Political prisoners often say the worst thing about their captivity was not the beatings, but being kept in solitary confinement. Despite the sophisticated trappings of twenty-first century living, we are still monkeys at heart and crave the comfort and companionship of being with other hairy monkeys just like us.
But that dynamic is changing both on the home and work front, as more people live alone and technology advancements mean we can chip away at the coalface from the safety of our sofa. Going to work is becoming a change of mindset, not location.
That we can do our banking at midnight online, and buy our shopping at 3am means our work and our home lives are no longer boxed into a nine to five timeframe.
‘It’s an always-on society, which means you can work any place, any time and anywhere,’ says Gordon Tinline, a psychologist and consultant with business psychology company Robertson Cooper.
The rules for modern-day living and working are changing, but no one has written the rulebook yet.
Thanks to laptops, BlackBerrys, mobile phones and broadband, more people are choosing to work part or full time from home or away from the office.
The advantages of home or flexible work practices are clear. From an employee’s perspective, it puts an end to the dead time and the expense of commuting and gives them far more control over how they structure their time and the way they work.
A recent survey by internet specialist SonicWall found home workers will use the opportunity to eat and drink outside of the usual lunch hour, listen to music, watch TV or even take an afternoon nap – all things that would be impossible in an office building. What would be even less appealing to most employers is that 12 per cent of men and seven per cent of women wear nothing at all when they work from home.
Home working means domestic chores, such as the school run or the dentists, can more easily be slotted into the working day. A happy workforce is a productive workforce, and having more control over your work life can lower stress levels.
From an employer’s standpoint it means the company can save substantial sums on office space and, better still, productivity is improved by significant margins. For example, at the AA its 200 emergency call centre workers have become between 10 per cent and 40 per cent more productive and turnover of staff has dropped since the firm instituted home working – see box.
But is having a permanent link to the office necessarily a good thing, or does an always-on lifestyle mean staff are on permanent standby and can never switch off?
The simple answer is it depends if you let it. It is crucial for companies – and individuals – to assess their suitability for home working and their ability to switch off.
There is a sliding scale from the highly conscientious workers, who work independently and are ideally suited to flexible working, to those who need the structure and pressure of the workplace to perform.
‘There’s also those who are highly creative and imaginative, but without peer pressure they may drift,’ points out James Finn, business psychologist at talent management company Getfeedback.
There are many practical reasons why home working is not ideal, such as a lack of space, so it is important for people to be able to delineate between home and work areas. And then there is the personal space.
Not every marriage could survive both partners working in the marital home, for example. In the worst-case scenario, working from home can cause health problems as workaholics take on too much and push themselves too hard.
The lynchpin to making home working a success is having the right managers on the front line. That manager has to create a strong bond with employees and trust them to work out of his or her sight. These are qualities that any good manager should possess and are not just the ability to manage disparate teams. After all, a chief information officer (CIO) or managing director is not with their team every minute of the day, yet they expect things to get done.
‘There comes a point where if you want to progress beyond a certain level you have to be comfortable with managing from a distance,’ says Dr Maria Yapp, chief executive of business psychologist Xancam Consulting. ‘As people become more senior, they have to become more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.’
The weaknesses of a bad manager will only be magnified if they manage a virtual team. These new managers need to be able to manage by performance and outcomes, not on the hours someone works.
But Finn points out that managers must be careful not to become too blinkered by task completion. ‘I do a lot of surveys and I find that if there’s a strong bond with the manager, it’s not just about task management, but managers as leaders so they need to work on building belongingness,’ he says. ‘A manager’s weekly phone call may be the only direct contact with the firm.’
Raising motivation is a critical role of the manager, who also sets the tone for what is expected – for example, whether it is acceptable for staff to be contacted at home in the evening on their BlackBerry, says Tinline.
‘Having a BlackBerry sets expectations – you’re no longer able to say you haven’t seen an email,’ he says. ‘That’s great if you can control it, otherwise it will take control of you. People now assume they can reach you when you don’t want to be reached.
‘If you instantly respond to an email, then that’s an expectation you set and it’s a very reactive way of working. The advice we give is to try to discipline yourself to only check email every couple of hours.’
