All around the world, debates about hybrid and remote working rumble on as employers and employees experiment to find mutually agreeable and effective ways of working. There is a lot of noise in the debate around the future of work, and I really want to cut through this. With that in mind, I’m going to focus the next three episodes of the podcast on the future of work, exploring the real issues, looking at the practical solutions that are being put in place and taking an informed look at what the future might look like.
My first guest in this mini-series is writer, speaker and consultant Julia Hobsbawm, author of the brilliant book “The Nowhere Office”. In her book, Julia explores what is happening at the moment in the context of workplace changes over the last few decades and examines the current issues to help map the future.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Reimagining and reframing how we work
• The four phases of work since 1945
• How the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already there
• The complexity of hybrid
• The real challenges with developing the next phase of work
• Undoing assumptions and old norms
• The challenge for talent acquisition
• Autonomy, flexibility and networks
• Thinking strategically to improve wellness and mental health.
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 443 of the Recruiting Future podcast. All around the world, debates about hybrid and remote working rumble on as employers and employees experiment to find mutually agreeable and effective ways of working. There’s a lot of noise in the debate around the future of work, and I really want to cut through with that in mind. I’m going to focus the next three episodes of the podcast on the future of work, exploring the real issues, looking at the practical solutions that are being put in place, and taking an informed look at what the future might actually look like. My first guest in this mini series is writer, speaker and consultant Julia Hobsbawm, author of the brilliant book the Nowhere Office. In her book, Julia explores what’s happening at the moment in the context of workplace changes over the last few decades and examines the current issues to help map the future.
Matt Alder [00:02:09]:
Hi Julia, and welcome to the podcast.
Julia Hobsbawn [00:02:11]:
Hello Matt, Nice to be with you. Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you just introduce yourself and.
Matt Alder [00:02:19]:
Tell everyone what you do?
Julia Hobsbawn [00:02:21]:
My name is Julia Hobsbawm. I’m a writer and entrepreneur. I write about work, the workpl organizational change, and my latest book is called the Nowhere Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future. And I also have a podcast called the Nowhere Office which addresses these issues as well.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
Fantastic stuff. Now, I’ve just finished reading your book and it was a pleasure to read and it’s brilliant to read about someone looking very much into the future rather than necessarily dwelling on exactly what’s happened in the last two years and really thinking about what the implications are for. Implications are for work. Just give us a quick intro to the book. Tell everyone a little bit about what it’s about and why you wrote it.
Julia Hobsbawn [00:03:08]:
Thank you for asking me to explain it. So the Nowhere Office is a phase of work. I think we’re in 75 years, 80 years or so after the end of the Second World War, when the last big reset globally happened. And I’m framing it as a time in the story and the history of work where we are nowhere near where we were in terms of going back to offices and fixed schedules. And we need to reimagine and reframe how we work because of all sorts of trends that have been triggered by, but not caused by the pandemic. So the Nowhere Office is a sort of optimistic but realistic look at the state of work, which I don’t think was working very well before. So it actually does look to the future, but in order to look to the future, it also looks to the past. And so I begin by framing this phase of work against three others that preceded it between 1945 and 2020. And very briefly, those are that I believe the first phase, immediately after the Second World War, was what I would call the optimism when everybody who worked in an office sort of went to an office. Things were very hierarchical, they were simplistic, the power resided in the corner. Office computers were really very much over there. Not, you know, desktop, not laptop, not handheld. Then the mezzanine years that lasted between about 1977 and 2006, in which all sorts of workplace issues that we’re now familiar with, around identity and flexibility and rights and inequalities and HR, became more prominent and the technology moved closer into the office and into our lives. And then the period of time that immediately preceded the Nowhere Office phase that began with the pandemic I call the co working years, and those were beginning in 2007 with really the arrival of the Internet, really the arrival of mobile, and the sense that in order to work you had to be free and you came in and out of offices and co working spaces were born. But the office, as the sort of palace of presenteeism, was still there. And now we’re in the Nowhere Office. Nowhere is an anagram for your eagle eared listeners, of course, of now and here and here and now. And so it’s very much a present instant moment where it’s just all changed, it’s all up for grabs, it’s all fluid, it’s all hybrid. And I’ll stop here by saying I think it’s a very testing moment for recruiters, for managers, for leaders. But I also think it’s a very important, necessary, and, dare I say it, exciting moment too.
