Are you just paying lip service to a people-first agenda?

Simon Caulkin

In the COVID-induced move to working from home, one business is booming: developing and selling surveillance software to monitor remote employees’ behaviour via their computers and phones. Some companies are quietly installing similar programmes in their offices, too.

People detest and resist this kind of tracking. It is self-defeating, damaging business performance by sabotaging trust on both sides.

“High trust is a dividend, low trust is a tax”, one author reminds us. Mental and physical health are also casualties. People at companies where electronic monitoring is the rule are more stressed and unhappy, less energetic and burn out more than those who work in a trusting environment. Bottom line: surveillance is bad for the bottom line.

All this has been known for years and is backed by reams of research. So why on earth does it get signed off? Unfortunately, you can ask the same question of many other management and motivation practices.

Take pay. Almost all companies use incentives and pay-for-performance programmes of one kind or another. Again, the evidence suggests that most fail to achieve their objectives and simply cause employee dissatisfaction. What’s more, whether it’s carried out in companies, university faculties or baseball teams, the research is unanimous: the wider the pay inequalities, the worse the performance. If pay is the most direct measure of an employee’s value to an organisation, how do you think they feel about one that pays them the minimum wage while the CEO receives millions?

More than 80% of Americans believe they work for a company that doesn’t care about them, and 75% are disengaged from their work

Or consider employment security, a well-acknowledged component of a healthy, high-performing workplace. According to Gallup, what most people want more than anything is a steady job with a decent pay packet. At the launch of a recent Carnegie Trust report entitled Can good work solve the productivity puzzle?, representatives from the Bank of England, the TUC, McKinsey and the Royal Society of Arts all agreed: broadly, yes, it can. There are simply no downsides.

Yet in today’s weightless economy, the reality is that companies create “good work” only when forced to. Instead, they rely on contingent workers who can be turned on and off and are increasingly managed by algorithm. The reciprocity of the employment relationship of 50 years ago has disappeared. Meet the new work,same as the (very) old work, where all the risk and responsibility is borne by the individual, not the organisation.

The more you look at it, the harder it is to avoid the conclusion that while almost everyone pays lip service to a people-centric agenda, what companies do behind closed doors often tells a different story: they put shareholders first and people last.

At the end of the day, employees aren’t stupid. More than 80 per cent of Americans believe they work for a company that doesn’t care about them, and 75 per cent are disengaged from their work.

Across the board, we need to question our obsession with the performance of individuals and pay attention instead to the system that governs work. Managers need to start trusting and stop demotivating, remove the rules that prevent people from doing good work, cease measuring activity rather than the achievement of realpurpose and above all do away with incentives that distort priorities and divert ingenuity into gaming the system.

Goodbye surveillance, inspections, performance-monitoring, culture and engagement surveys, appraisals, and courses on coping with change and other fake subjects that add no value. Welcome to the organisation that really puts people first.

How would you go about putting people first? Tweet Simon @nikluac