It is about creating balance and working out your own boundaries and communicating those boundaries to your manager. For senior management, being able to be in contact with the office at all times is often essential – and having a BlackBerry is less intrusive than receiving a phone call.
Emma Hardaker-Jones, managing director of headhunting firm Moloney Search Campus, says she particularly likes having her BlackBerry on holiday. ‘I run my own business so I can check it once in the evening,’ she says.
‘That’s great as it means I don’t have to ring into the office. But my team don’t take their PDAs with them and I support that.’
Company culture is key. If the culture in the office is not to take lunch breaks and being frowned upon for leaving the office before 7.30pm, then the pressures will be the same in a devolved office.
The key to stopping people working all hours is for senior managers to set up a culture where that is not acceptable. In its internal magazine, AA chief executive Tim Parker explicitly told workers not to call into the office when they are on holiday.
‘It is often a question of senior managers setting an example to the business,’ says Martin Sawkins, HR director at the AA.
Alan Harrison, managing director of Yorkshire Water agrees. ‘You have to be very clear about the culture of your organisation,’ he says. ‘It is far too easy to drift into a bullying mentality. At Yorkshire Water we would not expect people to reply to an email at 11pm. But I wouldn’t stop people sending one if that’s what they wanted.’
But if that is not the culture and people do have a ‘CrackBerry’ addiction, then it is up to their line managers and colleagues to tackle it. There may be a perfectly good reason for them answering emails at 11pm, but it needs to be openly discussed.
As Philip Everson, partner in consulting at Deloitte says: ‘The work-life balance is blurring and some companies or individuals can’t cope with ambiguity.’
Tinline agrees that the work-life balance is problematic, but that is partly because of how it has been portrayed. ‘The view is that there is big bad work on one side and a nice life on the other, and you have to keep them apart,’ he says. ‘But for a lot of people it is about integration. The phrase may be a bit of a problem, but there’s definitely a blurring and unless you put new boundaries in place this can cause problems.’
He also believes that the phrase work-life balance has been tainted by the idea that it is all about the family and working mums. But it is far more than that. A better phrase is work-life integration and how you manage work within your life, says Tinline.
The irony about having technology to make home and flexible working so easy, is that talking to people, either face to face or on the phone, is more important than ever.
‘We’ve found over time that there is much more talking and less emailing,’ says Dave Dunbar, head of work styles at BT, a firm that has wholeheartedly adopted flexible working – see box. This extra talking is important, because it helps make up for the loss of the 60 per cent of communication that is non-verbal. We need to compensate for the lack of facial expressions and for the ambiguity of some emails.
‘We’ve all had experience of email messages being misread or misinterpreted,’ says Hardakar-Jones.
‘When I’m coaching my team or interacting with clients my preference has always been to do so over the phone, so if something is misunderstood I can explain.’
When people cannot pick up on these signals you have to work much harder at communicating – which is true even when you are in the same office. ‘Because you become used to email and telephone it is important to maximise face-to-face contact. But people sitting 10 feet away from each other still use email to communicate,’ says Sawkins at the AA.
Fred Eulenkamp, managing director of Uniglobe Island Travel agrees. ‘Email has created instant communication, but I think things can get out of hand and you have to think how the other person will interpret this. You can’t see people’s expressions, which is why voice communication is so important,’ he says.
Uniglobe Island Travel is a travel firm based in three offices in Guernsey, Bristol and Oxford, which are run as one office by a manager in the Bristol office.
‘The challenge has been teaching people that although they cannot see colleagues, they can speak to them,’ says Eulenkamp. The company links its office’s through Mitel IP communications technology, which enables employees to see whether their colleagues are free.
Eulenkamp says it is also essential for the whole company to meet up two to three times a year, as well as individuals meeting on a more ad hoc basis.
The results of a survey released in September on the psychology of mobile working by Cisco points out that it takes a minimum of two weeks before relationships based on electronic communications become as socially grounded as face-to-face relationships. Multi-cultural teams can take 17 weeks to become fully effective, although they then start to outperform teams of the same culture.
Andy Bird, managing director of engineering consultancy Softronic Technology, found it difficult to work in a cross-cultural team. ‘The biggest problem I found was a lack of local management. You cannot be a line manager for a team across countries because there is simply not enough face-to-face interaction and it is often a culture that you do not understand,’ he says.
