Chairman's blog: Reflections - You know now the limits and the consequences of getting it wrong - By David Lennan, Chairman, Work Wise UK

“You know now the limits and the consequences of getting it wrong” that’s how I finished off a previous Blog and leads me to reflect on the issues but more importantly the opportunities that the last year has provided.

How many times during our working lives have we had the opportunity to push the pause and reset buttons and have another go. Despite all the tragedies of the last year, businesses and individuals have been able to take the opportunity of a long hard look at how they operate and what really works for them in practice. 

Phil Flaxton and I have been running Work Wise UK for two decades and for at least the last 15 years have been bashing on about how organisations could work smarter and more efficiently. We have run events, courses, projects, and full change programs across the Private, Public and Not for Profit sectors helping organisations and people change the way they work and become more efficient and productive.

I have to say overall progress towards a smarter working Britain has been painfully slow. Why? Because leadership has been sorely missing and attitudes towards change have been very disappointing especially the wonderful cohort of middle management who rarely look for change. In many cases especially in the Public and Not for Profit sectors they are often hostile to it. They make the right noises when someone is watching, but as soon as the cats away they resort to their old ways of doing things. I can well understand why Dominic Cummings wanted a clear out of the old guard and attempted to modernise the thinking and change the way people work. But look what happened to him! Change Managers don’t always last the course.

It’s an appalling thought that it taken a pandemic to actually shift the paradigm and shameful to read articles in the press about major companies moving senior executives to open plan working, they should have done so 30 years ago!!  Work Wise UK introduced the concepts of sharing skills and experience when we set up Skill Exchange UK and Staff Share in 2015 and the only Government Dept to show any interest in trialing leading edge thinking was in Northern Ireland.  NI lead from the front through forward thinking MP’s, Government Ministers and advanced thinking Company Executives who sponsored the schemes. These trialed well, but 7 years ago were maybe a little ahead of their time and the learning failed to cross the Irish Sea, now where have we heard that recently?

We at Work Wise Uk have long believed and written much about how low productivity is a symptom of poor workplace management, which comes down to poor leadership and poor communication. Leadership and Management practices are the real game changers in delivering success. Bad to the core Organisations don’t survive, they die from within from sloppiness and apathy. Leadership and clear communication in transformation is absolutely crucial. Clarity of message is essential if you are to take people with you on the journey of change and development, the same is true in every Organisation small and large; people need to understand and be connected with the direction of travel.

Good leadership is really about doing the right things, not just being followers of laws. To be honest where would we have been if our Government hadn’t intervened during the pandemic and tried to create the environment where we would all be safe and for most people also have their incomes supported. I doubt whether the collective voices of all our Representative Organisations could have created such a secure environment for us, or provided industry leaders with the remote controls not only to pause, but reset their business models. Many businesses have done so, others have winged and the representative organisations have been uncharacteristically quite, probably enjoying their  enforced vacations and sadly missing the constant rounds of meetings and conferences. 

During the last year we have seen the high street decimated across the country, commercial property owners running for cover, businesses allowing their staff to work from home, whilst sectors such as the health and care, essential retail, delivery services, security services were all working to extremes to keep the country and our population fed, watered and safe.

The shift to online and virtual services has been amazing and our habits and norms as a Nation have been transformed. Everything associated our workforce has changed. Commuting has all but stopped and all the retail and service companies that ran alongside who provided us with our daily needs from morning coffees, papers, lunches, dry cleaning, clothes, food for home, DIY and also ferried us around in taxis and fleets of company cars, all gone or changed. Will it ever be the same again? unlikely.

The changes however have not been driven by far sighted leaders and managers from companies seeking improvements, but in the main the changes have been forced upon them. This has provided very fortuitous opportunities to close shops, restaurants, bank branches and change some working practices in the public and not for profit sectors that were often badly run on old business models, not really fit for the modern world and heading down hill. The pandemic has shaken out and exposed many businesses already on life support using old legacy systems with too many hangers on and some have paid a high price.

New businesses and new ways of operating have emerged and for once technology is being embraced as part of the change rather than being used to prop up failing processes, structures and organisations. Supply chains are under pressure and in the spotlight and are not well understood within many organisations. The pinch points, constraints and limitations need to be analysed and scrutinised regularly to ensure continuity of the chain. Component or resource shortages can have a massive impact on business continuity and the Suez crisis is yet another very timely pause and reset moment.

Work Wise Week provides a real opportunity to think about how your Organisation tackles the thorny questions surrounding efficiency and productivity. What do your staff really think of the Management and the Board? How effective are they? How are you viewed by your customers and stakeholders?  What do they really think of you?  How do you measure your impact on society? What does all this mean to your future prosperity?  We really can’t afford to be on the perimeter of the important issues that affect us all, we can’t simply remain as bystanders and expect everything to turn out well, or Government handouts to last forever.

We never know when the next disaster may occur or what events outside our control might strike, but we do know what’s right, what’s wrong and what the limits and consequences of our actions or more importantly our inactions are.

We are often good at managing the financial issues and tangible assets within business, but we are certainly not good at managing the less visible intangible assets in our businesses especially our working practices business processes, supply chain management, all of which are vital to business success and how reputations are won or lost.

Companies through hierarchal structures or ownership are very good at covering up or ignoring wrongdoing or errors of judgment, but they are finding to their cost that they are judged very quickly in all forms of media and this can have devastating impact on reputation, which in turn affects many thousands of employees and their families deep into supply chains. Why Boards allow such incidents to impact on hard won trust and reputation is a mystery to me, very often it comes down to Board ineffectiveness and concentrating on the wrong issues at the wrong time.

By creating a culture of openness and transparency and clearly communicating to all parts of the Organisation and most importantly throughout the supply chain, all parties can start to understand the real trading risks and the consequences of getting it wrong. When things go wrong which they probably will again at some point, careful and compassionate communication is key.

It is no longer acceptable or indeed possible for CEOs, Executives and Boards to hide behind issues and hope all will go away. It doesn’t just go away and people’s lives are affected by crisis, the costs of which can be very high indeed and even lead to going out of business. The mantra should be, manage risk, reputation and create value.

Work Wise Week is a great time to think about the issues from operations to reputation and how these impact on you and your Organisation and taking time to discuss them openly and find ways to raise them for action.

The Pandemic has reminded us all how fragile we and our working infrastructures really are and how change can happen so fast and from some very surprising directions. The alarm bells should be ringing very loud in everyone’s mind. This should be a period of reflection for us all, while we still have the time.