Matt Alder [00:06:21]:
Absolutely. And I really want to kind of talk more about that. But before we do just to kind of reflect on what you’ve just said. What I really liked about your book was the way that you’ve defined those previous areas of work. And as someone who’s worked through, I don’t know, at least three of them, maybe without wanting to date myself, they were very kind of recognizable descriptions. You mentioned at the start of the conversation that the pandemic was ushering in a new phase of work because it had accelerated trends and issues and problems that were already there. Can you tell us a little bit about what you perceive those sort of trends and issues to be?
Julia Hobsbawn [00:07:01]:
Yes. So one of the things that’s really interesting to me is that when the pandemic started, everybody missed the office and eulogized it and the water cooler. And there’s still a lot of talk about how wonderful the camaraderie of the office is. And I’m absolutely in favor of people being together and coming together in an office. I’m just suggesting that how and when and why they do it and the patterns will change. But I’m also in favour of being realistic, which is that actually most people identify very much with toxic workplaces and office politics and the struggle of the commute and the fact that most office life is full of meetings and things that didn’t work so well. And when you look at the data, as I have done pretty, pretty deeply, the reality is that stress and workplace stress not only costs the economy huge amounts of Money, I mean, 300 billion in America alone, but 60% of working days in the EU were lost to stress. Pre pandemic, 17.9 million working days in the UK, according to the Health and Safety Executive and the World Health Organization. Pre pandemic declared stress as the biggest single epidemic of the 21st century. And so I think it is fair to say that work wasn’t working, actually. And so we need to look at why that is. I’m interested in organisational behaviour and I’m interested in organisational. And so for me, these discussions about the future of the office and how you go back to work and when and hybrid and all of the complexity of that. And by the way, it is complex and challenging and there are hybrid haves and hybrid have nots. Nevertheless, I think that we should be saying, yes, but how do we make some of the things that caused those stresses and the toxic workplaces disappear or be minimized? And that’s what I’m interested in, is remodeling and resetting a nowhere office culture that says it’s about why you work and the fairness with which you’re working that matters, not when and where as much.
Matt Alder [00:09:33]:
I think that’s such an interesting point and it really is the conversation that we need to be having because on this topic the news is dominated by people putting forward quite simplicity, simplistic and clear cut arguments about why everyone should get back to the office, or why people should stay away from the office, or why hybrid working is the only way of the future. And it comes from all directions as well. Because I’ve spoken to people who kind of specialize in remote work, who’ve done remote work for decades, who very strongly argue that hybrid working won’t work. But all of this kind of stuff, it really does obscure, as you say, the sort of key issues in terms of developing this next phase of work. Talk us through some of the challenges employers are actually facing once we cut through the nonsense arguments that are out there. What challenges are they facing them and how are they dealing with this very new world of work?
