Useful work v useless

Three recent news stories have raised questions about the nature of work.  Firstly, there is the transatlantic spat between the US tyre company CEO who is declining to take over a Goodyear factory in Northern France because the “so-called workers” only worked three hours a day, spending the rest of the time eating and talking. Then there were reports of a survey which found that one in three professionals is suffering from “burnout” leaving them struggling to cope with stress at work.  And finally there’s the news that Yahoo’s CEO is banning working from home in favour of meat space offices.

Useful work v useless toil was the title of a lecture given in 1884 by William Morris to the Hampstead Liberal Club.  He said that there were two kinds of work - one good, one bad. “One not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a mere curse, a burden to life.” (Morris was also pretty handy with a soundbite: “toiling to live that we may live to toil” was rather a good one. )

For nearly all of us work is not an optional extra.  As Morris puts it: “The race of man must either labour or perish.  Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis”. But for many work has become all-embracing.  I often say to US friends that whilst they call themselves the land of the free they are, in fact, slaves to their work - starting ridiculously early, working ridiculously late, and taking fewer holidays than most.  And what is it that they do?  As Parkinson’s law states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”  Work often becomes unproductive with the focus on a hamster wheel of input, constantly doing things and attending endless meetings.  Occasionally this production line results in output but not often enough to disrupt the raison d’etre of input for its own sake (for if we could achieve this input efficiently then how would we spend our days?).

The decision, taken by a global technology giant, to move all its people back into offices in order to be more effective at “communications and collaboration” is as good a definition of irony as you’ll see for while.  Technology was meant to liberate us, to allow us to work, share, learn, and produce efficiently regardless of location.  Here’s Morris again in 1884: “Our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use.”  Work is something you do not a place you go.  Offices can be hot-houses for team-work and collaboration, but they can also be noisy, unproductive, and bureaucratic places full of politics, processes and people.  Being rid of the need to spend the day navigating through what I’ve often described as large company syndrome can be a liberating experience, allowing issues to be seen with a far greater degree of clarity. As always it’s a question of balance but one thing’s for certain, you don’t get collaboration by imposing rules of where and how people work.

One interesting idea I came across recently was of an Australian company which had free Fridays.  For the first four days of the week employees did their jobs, working within their functional areas on the roles on which they were measured and incentivised.  On Fridays, however, they could work on whatever took their fancy across the business; private projects, assignments with other teams, or just offering help.  They found that problem solving soared and creative ideas flourished.  Allowing people to bring their ideas and expertise to a variety of issues is important.  As Morris again said: “To compel a man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change, means nothing short of turning his life into a prison torment.”   After all, it’s not where you work, it’s how and why.

Changing down

Three change stories caught our eye in Management Today's excellent daily bulletin on this Valentine's Day. Two are about downsizing and one is about the threat of extinction for CIOs.

The high performing retail group that MT describes as 'the saintly John Lewis' may be about to axe some 325 manager level posts in its stores. Blockbuster - not described as 'saintly' or anything else - is to close another 164 stores. And corporate Chief Information Managers are going to have to do more to prove their worth if they are not to join Blockbuster and John Lewis managers as the next cohort of executive job seekers.

This, taken together with the report that the economies of our friends and trading partners in Germany and France saw their economies contract in Q4 made us feel that the world of business was losing that loving feeling on this of all days.

When you look into it however, each of the downsizing stories has a different flavour and perhaps offers different lessons. Whereas the Blockbuster closures are just another stage in the inexorable wind-down of a collapsed company whose business model failed to change quickly enough in response to new technologies and consumer demand, John Lewis is taking action from a position of relative strength.

According to MT, the John Lewis plans come in the wake of a healthy 13% rise in like for like increase in sales in the pre-Christmas period. They're not reacting to events but sensibly planning for a future in which more of their business will be conducted on line rather than in store and they're adjusting accordingly. That's anticipating and managing change rather than becoming the victims of it.

That leaves the threatened CIOs. It appears that they just need to adjust to the changes in technology all around them. MT is quite clear: "The old guard of CIOs need to change their ways if they are to compete with the next generation of enthusiastic tech-savvy IT guys who are chomping at the bit to get under the skin of the old CIO mentality and change it for the better".

Apart from the horse-drawn metaphor, we would go along with that. But why stop at the CIOs? It applies just as well to 'old guard' CMOs, COOs and CEOs and everyone else in the C-suite for whom we don't yet know the acronyms.

Love and money

Until this week we had gone along with the notion that you can’t buy friendship. This concept was challenged momentarily by this slice of horse-free spam which today made the compelling offer:

“Buy GUARANTEED Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers and YourTube (sic) Views at the cheapest prices and become more popular!”
Furthermore, these new friends will be “safely delivered” with “absolutely no risk” although it’s not clear whose risk being taken care off in this transaction of human kinship.

Perhaps it’s a special offer for Valentine’s. Or just another example of how some marketers have become fixated with the wrong indicators. Brands are not built on the number of Facebook likes or the volume of pithy and often cryptic one liners in the Twittersphere.

