Month: March 2016

Sitting on the London Underground the other day was a gloomy experience for me. Everyone on the platform and in my very crowded carriage was wearing a black coat or jacket (including me). These, paired with either black trousers or dark denim resulted in my buying bright red hat and bag in Kings Cross Station: anything to ward off the gloom and add a splash of colour to the uniform darkness.

Similarly a work colleague arrived and we started the usual 'commute journey' tale. Hers was different from the normal 'delayed on the Northern Line'. She said she'd seen a person in her carriage in a bright yellow coat. She had been instantly cheered by that single splash of colour in the sea of black.

At the Big Bang Data exhibition, I saw the visualization Colours in Cultures. It's a wonderful expression of the characteristics that colours are associated with in 10 broad-banded cultures (Western/American, African, etc). In only two of the ten – Western/American and Japanese – is black associated with anything other than evil, death, bad-luck, anger, unhappiness, penance and mourning. In those two cultures it is a colour of style albeit paradoxically also associated with death, mourning, etc. Is England a drab and gloomy culture that reflects in the black clothing? (There was a British sitcom called The Glums). Or is everyone thinking they look stylish in their black uniform?

Remembering these experiences led me to thinking about colour in organisations. What are the cultural colours of your organisation? How do they reflect in the colours people wear, the choices of paint and furnishings, the logo colours, and so on. Does colour choice have an impact on what people do and their productivity levels?

Think of the way people responded to Yahoo's purple logo. It was panned. 'Purple is a distinctive, vivid, and fun color; it's also chronically under-represented in the depressingly blue palette of Internet branding (look at Facebook, Twitter, and, to a lesser extent, Google). But for thousands of years, we've been culturally associating purple with wealthy, out-of-touch dynasties'.

Are the people in Yahoo out of touch? Maybe, if the stories circulating about its being bought are anything to go by. Would a different colour logo have influenced its history differently? (Both Twitter and Facebook have blue and clearly Google is hedging its bets). Do the colours of the logos reflect or inspire the cultural colours of the organisation?

We know that people are affected by colour and have strong preferences when making personal choices related to it. The choices 'are deeply rooted emotional responses that seem to lack any rational basis, yet the powerful influence of color rules our choices in everything from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to the cars we buy'.

Colour is said to be important in healing therapies and choices of hospital decor although a review of the literature makes the point that 'most color guidelines for healthcare design are nothing more than affective value judgments whose direct applicability to the Architecture and interior design of healthcare settings seems oddly inconclusive and nonspecific … Analysis of color in any environment means respecting other kinds of processing forces such as culture, time, and location.'

Colour in office design is also subject to pronouncements. Is it really true that 'people are more likely to lose their temper in yellow rooms, which might make it a bad choice for conference rooms'? Nancy Kwallek, whose research informs this 2015 Fast Company piece, as far as I can tell last published in 2007. She may be right and her findings may still hold although in a 2012 piece she apparently says there's no clear answer to what colour works best. Again it depends on individual experiences and preferences.

Do you associate your organisation with a colour either literally or metaphorically? What colour would you like the culture of your organisation to be – do you think it would make a difference? Let me know.

We have a cohort of new, young, management trainee joiners starting work with us in a month or so. They are with us for around six months before they move to their next placement. They won't be working closely with each other but dispersed through the organisation but we think (to be tested), that there's value in them developing a 'strong community'.

What we're looking to establish is a network of people who work collectively in the interests of the whole organisation while they are with us, give ideas and support to each other during the six months, and who will feel drawn to return at the end of their training programme. We're in a market where we are competing for good people and what we have to offer is less of the high salary and glossy kit, and more of the social value and being able to influence and create major organisational transformation through creative, co-operative and collective approaches.

We had a go trying to create the strong community that would create the change we are interested in with the previous cohort but not successfully: hopefully we've learned something so undaunted we are giving it another go. We think we learned three things:

• The cohort didn't have the skills or incentive to self-organise into a strong community
• We didn't give them enough (any) guidance on what we were hoping for, our expectations of them and what they could expect from us
• We didn't intervene to generate activity but waited to see what happened (nothing)

So this time we're being more hands on and directive. (The opposite of what we read millennials want from managers).

But there's still the issue of what makes for a 'strong community' and can they be consciously designed? There's lots of stuff around urban planning that suggests the answer is yes – but that's due, in part, to the way the built environment is configured. We're talking for the most part about a virtual environment but with some face to face meetings.

I thought the American Red Cross example in how they designed a strong virtual community was interesting. The five steps could be relevant if we substituted 'management trainees' for 'public' and 'organisation' for 'company'.

1. Commitment – How the public views a company's willingness to commit time and resources to building relationships online
2. Control mutuality – Two-way interaction and control (the company/brand does not have all the control)
3. Communality – Sharing a concern for one another and similar values, beliefs, and interests
4. Trust – A company should be seen as believable, competent, reliable, and consistent
5. Satisfaction – How a company meets its community's needs and exceeds expectations

Another thought provoking blog with good graphics distinguishes between online social networks and online communities arguing that:

The single most important feature that distinguishes a social network from a community is how people are held together on these sites. In a social network, people are held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships, such as kinship, friendship, classmates, colleagues, business partners, etc. The connections are built one at a time (i.e. you connect directly with another user). The primary reason that people join a social networking site is to maintain old relationships and establish new ones to expand their network.