‘You can be a project manager, but it is difficult to be a line manager. I was a line manager for people in the UK, France and Germany, but because they had moved into my team, they no longer reported to their local manager. It worked well when people were natural contractors or consultants, and worked badly when people wanted to feel like part of team.’
The key to working in teams is that people need to trust each other and as a manager you do this by building your credibility. In an office environment, team working comes down to personality and whether you are well liked by your co-workers.
The decision-making process can also be far more problematical. There will always be people who dominate meetings, and they will transfer these con trolling techniques into the virtual world, where they are more difficult to manage. Ideally, teams need to meet face to face. Eulenkamp says that he tries to get his whole company to meet two to three times a year.
Apart from that, he actively encourages water-cooler-style conversations, which are not directly about the business. ‘Lots of employers dislike idle chit-chat, but you have to encourage it,’ he says.
It is vital to encourage these non-formal-style communications, says Dr Jo-Anne Carlyle, clinical psychologist and organisational consultant at Group Analytic Practice. ‘Those water-cooler moments are important not just for knowing who’s who, but because of the information they give, which can be seen as gossip,’ she says.
‘These exchanges are often about relationships and it can help reveal where the communication blockages in the company are. If you lose those opportunities you need to find them in some other way.’
Carlyle says social chit-chat also needs to be built into more formal work meetings. ‘If you institute a team meeting once a month, it can become intense if everything has to be packed into it. So you must also build in scope for informal contact,’ she says. ‘You need to encourage people to make calls that may not be about imparting information. For people who do not like telephones, this can be difficult.’
In most firms, mobile working happens on an ad hoc basis. Although Yorkshire Water has 600 mobile van workers, who have always been managed remotely, it is a different story for office workers. ‘We do not have home working as a formal option, but people do work from home occasionally,’ says managing director Alan Harrison.
But there will come a time, when the sheer volume of flexible workers means they will have to lay down some formal guidelines, as BT has done.
‘In a lot of organisations it happens in an ad hoc way. There’re some very large organisations out there that are pretending it is not happening,’ says Dunbar.
Research from Mitel earlier this year suggested that 42 per cent of managers will not implement teleworking as they would not be able to see what their staff were doing, and 30 per cent of managers would be less inclined to promote a teleworker quicker than an office-based worker. For flexible working to succeed on a large scale, companies need to make major changes in the way they are organised and the values of their people.
‘Lots of companies implement technology such as BlackBerrys, but do not make the necessary investment in how to change business process or how to enable teams to work remotely,’ says Kiran Chitta, senior manager in consulting at Deloitte.
Ultimately, companies are being forced to consider mobile working. Regardless of the legal pressure, companies can see how successful it has been at other organisations. Retaining top people and recruiting the best graduates is going to become even more important, and flexible working is one easy way to retain their loyalty.
‘I suspect that what we call mobile working is actually part of a broader cultural change in organisations,’ says Chitta. ‘The question is what is that cultural change and why is that important to the customer and the business?’
Cultural change takes decades. The technology may be changing fast, but our attitudes are way behind. And who knows where that will lead. Taking an extreme view, managing director of engineering consultancy Bird says we could be entering a working age where outsourcing is writ large.
‘An individual looks for flexibility and to manage their own time, but the organisation needs to ensure it is achieving value for money. This new idea of management by results is fine, but salaries reward hours worked, not output produced,’ says Bird.
‘If you consider that in the extreme, that’s what consultants and freelancers do. Perhaps there is a point where firms will say, why not outsource the whole workforce and manage everyone on a contract basis? The downside for the individual is they would lose employment security.’
And what about personal lives? Do we really know how this will affect us? many people meet their partners through work. ‘It’s quite a concern that single people are struggling for opportunities to meet people and start relationships,’ says Carlyle.
And if someone is shy and takes time to get to know people, then it could leave them feeling even more isolated without the possibility of meeting people in the pub after work or at the water cooler.
We monkeys are highly adaptable and will use any way we can to communicate. Opening up more channels of communication through technology is a good thing, but it also opens up more ways for us to misunderstand each other. Talking may be cheap, but it does work.
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