Companies forcing staff back into the office full-time are “dinosaurs” who wrongly believe their staff are “snowflakes”, according to the professor who coined the term “presenteeism”.
Sir Cary Cooper, a professor at the University of Manchester, said companies giving white-collar workers no choice but to go back to their desks full-time were “dinosaurs” who don’t trust their staff.
“Why I call them dinosaurs is they don’t ask, they mandate – this is not what the next generation want. You can call them snowflakes if you want, but they are more IT savvy and know they can work flexibly,” he said.
“Millennials have young kids, it’s costly to go into town, it wastes their time. We’re screwing our productivity up. Are we out of our mind? This is a no-brainer.
“Twenty years ago we didn’t have the technology we have now. This generation of workers are hard-working, they’re not snowflakes.”
Hmm, OK. Amazon has just insisted that everyone go back to the office 5 dasys a week.
So, who do we believe? One of the most valuable – and therefore possibly at least best managed – companies on the planet or a knighted professor who’s never run anything larger than a seminar?
Toughie, innit?
Sir Cary, who has previously advised government on the benefits of flexible working, first used his dinosaur analogy in comments made to The Guardian.
So, he’s preparing the ground for the Labour Party and their flexible working bill. Wait til the train drivers demand a pay rise for actually having to leave the home to go to work. TTK will cave in and pay them.
Has this benighted professor an explanation for the inverse relationship between the number of civil servants and their aggregate “productivity”?
It’s rather tempting for us no-brainers to draw the conclusion that the pyjama army is on permanent R&R.
I did like his Westerns when I was a kid, but he must be a bit of a dinosaur himself now.
From my experience of younger people working from home I agree it is very “progressive”, especially if you had one of those new garden fridges to keep the G&Ts cold. From a work point of view it only really worked for the couple of Civil Servants I know because nobody noticed they did fuck all all week.
Still, the leaders of two of our “progressive” political parties got knighted for doing fuck all…
There are some dinosaur attitudes around this. The “we’ve always done this” view, or measuring people by being at their desk rather than measuring output.
But it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s not even a one-size-fits-all for the same person. If I’m doing scoping with a client, I prefer to be in a room. When I’m writing code, I’m more productive at home.
Amazon does a lot of “move fast and break things” which probably suits people working next door to each other. They already did 3 days in the office before now.
As the CEO of one of the companies in my sector said:
‘“I completely understand why someone doesn’t want to commute an hour and a half every day. Totally get it… Doesn’t mean they have to have a job here either’
Sadly for the public sector noone has the balls to tell them that, especially a government wholly dependent on them for its support base. That’s why we need enormous cuts to the public sector upon the accession of Reform- 40% of most departments with loss of pension – starting with the universities that employ Richard Murphy. Plus the ending of immunity for Trade Unions and the ability for victims of strikes to sue both the unions and they elected officials for the inconvenience caused. Ditto for organizations like ER, IB and JSO. Make these people pay.
Now I know how Tyrannosaurus rex got its name; it didn’t ask, it mandated. So says mixedmetaphorus twatissimus.
It seems appearing in a film called Seven Days Leave has influenced his thinking.
VP,
“I completely understand why someone doesn’t want to commute an hour and a half every day. Totally get it… Doesn’t mean they have to have a job here either”
OK, but you also have to pay for that. If I have two clients, one that wants me in Reading, one that will have me at home, the one in Reading has to offer me something over £100/day more. That’s £35 for travel, 2 more hours of my time, various other expenses. It also denies you access to any talent living more than an hour away. You might get a mediocre Blazor developer, while there’s a brilliant guy in Sunderland.
WB. Maybe you can work like that. Maybe there’s independent metric to judge the quality of your work other than to have been seen doing it. But that certainly doesn’t apply to everybody. Maybe the people paying wages would like to see what they’re getting for their money. And with the Civil Service that’s you.
I’m not sure I can do the site surveys I’m currently doing from home. Or the equipment replacements last year. Or the courier deliveries a couple of years ago. Or the wiring installation before that. How do you fill boxes of Amazon tat from home?
VP: ’That’s why we need enormous cuts to the public sector…’
And not just Whitehall, either. Local councils need shears taken to them, so we no longer have a bunch of people on Teams all day insulting each other’s ’gender identity’ or ensuring that a Scottish school kid is supported to ‘identify’ as a wolf.
My reading is that this is a cheap and more media-friendly version of lay-offs.
Plenty of people can work from home day after day and be very very productive. Others have the odd day when they are productive and rather more when they are not. Also there are a few that get nothing done. If however the definition of productivity is changed to be just activities that are beneficial to their employer i.e. excluding shopping, gardening, cleaning or going to the gym to name but a few, it doesn’t look so rosy.
