Last month, Citisoft UK took a trip down to our reopened offices in the City of London to start envisioning what a return to the Monday-to-Friday work week might look like. Virtually all countries, states and territories the world over are gingerly approaching their own post-COVID reopening: a gradual, if frustratingly inconsistent, relaxation of lockdown rules. Political pronouncements on what families and institutions should be doing are counteracted with accommodation of individual preferences to stay home and maintain social distance. Media accounts of gatherings and those neglecting restrictions are buried in value judgements of bad actors acting in bad faith, or a justification for these actions to achieve political ends, depending on which network you are watching. What the many post-COVID-19 worlds will look like and how they will interact when they inevitably collide is anyone’s guess.
Up until lockdown, office culture was an exalted space considered a bastion of meritocracy. Businesses got things done, offices were where things happened. Being busy was the ultimate arbiter of priorities: every action and quarter-hour subject to risk assessments and cost-benefit analyses prior to commitment, ensuring that Mr. and Ms. Busy were virtually never at their desks. Reneging on commitments was the product of being too busy, but this did not brand you as irresponsible or fickle, it signalled your importance. Those of us lucky enough to have lasted through the last seven months with a stable income, a full cupboard and the ability to work from a home we could afford to stay in have all reacted to the environmental changes in our own way, but we are probably all a little ambivalent about this newfound autonomy.
What, then, can a return to the office and to a more “normal” working environment do to help us improve productivity, make good on our promises of meritocracy and set a new course better suited to business conditions that may have changed irrevocably?
Spontaneous, casual interactions among equals. One thing we as consultants have missed during the last six months are the impromptu meetings and introductions to stakeholders we perhaps didn’t know we had. By default, video calls have curated and sometimes censored our audiences. Indeed, we cannot wait for a stakeholder, familiar to us or not, to come by our desk unannounced with a “quick question” that becomes a major exchange of ideas. Social media has rewarded our obsessions with “Who?” at the expense of “What?”—we need to consciously address topics and ideas based on their merit and not based on our relationship to the person that has introduced them. We also need to remind ourselves not to see challenges to our received wisdom as threats to our group or our position. We bear sole responsibility for leaving our own echo chambers, no one else can do it for us.
Challenge the cult of “busy.” It is difficult to say whether working from our homes has resulted in us using more time to process information individually and come up with our own ideas after fully digesting someone else’s. A return to the office should place both individual and group productivity on equal footing. We have become immune to the irony that the main signatory to a major project deliverable never has the time to read it, but cannot avoid the fact that reading is essential to high-quality interactions and outputs. In an era that stresses collaboration, reading, a solitary pursuit that cannot be delegated, can often be de-prioritized.
Be honest about culture. Citisoft UK is fortunate to be growing and has found a wide group of qualified applicants typical of a large metropolitan financial hub. Critically, our process does not ask interviewers to determine whether a candidate is a “cultural fit.” This is a good thing: the idea is not only antiquated, but also implies that this culture needs to be protected from infiltrators, namely those that are not like us. This can reinforce our cliques, lead us to hire our friends and prevent us from facing our biases. The codification of a corporate culture is no less problematic than a definitive statement on American or British culture. This does not mean that hiring decisions are made with malice, but that our recruitment processes are not as objective or meritocratic as we would like them to be.
As we continue to grow Citisoft in the UK, we look to target recruits who are less likely to see themselves in the City or working at Citisoft or its clients. This is in no way intended as charity, but an exchange of useful information and ideas among equals that no one should be too busy to participate in.
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