The workplace of the future

The workplace of the Future.

A topic that has quickly become a murky minefield, saturated with opinion, limited evidence and barely-disguised vested interests. Whatever your stance, there can be no doubt that the opportunity to change our working practices is a pertinent and pressing concern.

Many of these new “ways of working” conversations are easy to grasp. The number of days in or out of the office. The flexible benefits of remote working. The technology that teams use to contact one another urgently. Quickly, without too much need for considered thought, we can arrive at a decently-formed opinion on these areas.

However, hidden at the heart of the debate around redesigning work is a more complex, nuanced issue. Something that affects everyone within a business but becomes uncomfortable when said aloud.

How much do you trust your team?

Answers to this question are likely to be instinctive. Perhaps a little defensive. Most workplaces would like to believe that their recruitment strategies, unique culture and the inherent goodness of their people leads to an environment in which people can be trusted to work effectively.

It’s true that productivity for many businesses has maintained or even increased during the past 18 months. Trusted teams filled with trusted people have managed to find a way to excel in an attritional climate. A Harvard Business Review study found that those businesses that were already effective in managing the time, talent and energy of their teams have grown 5% to 8% more productive over the past year.

Not that it’s that simple. The same study found that the productivity gap between the best and the rest had widened during the pandemic. Most organisations experienced a net reduction in productivity of between 3% to 6% (or more) due to “inefficient collaboration, wasteful ways of working and an overall decline in employee engagement.”

What was the issue here? After navigating the initial crisis response, did businesses trust too little? Or did they trust too much? Astonishingly, most people report that they themselves are entirely trustworthy, but that they can only trust a small number of other colleagues. Our ability to trust one another is at the crux of our current working dilemma.

A technology solution to a human problem?

Perhaps we are placing too much emphasis on the ability of humans to solve these problems. Within business, how important is the capacity to trust? Technology doesn't suffer from these foibles. It’s reassuringly dispassionate. Emotion-free. Optimistic tech-evangelists will continue to outline precisely why this is a moment of post-pandemic opportunity. A time to free ourselves of the shackles of our conservative, human-centric working past and fully embrace the flexibility and freedom bestowed upon us by the miraculous advances of modern technology. In fact, as systems are developed to increase our security and keep our businesses safe, there is a widespread interpretation of trust as a dangerous weakness rather than a competitive advantage.

Enter the concept of “Zero Trust”.

Zero Trust is a security concept centered on the belief that organisations should not automatically trust anything either inside or outside its clearly-defined perimeters. The principle advocates that everything and anything should be verified when trying to connect to its systems before granting access at every stage. The approach can be distilled into three words - “don’t trust anyone”. Everyone working within and outside of the organisation should be granted the least amount of access they need to accomplish a specific task. Trust is only earned once credentials are displayed. It’s a brutal realisation of the old adage - trust is earned, not given.

Brutal perhaps. Yet surely there can be little argument with such a sensible and pragmatic methodology?

Human application

So could this “zero trust” approach be transferred into our interactions with one another?  A connected, safe working world in which we can all operate within strictly defined parameters?

To many, this may sound like a draconian, far-flung fantasy. One that should never be allowed to infiltrate our workplaces. It’s likely that our natural reaction is to assert that no measures are needed to prevent this from becoming our mode of operating. We may state, with total sincerity, that we are capable of differentiating between tech-security protocols and human relationships.

But are we?

Human behaviour has a tendency to mirror technological advances. The concept of zero trust can seep from tech-security to human interactions. A lack of trust can manifest itself in many ways.

Do you set work and repeatedly check-in on a colleague to ensure progress is being made?

Do you swell with irritation when you spy a ‘blue tick’ and the recipient has not yet started ‘typing’?

Do you send an email and follow up with a call if you don’t receive an immediate response?

Ultimately, we attempt to replicate our digital experiences in human form. Instant answers and constant connectivity transfer from device to brain to action. This means more speed, a fear of disconnection and an erosion of trust.

The cost of unthinking adoption

This dark underbelly of opportunity rarely gets discussed. We relish moments of seismic change and all of the potential it can unleash. Yet we neglect to scrutinise the murkier corners that lie within our race to adopt the next technology or create a flourishing workforce.

Initially sensible questions and solutions can lead to overreach. Innocuous questions such as;

“How do we know people are working?”

If you ever want to foster an internal sense of unease, type “monitor your workforce” into Google (other search engines are available!). Snooping, monitoring and remote-management software is not only everywhere...it's celebrated.

GPS tracking tools. Micro-management of timesheets. Random screen sampling. Tracking emails. Assessing threats. Check-in/check-out times. Live views.

Surveillance is masquerading as productivity-enhancement. The equivalent of an ever-present boss on your shoulder.

Our ability to surveille and snoop is enormous. It's tempting to distrust. It gives us a straight-foward way to answer that earlier question of knowing whether or not people are working. But take a moment to scroll down the anxiety-inducing list of ways in which businesses are prepared to unwittingly decimate trust amongst their workforces.

To badly paraphrase Skin from Skunk Anansie, just because we can, it doesn’t make it right.

Ethics aside, our working relationships with one another are impacted. Conversations are reduced to text. Thoughtfulness is jettisoned in favour of speed. Physical presence is favoured over an engaged brain. Too many of us have encouraged our people to turn on, tune in and zone out. Our organisational intelligence is willingly sacrificed at the altar of speed, convenience and poorly interpreted employee-monitoring dashboards.

Hurtling towards the new

Businesses leap towards adoption simply because it’s new. Because we are afraid of being left behind. And due to our tendency to be drawn to new, shiny technologies, we ignore their long-term capacity to increase suspicion and decrease trust. 

Our need for wariness is neatly summarised by the godfather of the issue, Edward Snowden.

“Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of “can we,” not “should we”. And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and use.”

Simply, good intentions are sometimes not enough.

An ambiguous answer?

At this point, it’s appropriate to return to Hemingway’s opening quote.

“The way to make people trustworthy, is to trust them”.

It’s a nicely-packaged, idealised, very-human directive that feels counter to the rush towards an adoption of remote-surveillance software. The insinuation is none-too-subtle. As we strive to create secure, high performance, modern workplaces, let’s not pursue speed and security at the expense of our ability to trust one another. 

Yet this quote does not tell the full story. This is a parsed line that appears in one of his letters to a lady called Dorothy Connable, whom he was warning about a chap called Charles Fenton. From Hemingway’s perspective, Charles was a deceiver who spread misinformation about Hemingway’s life.

The truly interesting part of his quote lies in the following line:

“The way to make people trustworthy, is to trust them.

But this man is not a person that works within that system.”

This sentence makes a previously simple quote mildly disconcerting. Ambiguity now shrouds what was initially straightforward advice. It strikes at the heart of the dilemma facing those entrusted with reshaping our working world. Does it demonstrate that people should only be trusted most of the time? That we can only trust those who play within the rules, abide by our company behaviours and embrace a clear operating system?

As we tackle the challenge of redesigning our workplaces, it leaves us with something to ponder. How can you get to a point of a trusted, trusting workforce?

Are you more likely to bestow trust on your teams as a starting point?

Or will you succumb to the baser urges that Hemingway reluctantly disclosed, trusting some but not all?

These are complex and uncomfortable questions, the outcomes of which we all have a stake in, whether they are being addressed directly or not.

Whichever view you take, it’s worth asking the question - in which direction is your business heading?

After all, trust - or the lack of it - remains the foundation of everything.