Most people who work from home say and probably “believe” they are in the first category. Personally I have only come across one who I would put in that category with the revised definition of productivity, and he retired earlier this year. I do know lots of people who fall into that second category, and many will admit that in private. Although I don’t know any people in the last category I do know they exist, having overheard people in the park saying that they are “working from home” when really they are looking after children and them still being there several hours later with no more that a cursory glance at their phones.
What is overlooked in this is one simple fact: This will allow Amazon to reduce headcount without paying severance, etc. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that is what Amazon’s new policy is all about. They want headcount reduced and this is one way to get a start on it.
I’d call bollocks on the whole of that, andyf. The vast majority of the UK workforce do jobs that require personal presence. That is most of your services, production, distribution, retail etc etc. These are all the things enable you to live your life. The amount of people who can productively work from home is likely minute. It’s just that they get a great deal more media attention. And also, this site itself is heavily biased towards these sort of people. It is not in any way representative.
It’s not as if we haven’t got recent experience to draw on. During the Covid fiasco, the desk jockeys were required to WFH. Where upon communications across the business/ customer interface & between businesses & within businesses were seriously degraded. Where WFH has been allowed to continue, much in the public sector, productivity has fallen & continues to be below pre-Covid levels. As an experiment, it’s an utter failure.
BiS
You’re spot on but it’s worth pointing out that much Public Sector productivity is below zero anyway – what value do the Equalities and Human Rights Commission add? (for example)
And as the great Julia M points out – the Bonfire of the inanities needs to be even more acute in the Local government field.
BIS,
“WB. Maybe you can work like that. Maybe there’s independent metric to judge the quality of your work other than to have been seen doing it. But that certainly doesn’t apply to everybody. Maybe the people paying wages would like to see what they’re getting for their money. And with the Civil Service that’s you.”
If you can’t measure someone’s output how do you know they’re good value? And I don’t mean that this is a precise measurement, but a broad one. You’re paying someone to do something, you should know if they’re worth it by their output. Being in the office doesn’t tell you that. Lots of people will try and look busy, or do fun things that look like work (going to diversity workshop, having meetings with the pretty girls in the call centre, angling for a conference in Barcelona). Developers will learn skills to pad their CV, rather than improving productivity. And then there’s just general incompetence.
I don’t care where the government works, or even how hard they work. I want value for money. I just want to see the output and how much it cost me. I’m sure lots of people worked hard on that Connecting for Health project, working in offices. But £9bn later, there was nothing to show for it. We could have hired 1/10th the number of people and had them spend their days on a beach in Marbella and it would have been a better use of taxpayers money.
@V_P I think it’s fortunate those who were required work throughout Covid never caught on to the fact that they were supposedly risking their health, whilst paying for the liggers on furlough preserving theirs, out of their own pockets. Because what else is printing money, other than an indiscriminate tax on all?
How would you like to explain to a delivery driver struggling under the weight of a Peleton he’s carrying to a door, that he’s also paying for the bloody thing? His gift to them.
Bis
Interestingly I was reading a copy of the Economist from March 2020 and it was a stark reminder how deranged the response was!! And yet there’s no call to hang anyone by their ankles a la Mussolini. I am reminded of Kipling:
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy-willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.
Their voices were even and low,
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd,
It was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.
It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.
@WB I’d be the first one to say that the UK is vastly over-administered. And yes that is the problem. It is very difficult to evaluate how much value these people actually create. I’m certainly not a proponent of the labour theory of value. Quite the opposite. But the employment market is largely based on it. Basically because the remuneration system is run by the people who benefit most from it. If you had a shortage of essential goods & services, you’d soon find out what people wanted to pay for. And you can guarantee Equality & Diversity Officers would come a long way down the list. As would a lot of other jobs & professions.
But since you’re not in that position, at least sitting at their desks means you know they’re not over the park playing with their kids. Since they’re there, they might just do something of value.
Personally, I think their days are numbered & maybe they need to get used to sitting around doing nothing. Most of these jobs are really rules based distributed data processing. And most of the “work” is the individual processing nodes communicating with each other. If anything is made for strong AI it is this. All of these jobs are likely to be going in the near future.
Administrators don’t create value. Neither do maintenance people. The value of their output is in arranging circumstances in which others can create value with tools and healthy bodies that work.
No profitable company chooses to maximise spend on admin and maintenance. They try to minimise it, hence the vast effort spent on automation and kit that requires minimal maintenance.
As Thomas Sowell points out, the lives of the elderly and infirm are made better by the provision of procedures, drugs, mobility aids, etc. but their lives are not better than those of younger, healthy people who don’t need these aids. We all need maintenance functions but all wish we didn’t. Maintenance and admin are a cost, not a benefit.
“ So, he’s preparing the ground for the Labour Party and their flexible working bill. Wait til the train drivers demand a pay rise for actually having to leave the home to go to work. TTK will cave in and pay them.”
