Productivity in the Office

A move back to 5 days in the office for Amazon so that the team can be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other” was the news story I was asked to comment on last week on BBC 5 Live.

When I get a press enquiry, to start with the researchers often ask me about the employment law surrounding these types of issues. For example, last week I was asked ‘Can a company just change someone’s terms and conditions of employment?’  

These questions are reasonably straightforward to answer, albeit in shades of grey rather than black and white.

For those of you who are interested in the law stuff, I can’t promise you my post-grad in Employment Law still means I am well placed to give advice because it’s 18 years old! However, I’ve put a PS appendix below for my take on the basics.

What is way more interesting to me in this debate about productivity is not the legal situation. It is what happens to people’s brains – and therefore their performance – when an employer or a boss and their teams disagree on what is ‘fair’ and reasonable.

When something feels unfair, it is likely that the thinking of the people who feel something is unfair will be affected and this in turn will affect current and future company productivity and performance. Sometimes quite significantly.

Here’s four reasons why:

• Our Threat Response Is Triggered
  When we think things are not ‘fair’ or things become ‘uncertain’ it is likely that our fight/flight/freeze and appease response will be triggered. It is important to recognise here that what seems fair to one person can be perceived differently by another. Our threat response doesn’t care what is objectively ‘fair’, it works on how we feel.

  When we go into threat mode, the blood and oxygen that normally fuels our pre-frontal cortex is diverted to our heart to make it pump faster, our faces where we get a flush or a grimace. This part of your brain deals with all your decision making, your choices, your rational thought and so on.

  When we are threatened – and that includes when we feel something is unfair- our capacity for higher level thinking can be reduced by as much as 80% – Dr Iain Price my collaborator on the book DOSE refers to it as having the same impact as temporary brain damage.

  If you have ever been in an argument and either thought afterwards – “Why didn’t I say that…it’s so obvious?” Or “Why did I say that, it did more harm than good” or “Why did I agree to that, I really don’t want to…” then your fight/flight/freeze/appease response were probably to blame.

  Certainly, we aren’t likely to move through complex issues at pace and as reasonable adults when one (or both of us) are in the grip of strong feelings and this threat response.

• We will be Multi-Tasking
  When something is on our minds that is unsettling or uncertain – whether we are worrying about it or seething with anger – this type of rumination again requires the pre-frontal cortex to get involved.

  It was the last part of the human brain to evolve and it has a finite size given your skull was already pretty full of other brain. This means you can’t multi-task with the pre-frontal cortex. It’s not big enough. We might think we are doing two or three things at once but we aren’t – we are switching at high speed between tasks so we don’t realise they are actually being done separately.

  This ‘switching’ takes additional brain fuel – so scientist have proven time and time again that when we multi-task there is always a compromise is quality or speed.

  What this means is that in times of high stress where you have fallen out with your boss, because you might be thinking about it a lot – you are likely to be multi-tasking – trying to do your day job whilst processing being cross/angry/worried about how you will pick your children up in time from school whilst being in the office rather than at home.

The last two thoughts I have are practical as opposed to scientific.

• We won’t be working!
  If you have ever been the ‘victim’ of unfairness at work, add up all the hours that you spent talking to your colleagues at work about it and debating what to do next. You may well be doing this whilst multi-tasking, but at some points in the day, during those extended coffee machine chats, you probably were not ‘working’ at all!
• We will be disengaging, maybe publicly
  Organisations spend lots of time and effort on marketing, employer branding and attraction strategies. Employees might well vote with their feet. But perhaps more worryingly, they may stay and disengage. This is proven to impede productivity and engagement. It can be infectious.

  In addition, imagine how many people a single disgruntled employee may talk to. Their friends and relatives could also be current or future customers. Now multiply that by the number of employees you have. Social media has made the world a small place and loyalty is easily lost.

These reasons for a reduction in productivity and thinking power might not be short term. Often a badly handled discussion can linger in the mind and the relationships – and I often advise clients to consider the relationship and behaviours that they want to see in the business after a ‘tough call’ is made.

However, I don’t tell clients not to make tough calls or put them off. It is in everyone’s interest that a business makes profit and survives. But every study done shows engaged and happy employees make more money. You want to be on the right side of that equation before during and after a difficult decision has been made.

Resolving these issues ultimately comes down to communication and trust – and that goes both ways. In this case employees trusting the company has made the decision about how many days the business needs them for in person collaboration for the right reason – and this has been well communicated is key. And in turn the company trusting their employees to make the right call about where they do their best work.

Certainly, a single influential leader liking control and being heavy handed about how to ‘get-back’ a sense of knowing what people are up to is not likely to build relationships, or the employer brand, or get your team to do their best autonomous thinking required to build its reputation and its performance.

A recent Microsoft study summarises the challenge: 85% of leaders find hybrid work affects their confidence in employee productivity. Despite increased activity metrics, about 49% of managers struggle to trust their hybrid teams to deliver their best. This could explain why so many businesses are mandating a return to the office.

I loved the study mentioned and related cartoon courtesy of Adam Grant’s post on Instagram on this very topic. I’ll leave it with you!

PS: My understanding of the employment law surrounding changes to terms in a nutshell!  First it depends on what someone’s contract of employment says in the first instance. And onwards from that whether there has been a change to the working arrangements that have become ‘custom and practise’ over time.

Where a different way of working has become ‘custom and practise’ over time this can become an implied term in a contract. Implied terms may as well be written down! They hold weight in law. So where a company introduced flexible working in Covid – and then just let it run, they are now likely to find it challenging both legally and practically to insist on a change because a right to flexible working is now implied by custom and practise.

I always stress UK employment law is different to that in the US.

The final point I usually make on the radio is that employment law isn’t like other law. There’s no guilty/not guilty. An employer simply has to prove they have acted ‘reasonably under the circumstances’.

What is fair reasonable is fluid and depends on the circumstances of each case. The decision that the judges then make at a tribunal become ‘case law’ – this means what is reasonable changes over time and with each decision.

What organisations should do when they want to make changes to the way people work in UK employment law terms is enter a period of consultation. This should take place over 12 weeks in an organisation like Amazon in the UK.

The consultation should be ‘meaningful’ – both sides should enter it in the spirit of collaboration. 12 weeks is long enough to ensure that both parties understand the implications on the other, but it is also a long time to sustain uncertainty and to have people worrying about the outcomes – and worrying and uncertainty are likely to lead to decreased productivity (see above!)

Consultations like this also take up valuable internal time up for a HR team and line managers that could be spend on other things to make the business more efficient – so there is an opportunity cost.

In a nutshell, only change terms and conditions that are really causing you significant issues in a business – and that you can clearly evidence a business case for. Beware of going into a challenge because a few senior people have a bee in their bonnet about a pet subject – particularly where there is not much hard objective evidence that stands up to scrutiny!