Julia Hobsbawn [00:10:28]:
Well, I think the biggest immediate challenge is that we’re in a very tight labour market. And in the professional fields of office based, knowledge based work, it is a seller’s market. And at the moment all the data shows that people want freedom, flexibility, autonomy. I mean, you know, even if you allow for the fact that the world’s corporations have more or less decided that 20% of, you know, their workforces will absolutely be working hybrid at any given time and that two, three day a week model will prevail, the reality is they have no choice unless they want significant churn and unless they want to lose workers. So from that point of view, the most obvious challenge is that you’ve got to go with what the market is doing. And the market is not in the favour of employers at this moment. Now that could change. But the second thing is that even those employers who are enlightened and who are interested in making hybrid work and who see the merit of it, there is no one size fits all. And my theory is that the world so embraced globalization that certainly for the last 30 years there have been increasing standardized norms from, you know, Singapore to Seattle, the Streatham, which haven’t really taken into account different industries, different workplaces, different teams, different time imperatives. Everything has been shoehorned into we’ve got five year plan, we’ve got the quarterly results. You know, this is how we all work. And that doesn’t work because people have home lives and work life balance. That really came crystallizing into view with the pandemic and the mobile tech Means that our handheld devices are those in which we both make our dental appointments and book our theater tickets and you know, phone our loved ones and check our emails and look after the social media accounts of our brands. And so the lives and the work lives of workers are very intertwined now. And so in practical terms it’s really quite difficult. For instance, I spoke to somebody today, a senior editor in a media publication. They’ve decided, aged sort of 50 something, that they want to go part time. Now the reality is they want to do that because they want to control the mission creep that they were ending up editing a lot during evenings with no boundary. That’s a big problem, as we know from home working and from mobile based working. But the truth is that may not fit the realities of the publishing schedules. I mean, that’s just one micro example. The problem is that there was a simplicity when everybody had to be in and be present, even though there was a lot of wastage of time, which we all knew about. It was simplicity, simpler. And it also suited managers and bosses, particularly those of a certain generation who really, you know, they like control and they like surveillance and it makes them feel in control. So I’m not in any way denying that to make hybrid work is going to be one of iteration and trial and there is no one size fits all. However, the benefits are if you pivot to what Nicholas Bloom of Stanford calls outputs, not inputs. If what you say is, look, this is our business, what does success look like? We need these number of people on the front line, in reception, in the office, in it, and we rotate them and we reward them or compensate them for that necessary presenteeism and then what does everybody else need and when in terms of the culture to get together, in terms of learning, which I think culture, learning and networking are probably the only things actual offices are going to be needed for. And then the rest of the time it really is all very, very technology enabled. And the truth is we all worried about tech and then we realized it saved work because you can in fact do so much cloud based and with teleconferencing. And therefore it means how you regard hybrid has got to be framed against what needs to be done next to other people and why and what doesn’t. So in the short term, sorry to give you such a long answer, I’m just so interested in this. In the short term, you’ve got a bit of a headache and a half for managers and leaders. They have to listen more, they have to try things more, they have to undo lots of assumptions that have formed about the systems that they believe in. I don’t think any of the old systems are necessarily built to last. That’s what the pandemic has done. It has swept away old norms. That’s the exciting bit. It’s also the challenging bit.
Matt Alder [00:16:11]:
I completely agree, actually. And I think what really underlines the challenge that we have now is the narratives that are out there. So I see more argument about, well, what about young people who are coming into the workforce? We have to go back to the office so they can learn how to work this kind of throwback to how things were as the only solution to that problem rather than discussion about, well, actually we have technology, we still have offices, we still have all these different ways of working at our disposal now that have been proven. How do we develop something that is fit for purpose, fit for the times we live in, and is going to be better than that old way of working? And this is why I really liked your book, because I don’t see enough of that discussion going on at the moment.
