The F-word: Flexibility vs Unity

Part 2: Research and insights deep dive on the topics keeping leaders up at night, from the team at Magnetic. we’re shining a light on employee tensions — check our part 1 of our Thought Report before you dive into Part 2 below. (Rather view the Thought Report as pdf? Download your free copy here.)

Everyone is demanding more. More choice in where to work. More say in when they work. A stake in how they work. Flexibility is now a right. But how should companies reconcile this right to freedom and flexibility with the need to create a strong, cohesive and unified team culture? How do they foster a sense of belonging and unity when your people work in their own cadence and preferences?

A simple first step would be to shed the biases associated with hybrid working. Recent research from Microsoft identified a prevalent ‘productivity paranoia’ amongst leadership, with 87% of business leaders finding it difficult to have ‘confidence that employees are being productive’, while an almost equal amount of employees (80%) are confident they are more productive, with many still getting burned out.

There’s a disconnect in expectations from managers and the feelings of their employees that creates fertile ground for distrust. Goldman Sachs CEO, David Soloman infamously said that working from home was an “aberration” that will be reversed as soon as staff can get back to the office.

He changed his tune and introduced a minimum number of days in the office after Goldman’s investment bankers revolted, saying flexibility was more important than pay. Forcing people back to the office does nothing to protect your culture, and risks sabotaging it.

‘I know all of this’, you might be thinking. ‘That’s perfectly fine, people can be flexible with their time, but the office will be the spot to collaborate, to connect with their colleagues and friends, to be more fluidly creative’. Yes, and no. A key piece missing from this neat classification is coordination. If I spend £10 per day to come to a mostly empty office, with half my team at home, and a calendar full of calls I have to take in a quiet room because the open floor is just far too loud, the office becomes a hindrance.

Co-ordinating compelling reasons for people to come back to the office, rather than relying on empty promises of bountiful productivity and boundless creativity becomes a must.

At Magnetic we encourage our teams to coordinate days when they can commune in the office for workshops or ideation sessions, but leave it up to the specific circumstances of the team and their outcomes to guide that decision making. We also introduce company cadences such as our monthly company wide catch up. It’s an opportunity for teams to deliver updates and share learnings on projects, discuss internal initiatives and spend some time together informally. The get-together is held in person at our two offices and connected virtually, allowing everyone to be involved, wherever they are, while creating a palpable reason to venture to the office. Every month will look different to a typical day, uniting an opportunity to strengthen and live our culture, while also allowing flexibility of choice to direct how you’d best like to get involved.

A case study from the Magnetic vaults: Bupa

Bupa Healthcare, the insurance and provision brand with over 80,000 employees globally, has a complex workforce of care workers, dentists, doctors and head office employees. They have resisted implementing an arbitrary and immeasurable set number of days in the office each week or month, and with our help developed a clear decision making framework to enable everyone to choose where they should work based on their own working preferences, the needs of the business as well as the needs of their immediate team.

Here’s what we did:

1. Magnetic interviewing frontline teams, leaders and managers to understand their needs from a high level strategic perspective down to tactical daily changes.
2. We created the framework using a human-centred design approach. Immersive research made sure that the solution was specifically tailored to Bupa’s culture and existing ways of working.
3. We identified changes for leaders and managers to better prepare them for conversations with their teams — trusting teams, setting expectations around rituals, and maintaining a sense of community and belonging, as well as ensuring they themselves felt empowered to role model best practice.

Of course flexibility is in many ways a privilege. There is a class divide emerging. All the headlines in the press over the pandemic about working from home were of course referring to the white collar workers; middle and upper classes who have office jobs and laptops to work from everywhere. The often lesser paid factory and shop floor workers were still servicing our retail and distribution needs throughout COVID and continue to have less choice.

Additionally, as the cost of living crisis worsens and the winter energy bills hit home, will it be cheaper and preferable to commute to take advantage of office facilities, or save money on travel and food by remaining at home?

It’s unclear how this might play out, but it will be vital for businesses to keep their fingers on the pulse of how their employees feel, to prevent the emergence of second-class workers unable to fully take advantage of either the benefits of flexible working, or a united, flourishing culture.

This is the second part in our series of articles breaking down this huge topic. Follow us for more on the four key tensions. (Rather view the full Thought Report as pdf? Download your free copy here.)

Magnetic is a design and innovation company that helps design better futures. We’ve worked with global businesses to build capabilities, products, services and transform organisations. To find out more, get in touch: hello@wearemagnetic.com.