to respond to email.
- They (the employees) got more messages after hours.
- Their managers had the least outside email correspondence (like with other teams, outside experts, etc.)
We can speculate some things from this data:
- Employees prefer managers who are communicative and responsive.
- Employees value time away from work and dislike being pinged after hours.
- Employees benefit somehow from well-connected managers.
The Managerial Maze
My coaching clients are almost all in leadership roles. To a person, their calendars are stuffed with non-stop meetings. That makes it difficult to chat with their team members, respond to email, or network with outsiders.
In other words, they can’t fulfill the things that employees most want: Fast responses, real-time off, and lots of outside connections.
Employees flounder when their managers are MIA. The managers hate it because they want to support their teams. Everyone is unhappy about how busy leaders are.
Absent managers fail—and it doesn’t matter whether their absence is because they are disinterested jerks, or simply overbooked. The outcome is the same.
The best people leave for positions in which they have managers who nurture them—or, as managers, they flee toward roles in which they have time with their teams.
Takeaway: Here’s the basic reality that research demonstrates over and over. Managers are too busy. They have way too many meetings.
Plus, they are tasked with administrative activities that—while intended to provide useful data for the organization—undermine the team by monopolizing managers’ time.
As valuable as data are, if getting them cannibalizes leading, managing, mentoring, and collaborating, it is too costly. The time required for that extra work is often what leads to extended working hours and the loss of distinctions between work and life.
“Soft” Matters More Than Hard
Prior to 2009 Google had always assumed that the main job of managers was to help their team members with technical problems. Therefore, they hired managers for their subject matter expertise. This will make perfect sense to founders whose Head of Engineering started as the best engineer.
But, in 2009, Google implemented a research project called “Project Oxygen” to learn what really makes managers successful.
They had terabytes of data and analyzed everything about their managers and the teams they managed. They also interviewed most of the individuals involved.
The results contradicted their existing practice. The 8 (now 10) Management Behaviors emerged from that analysis. Here’s a sample.
A Great Manager…
- Is a good coach.
- Empowers. Doesn’t micromanage.
- Is inclusive and cares about the individuals.
- Is a good communicator; listens and shares information.
- Supports career development and discusses performance.
Obvious, right? Then why is it so rare?
That’s easy. We are focused on numbers, productivity, throughput, shipping.
But the data demonstrate that when managers exhibit these behaviors, every result is better. That includes sales, revenue, productivity, but also employee retention, loyalty, product quality, and innovation.
I can’t think of a single organization that doesn’t have a system, process, or belief that is making it hard for managers to exhibit the 8 10 Behaviors. Can you?
People Need People
Remote=Separate
Remote work has lots of obviously attractive qualities. Employees can avoid commuting, wear pajama bottoms and do laundry between Zoom calls. It saves companies money on real estate and reduces their carbon footprint.
The downsides are subtler and less immediate.
The Productivity Paradox
Once the commute is eliminated it seems as though employees should be able to focus from start to end of workday, increasing productivity. But even though they seem to work more hours—as much as 18% more outside of working hours—studies find that productivity drops by up to 20%.
Why? It seems odd when we know that employees are working more. Productivity should increase along with working hours.
The answer may lie in the subtle ways that remote work disrupts communication and collaboration.
In a shared office, employees connect with others in a variety of ways. Some are easily replicated remotely—like meetings or conference calls.
But there are also quick points of clarification at someone’s desk, or impromptu chats with a counterpart from another team.
Those cross-functional communications form a scaffolding that accelerates progress.
When they are gone, everything takes longer.
Microsoft went from in-office to entirely remote during the pandemic. Researchers used that natural experiment to track all electronic communication over equivalent periods.
During the remote work period, cross-group interactions and outside communication dropped. So, for those working on Team A, they stopped both communicating with and about Teams B through Z.
From the study:
…firm-wide remote work ossified workers’ ego networks, made the network more fragmented… each fragment more clustered. [Results] also indicate that firm-wide remote work led to a decrease in the total amount of synchronous collaboration, both in-person and through Microsoft Teams.
In other words, remote work led to fewer connections between teams and less real-time collaboration. [emphasis added]
Even though remote workers could do the same amount of synchronous work as when in-office, they didn’t.
When people are geographically separated they also separate epistemically and cognitively. That leads to silos and the loss of strategic alignment. [Tweet this thought]
The downstream effects:
- Less access to information.
- Less organization-wide cohesion.
- Less collaboration.
- Less shared context.
More from the study [edited for length only]:
… firm-wide remote work caused workers to have fewer bridging ties, and to spend less time with their remaining bridging ties, suggests that … remote work may have reduced the ability of workers to access new information in other parts of the network. …[Plus] our finding that … remote work reduced workers’ cross-group interactions, also suggest that … remote work caused the collaboration network to become more siloed….
Remote Time Bomb
There’s yet another lurking remote work problem. We see above that when people work separately, at home, they default to that separateness. They interact through formal meetings but generate little additional connection.
While we don’t have long-term data on the tail effects, it isn’t hard to guess.
For a start, we know that anxiety is at an all-time high, with greater rates of depression and loneliness—especially in young people.
Much of that has been attributed to mobile phones and social media.
But the hedge against increasing isolation was—until the pandemic—workplaces.
Despite all the social isolation, young people still had to go to the office and interact with bosses, peers, mentors, and strangers. That was a good thing.
Since 2020, it’s become rarer.
I think one of the truths we will all come to understand is that remote work is bad for people—especially young people. It caters to the worst impulses of the digital age—isolation.
Young people working remotely will argue. But they have no counterfactual experience. They never had the friendships or romances that began in the office; or the rituals that allow for being dressed, fed, and at your desk by 8 AM—while also taking care of your house, your body, and your spirit. So, they have no reference comparisons.
Those rituals and the community of infuriating, supportive, nattering, toxic, generous and annoying coworkers reduce loneliness and isolation. Seeing the same people every day makes it harder to hide when you’re sad, scared, or mourning your childhood pet.
Remote work, with all its asynchrony and scheduled Zoom calls, is designed for hiding. Whether you’re hiding your bunny slippers or your suicidal ideation–no one will ever know.
I can’t show you data to prove this one. But, to quote a regular bit on social sage, Bill Maher’s show, I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true.
Remote work damages employees—even though they love it and will defend it with their very jobs.
The Bottom Line
The lesson here is simple. Much of what we do makes our organizations less effective and our employees unhappy—even though it aims to do the opposite. The research and our guts tell us the truth.
- People need human contact.
- Managers need to spend actual time with their teams.
- Employees need to meet and get to know each other and their bosses.
Processes and structures that obstruct those natural drives will also hurt results. Every employee and manager needs more unscheduled time at work. And every organization must create occasions for the whole group to be together in person.
This Isn’t a 20th Century Thing, It’s a Human Thing
We fell into the social rituals of work long before there were offices. We gossiped in fields, hoarded knowledge of hidden berry bushes while foraging, and made friends with those next to us on the assembly line.
One day, when the metaverse is fully formed, we will return to those same rituals, albeit virtually. Then, we will stop by each other’s desks and perch on the corner to chat and admire a new haircut or hologram; to lament an imminent divorce, complain about a rude customer or fine-tune a 4d pitch deck.
That is also something you already know.