Julia Hobsbawn [00:16:58]:
Thank you. I mean, I don’t either. The truth is I’m a lay person. You know, I’ve worked for 30 plus years as a consultant. I’ve had a bit of time myself in large corporations. I’ve been a consultant to have clients across, and have clients across micro enterprises and substantial global businesses. And what I see in all of them are people, humans struggling with relationship problems, to do with communication, to do with expectation, to do with miscommunication, to do with unrealistic timelines, deadlines, processes, and you know, the phrase that I have latched onto, which was not a phrase I made, but it’s a phrase I’ve written about and, and I hope popularized a bit more recently as the marzipan manager stuck below the leadership icing. The truth is that we need to unstick a lot of norms that have been taken for granted about the way human beings work in organizations. And if you have too many layers above you, below you, to the side of you, you cannot be agile. Now, as a management ideology, agility and agile has been, you know, the phrase of the day for a long time. But we, we now realize, and I think I’ve uncovered this in this book and also in a previous book called Fully Connected and the book immediately before this called the Simplicity Principle, sort of three books published in very short succession, ending with the Nowhere Office. I think what we now understand is there’s really a difference between words and action and we need work to work, we need to be Able to say, oh my goodness, hang on a minute. You know, we’ve got a workforce that absolutely must come in 10 hour days for three months in order to get this project done. I mean, hypothetically, now if you can make the case for that and everybody’s on the same page and they’re well led and they’re well organized and they’re well renewed, that’s not really hybrid, except that you might have an enormous break after that immersive period. For other organizations, going to a 3, 2 model is fine, but the compromise may be what? You don’t get a desk anymore. If you want a desk and you want an office, then you have to commit certain things. So it’s about what works, it’s about compromise. It’s not about a sort of blind faith in, in buzzwords and techniques that really don’t trickle through. I mean, I looked at the data for how much management and leadership development investment is. I mean it’s billions of quid. Who benefits from it? No one apparently, based on what has happened post pandemic, because everybody’s having to relearn it. So I really want us to call out some of this sort of nonsense because we are all working together to get work done. And by the way, I’m also pretty anti the movement that had begun to sort of gain traction pre pandemic which says, oh, you know, we shouldn’t be working anyway. I’m very pro work. I think work gives us meaning. I think it’s probably the economic model that is most viable. I think it’s very difficult at the moment in a tight, in roaring inflation and so on and so forth. But so I’m pro work, working better and that means we’ve got to, in writer speak, kill some darlings. We’ve got to talk frankly, really frankly about stuff that doesn’t work and we should champion the best practice where it, where it rears its head. There’s loads of innovation around, by the way, from talent officers, recruitment people, managers, but we’re not bringing it all together systematically and saying the Nowhere Office is a phase that we’re in. Who’s doing what and how are we learning from each other across the board. That to me would be real progress.
Matt Alder [00:21:10]:
You mentioned recruiting there and I’ve just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about talent acquisition and where it, where it fits into all of this. Obviously it’s a very disruptive time in recruiting at the moment. Massive investment in technology, very, very hard to recruit people. Everything that sort of happened in the pandemic and we are seeing some incredible innovation, but it’s not widely distributed and actually so many organizations still working off Word document CVs and interview processes that haven’t changed in, in 20 years. How do companies need to think about talent acquisition now and the process of recruiting in this, in this sort of period of the nowhere office?
Julia Hobsbawn [00:21:55]:
Well, you’re the expert. I’m not the expert in recruitment. I mean, what I’m picking up from the, and from the conversations I’m having is that recruiters are pretty happy that, you know, the geographical lid has been lifted. And certainly lots of employers are happy that the talent cap that meant it was geolocated around offices is no longer there. So from that point of view, I think it’s a plus for recruitment. And as I say, I think the technology has come on so significantly. I think there are six key trends. Three months or so after the publication of the book, I would say that there are six really key prevailing trends. One of them is around autonomy, that people definitely want choice in agency. So that is potentially a challenge for recruiters because, you know, you really can’t offer an inflexible package, even if, as they have found to their cost, you are Goldman Sachs or Apple. The second is the question of commute, which is people do not want the commute, which again, lifts the lid on the geography. And you’re seeing fantastically interesting developments, you know, with entire countries like Ireland and cities like Hull creating strategies to say, you know, you can work from anywhere and live in, in our place, you know, the third is the question of cost. The fourth is the question of environment and sustainability, which is again, for managers and leaders, a problem. You know, you can’t hurtle around the world in quite the same way that you did. And then place and technology are the other two key factors. And all of that puts pressure on the industries around employment and management of employees, subcontractors. And by the way, another trend, of course, is that about half the world’s knowledge worker workforce is set to become freelance, really within the next decade. And that’s an astonishingly rapid shift. So, you know, what that means is people are much more mobile in their careers anyway. So what do I think that means for recruiters? Well, I think they need to make better use of networks. I’ve written a lot about networks and there’s a significant chunk of book devoted to it. What networks do you run to surface talent? How do you recruit? By nosing around and noticing people digitally and in real life, as well as, you know, putting out Job ads and so and so forth. So I think the recruiters that are going to win are the ones that innovate and are curious and do not rest on their laurels. Again, the failure of tech, I think, is that in recruitment, pre pandemic, it became literally, and I’m probably exaggerating and probably doing a disservice to some of the finesse that you and your listeners know more than me, so forgive me, but if I can generalise critically, I would say that there was an over reliance on the algorithm led response. You know, I know a lot of young people for whom it was routine to graduate or to not graduate to apply for jobs and not even get an acknowledgement that their application had been received. I mean, that is just grotesque. Who thought that was acceptable? Who thought that recruiting people via a don’t call us, we’ll call you, let’s put the machine system before the human was anything to do with talent. And I hope that that sort of log jam has been broken.