It’s boring but still self-evidently true that sustainable brands are built on trust and performance. Brands can earn loyalty but they can’t buy it. It’s that customer loyalty that will carry Tesco through its cases of mistaken ingredients and at least some of the banks through their cases of mistaken selling.

We won’t take up the offer of instant popularity and will stick to our belief that Spike Milligan had it about right when he observed: "money can't buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy."

So what's the difference

Corporate foundations are playing a vital and increasing role in sustainability. That's the positive take-out from the study recently produced and published by Corporate Citizenship.
The headline message of their report The Foundations of Business is that that there are now some 140 corporate foundations in England and Wales compared with 107 in 2006.
And that's just the national perspective. From our work with the Better Cotton Initiative, the 4C Coffee Association, GoodWeave and ISEAL , we know that major international corporates are also working effectively through their foundations to reduce environmental impact and materially improve the lives of those involved in the production of the commodities on which their brands depend.
The less good news is that, in England and Wales at least, the average income of corporate trusts is tending to decline from about £1.75m in 2015 to an estimated £1.46m in 2011. We suspect, however, that some of the US, European and Asian based foundations are showing healthier growth and certainly far more impressive overall numbers than those here in multi-dip Britain.
The real concern from the report is the patchy approach to the collection and management of impact data. 42% of the respondents said that they do not 'do impact assessment' and those who did seemed not too confident about its accuracy. This may the issue that really matters.
Corporate and foundation boards rightly expect to see a return on investment. As once Sustainability Manager told us: "I am going to have start doing more than tell good anecdotes to persuade my Board to keep investing at this level. They want to know what impact we have had on the countries and the people where we are spending millions on sustainability."
Bill Gates made his focus on impact crystal clear in the Dimbleby lecture. He's prepared to invest billions from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to eradicate polio which is now down to its last couple of hundred cases. It may be an astonishing cost per case but the impact is clear, measurable and sustainable.
If corporate foundations are to thrive, all of us in this sector have to work harder on the metrics, the outcomes and the impacts. The techniques and the capability to assess impact are already there. What is really needed is higher levels of cooperation between governments, companies, standards systems and assessors. That's possible if there is the will to make it happen.

PR’s identity crisis

I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner;
I have a slimline brief-case and I use the firm's Cortina.
You ask me what it is I do.  Well, actually, you know,
I'm partly a liaison man and partly P.R.O.

Those marvellous lines from Betjeman stem from a time when PR was a more simple profession.  Then it was loosely about having a relationship with the public and being a representative whose role was to both promote and to smooth things over.  However, today, it seems, there is a growing unease at the inability to define the “profession”.  Every other discipline seems able to do what they say on the tin so why can’t PR.  Here’s a few thoughts.

Firstly, it is, of course, difficult to actually pin PR down.  There are no professional barriers to entry, no entry qualifications, practioners come a variety of backgrounds, there’s no agreed measurement criteria for success or failure, and activities vary from celebrity puffing and product placement to strategic counsel. Secondly, the discipline has spawned countless specialisms from media relations to internal communications to public affairs and social media.  Each often speaks its own language and has distinct networks. Thirdly, each of the component parts is under attack from other disciplines. Social media, for instance, is under threat from its higher paid and better resourced cousins in advertising and marketing.  Internal communications morphs into human relations who come armed with the support of business schools and the global management consultancies.

But it is not just the nebulous foundations upon which PR is based that have led to this crisis of identity.  Two enormous changes have taken place that threaten the fundamentals.  The first is, of course, digital communications.  Not only has content been effectively democratised but also the tools of our trade have opened up to everyone (for instance, anyone with a laptop and energy can run a pretty effective campaign against, say, local development proposals.) Secondly, the decline in trust means that people no longer believe what they hear simply because it comes from someone in a position of “authority”.  Taken together these two societal disruptions have changed the game for PR.  They mark the end of communications as a transactional, top-down, command and control function (see my blogs passim), although it is an end that few in PR have reacted to.

So what to do?  Some see the answer as positioning PR in the arena of reputation management; others like the idea of PR becoming the corporate conscience.  For some an increasing use of (robust) data could solve the problem.  I personally have doubts about many of these avenues.  For me there can never be one-size-fits all definition of PR.  In fact, PR’s very strength ought to be its adaptability and flexibility.

The world has changed.  Businesses are struggling to make sense of relationships in the new digital marketplace.  Indeed, with out-sourcing and co-creation it is sometimes hard to know where a business starts and ends.  And yet many people, especially in the PR world, are continuing to demand the type of professional demarcation of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker.

The old landscape of separate audiences and ring-fenced issues has gone.  The role for PR is to help organisations be comfortable with ambiguity.  We need to help our clients make sense of the changed environment and assist them in understanding the relevance of their audiences and their issues.   We can play a part in helping them to navigate their way through change.  And rather than being focused on channel-specific outputs we should consider the types of outcome and behaviour change that we’re seeking.  And the type of person who will thrive in these puzzling and uncertain surroundings will still most likely be partly a liaison man and partly a P.R.O.