They’ll get the “unable to work from home” allowance. My guess is 20% of salary or we go ro strike again.
Depends what you mean by maintenance, Norman. Maintenance is normally part of the capital cost of a product. One budgets for it during the utility duration, since it extends the utility duration. So it creates value. Repairs do likewise.
A certain amount of administration creates value. If you run a small business, comes a point where it’s more cost effective to get someone to do the paperwork because their time is cheaper than yours. But if you look at the value created by the guy sweeping the factory floor compared with the power skirt in HR, you may come up with an interesting result.
– This will allow Amazon to reduce headcount without paying severance, etc. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that is what Amazon’s new policy is all about.
Unless someone comes up with something more cynical I’m going with Dennis’s assessment.
I’d dispute, that, BiS. Maintenance maintains value, but cannot create it. It’s certainly part of the capital cost, mind, which is why defaulting on or postponing maintenance is almost always false economy. I think the same is true of admin, which is also a form of maintenance. We’re always better off if support functions can be delegated to cheaper staff so that the real value-creators can do more of it.
Oh, and I’m sure the HR power skirt (something with which I’m blissfully unfamiliar, having always run my own business) creates value. Problem is, it’s only entertainment value. The rest is all cost, much of it severe.
BIS,
“Personally, I think their days are numbered & maybe they need to get used to sitting around doing nothing. Most of these jobs are really rules based distributed data processing. And most of the “work” is the individual processing nodes communicating with each other. If anything is made for strong AI it is this. All of these jobs are likely to be going in the near future.”
I don’t because government generally lacks the incentives to improve efficiency (the arrival of computers that saves money has just led to more bullshit government being created to spend the money). And the public really have no concept of how wasteful government is. Even most small government conservatives. HS2, Connecting for Health are not unicorns. Waste, in various forms, is endemic.
But the state is surrounded by propaganda about how good it is. Documentaries about hospital wards, the police, all showing good, hard-working people. Unions, politicians, lobby groups, socialists generating pro-state press releases. But if you put hidden cameras in government offices, the average mechanic or factory worker would be shocked.
“And not just Whitehall, either. Local councils need shears taken to them, so we no longer have a bunch of people on Teams all day insulting each other’s ’gender identity’ or ensuring that a Scottish school kid is supported to ‘identify’ as a wolf.”
Unfortunately while one could probably sack half the public sector and theoretically still get the same output, that depends on getting a proper days work out of the remaining 50%. Which they don’t do now. So all you’d do by sacking 50% is collapse public sector output by more than 50% as most of the remainder would work no faster or better than they do now, and many probably worse as the ‘stress’ would result in loads of them going on the sick anyway. There would hardly be anyone left standing. The public sector is not somewhere the productive gravitate to, quite the opposite in fact.
Tend to agree with Jim on this one – sacking half the public sector won’t cut it.
You have to sack off or devolve their functions – like what Trump wants to do with the Department of Education. Or in the UK, there should be no government function to decide asylum claims, none at all, no arts subsidies at all, no centrally determined bans on smoking, minimum wages, hunting, drugs. No Minister for Women or Equalities, not half a department, none at all.
Javier of Chainsaw has this right.
You need to identify the right 50%, Jim, but that needs competent managers, who are no more frequent in the public sector than competent workers.
Chris Miller,
Ultimately, you get to politicians. Do people like Rishi or Keir know who to keep and who to fire? No, they don’t. Give the politicians as little as possible to play with, what absolutely must be done by the state. And privatise the rest. They will be shit at running their bit, but the rest of it will improve.
I spent the Covid Summer working as a courier, driving around in a baking tin can delivering laptops to people “working from home”. I wish I could have done that by working from home.
Someone from outside companies telling companies how to company. Seems a bit colonial, no?
Since the lock downs and when WFH became a jolly wheeze for staff in HMRC, their service levels have been totally and utterly shyte.
Anyone even pretending that HMRC staff are just as productive WFH is talking bolleaux.
Go on – call HMRC’s ‘helpline’. If you get through (after up to 40 minutes of hold time) you’ll likely be told at best that “yes. the letter you sent in four months ago has been logged as received but, no, I can’t say when you’ll get a reply”
I work for the government. My department moved to two days at home, which is presented as and perceived as a benefit. We can measure productivity well, so we know that people are more productive at home. Despite this, management refuses to consider expanding time at home, which is constantly requested.
Last year, we went fully hybrid. Hot desks only. We used to sit as teams, now everyone is scattered around the office and just sit in headphones all day. Time in the office used to provide time for mentoring, discussing process improvements and boosting engagement. Now it’s a waste of time. Productivity has fallen by 15%, mostly on office days. Management has declared hybrid working a success and rejects any request to give teams time together.