Unlike social networks, communities (both online and offline) are more interesting from a social anthropological perspective, because they often consist of people from all walks of life that seem to have no relationship at all. Yet, as we've learned from history, communities are very robust social structures. So what is it that holds these communities together?

Communities are held together by common interest. It may be a hobby, something the community members are passionate about, a common goal, a common project, or merely the preference for a similar lifestyle, geographical location, or profession.

Various reading around the ideas on strong communities has given us some things to try out and I think we can make a better go at establishing a strong community. Do you have any tips for doing so? Let me know.

March 8 was International Women's Day and I'm writing this 5 days later now I've had a bit of a chance to think about it. Organisers asked that we 'Celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women. Yet … also be aware progress has slowed in many places across the world.' They say that 'urgent action is needed to accelerate gender parity' and that 'Leaders across the world are pledging to take action as champions of gender parity.'

Gender parity in the workplace means addressing the fact that 'Women are overrepresented in informal, temporary, and low-productivity jobs with low pay and limited opportunities for advancement' and that they 'continue to lag behind men in economic participation and opportunity by 15 to 25 percent in even the most gender-equal societies.' (McKinsey)

The McKinsey video The Power of Parity is powerful in quantifying the economic opportunities that lack of gender parity means. But as other commentators point out economic value is only part of the gender parity puzzle. Gender parity is lacking on many fronts where it could add value – politics, child and elder care, everyday sexism, tax regulations, employment policies (e.g. around family leave), land and inheritance laws and so on.

This leaves me wondering how much organisation designers can wield their skills to become 'champions of gender parity'. What is it that we could/should do that will help with this? (Assuming that we think that gender parity in its many forms is 'a good thing'). There are many ways but I will look specifically at flexible working as one of them.

The UKs Modern Families Index 2016 makes five recommendations related to increasing flexible working. I've taken the headline of each and suggested how organisation designers could help realise the recommendation.

1: Flexibility by default: In each redesign or design piece of work organisation designers should consciously think about the way that existing jobs are done and how they are designed to find ways of incorporating flexible working into them.
2: Getting workplace culture right: There's still a prevailing attitude that flexible working is not 'real' working and many men are hesitant to use even existing flexible working policies. For example: 'A study of 1,030 Australian workers has found that … men were twice as likely to have their flexible work requests rejected and even when they were permitted to work flexibly, felt judged, less confident and committed, and that their careers had been jeopardised'. Download the full report here. Designers can help on this by designing work processes, uses of technology, work patterns and incentives that will support a culture of gender parity for flexible working.
3: Joined up thinking about family and work: The Modern Family report notes that seniority allows for flexible working. Paradoxically those on higher incomes are also more likely to be able to afford family care support and more senior people tend to have more discretion over their workloads and how they manage them than more junior people. Designers can redress this in several ways: for example, designing for: outcomes not input, role autonomy, team accountability and trust building. Additionally we could be redesigning benefits packages in a way that will help support balancing family and work commitments.
4: Bridge the childcare/eldercare gap. Although much of the research on flexible working is concentrated on childcare arrangements as the population ages there is an increasing need to consider elder care (and other dependants' care). Again we could be generating innovative approaches to this for example, designing collaborative arrangements with providers of care, or building care support networks within the organisation.
5: Work with the next generation. More long established organisations with traditional ways of working are increasingly losing out on attracting a younger generation who have different views on careers, work/life balance and attitudes to management. See some research here and here. Typically organisation designers are hired by senior executives. Consider contracting with your client to do all design work in collaboration with the next generation.

Do you think we can and should design for gender parity? Is flexible working one aspect where we could support this? Let me know.

Years ago I read The Territorial Imperative in which author Robert Ardrey explores his 'central notion that territory – not food and not sex – is our strongest biological drive'. Rather than spend time looking for the book on my bookshelves, I know it's there somewhere, I downloaded a sample chapter to my Kindle to remind myself of more of the detail.

Having done a quick revision of it I'm beginning to think it should be a 'must read' for anyone trying to introduce, or work with, the newer ways of thinking about office workplaces and working patterns. Often these newer ways fall under the heading of 'Smart Working' which as the new BSI Code of Practice on the topic states 'incorporates the benefits of increased flexibility and organizational agility by introducing … changes to working practices, working environments, processes and organisational culture'.

In the category of 'working environments', for the most part, Smart Working involves forms of 'hotdesking', desk sharing, unassigned desks, and collaborative spaces, leading to what the Smart Working Handbook describes in its maturity model as 'non-territorial working'. It's fascinating to see that 'non-territorial working' is the first step of maturity towards the fourth and final level of maturity described as 'smart flexibility'. So if we don't get past non-territorial working are we ever going to continue down the path of Smart Working?