Matt Alder [00:25:34]:
I sincerely hope so too. Things move in the right direction, but there are still far too many companies that do that. Basically wanted to just change the subject slightly and ask you sort of a final quick question about wellness, because wellness is something that you talk about in the book. We’ve really kind of seen a lot of companies jumping on the sort of wellness bandwagon, but it just doesn’t seem very joined up. I mean, I think what really brought it home for me was during the pandemic there was this kind of big push around wellness and, you know, the well being of our teams. Working at home in very stressful circumstances is crucial. And the answer seemed to be to get everyone on zoom to have a drink or everyone on Zoom back on Zoom, you know, to do some yoga or some mindfulness and, you know, not really getting to the crux of the core problem of people, you know, burning out because of use of screens and things like that. Do you think that post pandemic employers are getting better at thinking about the mental and physical health of their employees in a, in a more strategic way?
Julia Hobsbawn [00:26:35]:
Yes and no. I definitely think that there is an acknowledgement that we’ve been in sort of well being 1.0 for quite some time and that the whole client of box ticking, exercise of mindfulness and beanbags and saying, you know, we welcome people with mental health problems into our workplace is sort of not sufficient. Because actually what you need to say is we are a well functioning workplace, we are a strong workplace in which you can be your best self because we’re not stressing you out with impossible deadlines, bad management, Marcipan management, you know, having to work beyond the hours for which you’re paid, that’s number one. We need to get a bit real about what causes a lot of ill health and stress, as you say. I mean, I saw somebody recently, a very, very senior global executive. I mean, I’d never seen somebody look so unwell because they’re on back to back teleconferencing eight hours a day, which is not healthy. So I do think that there is a reset around the practicalities, but there is definitely a much, much greater literacy about well being, as in, you know, people need to feel valued and they need to feel that their home lives and their work lives have some sort of alignment. Where I’m pessimistic, even though broadly speaking, I’m an optimist, Matt. But you know, where I’m pessimistic is I think that the structures of governance and decision making around boards and the C suite is still completely not joined up. And so even though there are policies around physical health and mental health, there aren’t policies around what I call social health, which is how do people connect and collaborate and learn and actually how do people work with machines. And if we can get that piece right, then I think we really will be leading on well being and really we’ll be seeing great results.
Matt Alder [00:28:32]:
Final question, tell us where people can find and connect with you, but also tell us a bit more about your podcast and the type of guests that you talk to and the content that you have.
Julia Hobsbawn [00:28:42]:
Well, I’m easily findable. Very noisy. I’m, you know, loving this subject. So. Juliahobsbawm.com juliahobsbawm on Twitter thenowhereoffice.com It all leads to a weekly substack. In fact, I’ve just started a paid for service where organizations can subscribe to a private monthly zoom where I share some of my latest findings and they could meet each other and share that best social health practice and get some of the latest thinking. So there’s a sort of upgrade version if people are interested and they just, they, you know, I’m very easily findable but I think there are a lot of people interested in this and I’m tremendously grateful for you giving me time to address your audience. I think there’s a lot of people that want change and I think change is here.
Matt Alder [00:29:38]:
Julia, thank you so much for talking to me.
Julia Hobsbawn [00:29:41]:
My pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:29:42]:
My thanks to Julia. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple, Podcasts on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
