Ping Pong and Beanbags:
Why presenting the workplace as fun and engaging can end up being inauthentic Over the past several years, companies have rushed to copy design concepts championed by WeWork and Palantir. Budgets were secured to ‘transform’ offices into more social places, with serendipitous collaboration hubs, and relaxation pods. While the pandemic may have slowed some of this, there remains a belief that ‘cool’ office space may be the key to attract great talent.
Causation versus correlation There is a danger of this becoming another fad. This isn’t an unusual thing. Over the past 50 years, organisations have fallen in and out of love with different things, like how we dress, measuring the time it takes to do things, and publishing mission and values statements. It’s tempting in a busy world to look for hacks and shortcuts that can help us simplify complex challenges. The problem becomes when we confuse their convenience for something more meaningful.
challenge this, we are often confronted with justifications along the Bandwagon Fallacy spectrum.
The authenticity pyramid: a visualisation
1. The basics: pay, security, basic respectability. 2. The conditions: the office, the benefits. 3. The unwritten rules: degrees of freedom, self-expression, what is acceptable behaviour. 4. The work itself: is it engaging, challenging, am I encouraged, nurtured? 5. Co-workers: are they cool or jerks?
7. The leadership: do they walk the talk, do I trust them, do I respect them? 8. A higher purpose: do I feel good about what we do, is it something I’m proud of?
So, at what point does striving to create a practical but appealing work environment run the risk of inauthenticity? Quite simply when it is used to compensate for a lack of genuine substance. What surprises us about some justifications for ping pong tables and beanbags, is the suggestion that they will help organisations attract millennial and GenZ talent. When we
Smart talent can smell inauthenticity and see it as attempted deception.
A much more effective way to appraise investments in a companies’ employment proposition, is to remember there is a clear hierarchy in what matters. Think of this like a pyramid of glasses stacked, sequentially, on top of one another – overfilling one cup doesn’t help you with the others:
6. The future: can I go further, what is the ceiling?
Focusing on substance over form
Image by Aleksandrs Karevs - unsplash
Skills
In our experience, companies who overemphasise one of these at the expense of the others tend to get counterproductive outcomes. Smart talent can smell inauthenticity and see it as attempted deception. This was very apparent in research for our book, the belief that companies were being disingenuous and manipulative was one of the major drivers for Millennial and GenZ talent to make a change. Their number one concern was to find a job that gave them the best possible opportunity to experience the higher levels of fulfillment available in those organisations with authentic substance…. even if it meant their table tennis games suffered.
Dr Helmut Schuster and Dr David Oxley
Drs Schuster & Oxley, longtime friends and work colleagues launched the first book in the Shey Sinope saga on October 13th. They bring their considerable experience as energy executives, HR leaders, and social scientists to successfully navigating the four big existential crisis we are all likely to face across a 40-year working lifetime.
A Career Carol: A Tale of Professional Nightmares and How to Navigate Them by Dr Helmut Schuster and Dr David Oxley is out now, published by Austin Macauley Publishers and available on Amazon.
Southwark BUSINESS TODAY 23
