A subversive sixty minutes

A few years ago I had a fascinating conversation with a journalist about a particular aspect of the psychology of working in an office. He told me that when he needed to read a book as part of his work, in the office he found it impossible because of an overbearing feeling that reading a book wasn’t “work”. He had to go home to be able to do it.

The irony? Part of his job at the time was to review books.

The sociology and psychology of work are complex. Concepts like the Protestant Work Ethic run deep. What we personally perceive as being worklike or not worklike shapes our working behaviour. We are constrained by traditions that stem back centuries.

This is more important to understand today than ever before, because as we try to find new ways to fill the gaps that have emerged over the past few decades (and have been accelerated more recently) with the arrival of hybrid work, many of the things we might now need to do might not be regarded as work like.

Take coffee, for example. Or in my case 95 coffees (and counting). One of the things that I am learning through the #100Coffees experiment is just how subversive an act it has become for many people to take 60 minutes to have a conversation with someone without agenda or defined outcomes.

The UK has a massive productivity problem. And so we double-down on trying to make everything productive. Which, I think, is counter-productive.

Productivity doesn’t happen if you remove all fat from a system. Think of the fat as grease in a machine as opposed to blubber on a corporate body. And as we’ve accelerated the move from in-office to hybrid working the social grease that used to surround activities in person (the walk to the meeting room, the chat at the tea bar), the liminal stuff that we learned through osmosis, has been stripped away.

To replace it we need to be intentional in creating unintentional consequences. And that will require us to consciously commit to doing things that don’t feel work-like. That many of us, indeed, will feel guilt in doing.

And if a book-reviewing journalist feels guilty reading books, just imagine how hard this might be.

If we are going to successfully create new models for the successful lubrication of business in a hybrid world, we need to start by acknowledging some of these psychological factors, and then leaders need to act to give permission for people to start to push some boundaries.