Ardrey defines territory as 'an area of space, whether water, earth or air which an animal defends as an exclusive preserve'. He then goes on to wonder whether 'humans' are 'animals' in this definition and in a subsequent paragraph confirms that 'Man (I think these days he would include women) is as much a territorial animal as is a mockingbird singing in the clear California night'.

So you can see that my delve into 'The Territorial Imperative' was prompted by some work we're doing on (trying to) introduce Smart Working. In doing this I've observed, and not for the first time in this type of work, that getting to non-territoriality is a giant step and perhaps even an insurmountable.

This is because territoriality involves 'protection, a safety device, and a status marker'. In Smart Working settings I notice that it is the 'status marker' that is the biggest barrier to getting anywhere with Smart Working particularly in organisations where there are strong hierarchies with associated 'entitlements'.

We've all seen car parking spaces with the names of senior individuals attached to each one. There are similar things about 'my meeting room', 'my office, 'my desk' (if you are not senior enough to have an office), 'my chair' – complete with admonishments taped to the back of it not to alter any of the settings. I was once in an astonishing exchange (or was it perfectly ok?) where a senior person demanded us to go and fetch a tape measure so we could check that the lockers we were ordering would enable her to hang her full length coat in 'her' locker so that the bottom of it didn't get wrinkles.

In a previous organisation I worked in (in the US) I asked some researchers to come and investigate with us the issues we'd noticed around 'status markers'. I wanted to know if we could substitute 'territory' i.e. office, desk, or chair, etc. for alternate 'status markers'. You can read the findings in this article When the Bases of Social Hierarchy Collide: Power Without Status Drives Interpersonal Conflict .

In a nutshell the research team '[found that] employees who have power are especially reactive to changes in status. … establishing that power without status is a unique state that produces more interpersonal conflict and demeaning behaviour than any other combination of status and power.'

So what does this mean for introducing Smart Working in organisations where status is implied by amount of territory 'owned' (and where leaders are reluctant to give up 'their' territory)? Are there substitutions and/or organisation design possibilities for enabling people to feel they are keeping their 'status' when they lose their 'territory'?

Let me know.

Out running on Sunday morning I saw two magpies. Remember 'one for sorrow, two for joy …' the magpie rhyme? It came to mind then and also reminded me of the point that someone made at the Culturevist meeting earlier in the week. She'd said 'We don't talk much about happiness at work'. (The meeting was on Redesigning Performance Management – in most current designs a source of much unhappiness).

I think she's right. We don't talk much about happiness at work. We seem to act on the assumption that it's a good thing. So instead of trying to talk about what it is and consider whether it is a helpful workplace construct, we try and 'do' happiness, and bunches of consultants are ready to leap in and help us with just that.

One, for example 'believes that happiness is a serious business. Research shows that happiness and wellbeing at work is the foundation of a productive and optimised organization and makes a real difference to a company's bottom line'. I wonder where the research comes from? Could it be the 2014 research report from Warwick University which suggests that fostering happiness at work is a 'must do' because 'In the laboratory, they found happiness made people around 12% more productive'.

What's wrong with that? Well, maybe not a lot but it does bear some reflective thought. I looked at the research and found that: 'All the laboratory subjects are young men and women who attend an elite English university with required entry grades amongst the highest in the country.' That's not an exactly representative example of the UK workforce in my view. Also I'm not sure that a 'laboratory' is remotely like a call centre, supermarket, hospital ward, etc. where workers are engaged in work and not in carefully designed tests. So question one – how reliable is the happiness 'research' when it starts to be applied to workplaces?

Second, there's a lack of distinction between 'happiness' and 'well-being'. In a Futurelearn course that I'm doing – Strategies for Successful Aging – two questions were posed to participants in an article 'Introducing happiness and wellbeing'. These were: What do you think are the differences between happiness and wellbeing? Are there areas which overlap between both? This resulted in 1502 comments with people generally saying that 'well-being' is about physical and mental health, and 'happiness' is a much more subjective and intermittently experienced emotion. The tutor noted that wellbeing and happiness are not necessarily correlated i.e. happiness is experienced by people in poor physical and/or emotional health. And people who describe themselves in a state of well-being do not always think themselves 'happy'.

Third, the whole issue of 'happiness' gets tied up not just with well-being but also with 'engagement' which is more about people being emotionally committed to their company and their work goals. People who are engaged care about their work and often give discretionary effort. Again engaged employees may or may not also be happy employees – there isn't necessarily a correlation. A similar distinction could be made for employee 'satisfaction' which is not the same as either happiness or well-being, or engagement.

Thus, there's a patchwork of related and interrelated concepts which could all fall under the umbrella of 'positive psychology' which when they are approached separately seem to fragment the notion that organisations should be aiming to be overall good places to work. Happy employees may or may not be the outcome of being a good place to work but they are more likely to be. (If you like models the EFQM is helpful on a holistic framework for creating a good place to work).

So is it better to concentrate on becoming overall a good place to work rather than focusing effort on employing happiness consultants, trying to up engagement scores or engaging a Chief Happiness Officer?

Let me know.