I recently chaired a forum for business owners to gather feedback and share an appraisal of a freshly published government code of practice on legislation enshrining workers’ rights to request remote working.
I am Chair of the Labour Task Force for the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, a role that affords me access to a diverse group of business owners and leaders and a deeper understanding of Government policy, in order to respond by representing the business community.
Some business leaders were evangelical about the transformational power of remote working, which freed their businesses to thrive and deepened an organisational culture of trust. Some business leaders were screaming, ‘Get them back in the office!’. Some of these diverse responses were from people working within the same sector. So, what are the variables that make new ways of working either magnetic or repulsive?
At an organisational level, sector, scale, model and culture are all contributory factors. But to get the full picture, you can’t just scan the dance floor; you must look from the balcony. A 2022 report published in the US National Library of Medicine outlines key macro factors that must be considered. The authors use the ‘technological-organisational-environmental’ framework alongside the ‘Theory of Planned Behaviour’ to assess how effectively remote work can be performed. In other words, on top of your own organisational ‘stuff’, what’s happening outside your organisation to make this work and how will your your humans react?
Organisations tend to focus on the factors they can control for obvious reasons. Still, government structure and policies and the irrationality of human behaviour can create uncontrollable, if not unmanageable, effects and challenges.
The authors’ frameworks ‘identify factors, including government support, organisational support and technological competence, that enhance employees’ attitudes towards and ability to perform remote work’. The realities of cost, government support, cybersecurity, tax jurisdictions, health and safety marry with attitudinal and cultural perceptions and expectations to create a gnarly problem of our time.
But if we do this right , the authors find a positive relation to remote performance and emotional wellness.
Many jurisdictions are updating government policies to create a fairer more appropriate framework for socio-ecumenic engagement with a particular focus on working conditions and sustainable employment from the employees’ point of view. The policies include the implementation of, as mentioned above, the right to request remote working, the gradual implementation of a national living wage, auto-enrolment for pensions for a defined segment of the working population, increased statutory sick pay and increased parental leave and benefits. All of these policies make good sense for society, they go some way to even out the increasing issue of social inequity.
And society’s benefit must be in our mind when we are designing our company policies. Remote working has unforeseen impacts on our visibility at work, and our engagement in unpaid duties and may well exacerbate the impact of technological unemployment, or displacement of the workforce by AI.
Our world has become less equal. The rich are richer, the poor are poorer and the middle aren’t doing so well.
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, written by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson was published in 2009. In this meta-analysis of global inequality, the authors outlay the “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption”. All our modern ills, and all of our head-scratching concerns are shown to be linked with inequality societies. That’s all the big ones including mental health, obesity, social mobility, trust and child well-being. The indicators of these fundamental tenets of a fair and functioning society are considerably worse in unequal, rich countries. That would be us, then.
Today we must overlay all of these factors in the development of our company policies and be mindful of our role in social equity. As technology displaces and replaces the value of human capital, the vista of our inequities is set to widen even further. The best-selling academic author Daniel Susskind, pulls no punches in his recent book A World Without Work. He clarifies that “the income from traditional capital is more unevenly shared out than the income from salaries and wages. This fact is ‘true without exception’, he references Thomas Pickett, in all countries and at all times for which data is available.” This isn’t therefore about the gap in salaries but the chasm in wealth.That means, dear friend, based on Pickett and Wilkinsons calculations that our current social ills will continue to correspondingly intensify.
We face the reality more starkly than ever that the decisions we make within the physical and virtual walls of our businesses create a tidal wave of impact in streets, our towns, our cities and our country.
The mechanic of Western response to any issue is invariably based on treating symptoms. Perhaps it’s time to start looking further upstream and tackle the root causes.
We are the leaders, let’s lead.
