Let's make our work more “broad”

Hello and welcome to working on it.

I took time off last week, in order to get through a large backlog of tasks related to home and family management and maintenance. I now understand why new retirees, or those taking a break from their daily work, often say, “I don't know how I found the time to go to work.” There's always more on the to-do list. My colleague Emma Jacobs wrote a great article a while ago about experimenting with a virtual PA, testing claims that it can jump-start our careers by reducing the administrative burden. I'm so in love.

Back at the office, the city is booming. Here are the always beautifully planted Festival Gardens, across from the FT HQ – that's us behind the statue.

Read on to learn the importance of making time to “spacious” at work (and I'm not just talking about well-ventilated offices). In office therapy, we counsel a person who finds himself “extremely shy” in front of his colleagues.

Do you want some extra “space” to think, talk and listen? 🤔

I've been thinking—and talking—a lot lately about the importance of listening at work. Good listening allows managers and leaders to stay connected with their teams. It also creates the opportunity to talk about bad colleagues or processes that could be better. In “do-or-die” workplaces—think recent events at aircraft maker Boeing—safety issues may be suppressed when employees don't feel able to work. (For more on that, listen to last week's Working It podcast.)

The problem, as I see it, is that we all have incredibly busy diaries and too little time to spend listening to employee whispers. (Or, as I mentioned in an article earlier this week, everyone wants to be heard but no one wants to listen.) Where do we find time? Do we need a major rethink of where managers and leaders direct their energy during the work week?

Serendipitously, Megan Ritz, a professor of leadership and dialogue (love that title!) at the Hult School of International Business, reached out and offered a possible solution. She and her colleagues are running a major research project on “space” at work, she said.

Megan believes that “spaciousness” can bring all kinds of positives, including more creativity, productivity, and fulfillment😌. Obviously I called her right away. What are you planning on? It turns out she doesn't tell people what she thinks spaciousness means. Megan wants to hear what the word conjures up in her research participants, who come from many sectors. Many of us seem to view it as a sense of expansion of time, space, or internal space. It always requires slowing down a little, speaking and thinking more.

One of the big problems in workplaces isn't just that we're busy, Megan said. We are, as she puts it, “pathologically busy”: “One thing that is out of balance, not just in the workplace but also in education systems and political and economic systems, is the obsession with concrete, short-term goals. This is an absolute obsession with “I need to do it”. [stuff] And I need to put a mark “- this is the mark of what is worthwhile.”

Such is the pace and transactional nature of working life (Meghan calls it the “utilitarian outlook”) that simply taking time out of meeting, as she puts it, to “think and relate” to anything has become as unusual as practicing management. “It can be uncomfortable to ask teams to pause.”

This is the first time Meghan has spoken publicly about spaciousness – I will be following her research with interest – but I wanted to know what change we might make to think more about where we can create space in our work lives, and thus allow more space in our work lives. Conversations – and listen better.

“Although a lot of people associate spaciousness with time, it’s more about what you pay attention to and how you pay attention to it,” she said. We've gone beyond looking at it in terms of time management.

I'm now obsessed with spaciousness. How do you find time to listen/think/do nothing in particular in a very busy workday? All ideas welcome: isabel.berwick@ft.com. You can be anonymous if it is subversive!

This week on the Work It Podcast

Commuting is back – but how has it changed since we all went home in 2020? One new trend is the rise in “super commuters” – people who moved during the pandemic in search of a better lifestyle, and now live several hours from their desk🚙.

In this week's episode of Working It, I host a roundtable discussion on mobility with FT colleagues Andrew Hill and Emma Jacobs, who have done a significant amount of work on mobility trends around the world, and we hear from super-commuters Mo Marikar and Max Dawes.

Office therapy

The problem: The latest “innovation” at my workplace is a team visual spreadsheet that shows how much each of us is worth to the company – the business value we bring. And also the “downside” metrics: the number of sick days we took off last year. I have taken a lot of time off for health reasons. Is this public defamation actually legal? There is no HR department so there is no one to ask.

Isabelle's tip: No HR department? This is a huge red flag🚩. Run away as quickly as you can from any company that has someone “working” as an HR manager in addition to their regular job, or that doesn't have anyone doing HR at all.

On the issue of declaring sick days in this manner, I asked an attorney for guidance. “Sharing individual health information with other employees, especially in a way that could be considered ‘naming and shaming,’ can be problematic from a legal perspective, and may also be harmful to the workplace culture,” says Sinead Casey, partner at Linklaters.

It continues: “Health information, including sickness absence levels, is ‘special category personal data’ under data protection laws, and sharing illness records publicly without the individual’s consent and without a good reason for doing so may breach these laws. The individual may consider that Publishing such information in this way is a violation of his or her right to privacy and dignity, particularly when the context is one that calculates the individual's “value” to the employer.

Finally, this may be important in your case: “Some, but not all, illnesses may rise to the level of a disability protected by law. Disseminating information could constitute an act of harassment if an employee, whose health condition meets the definition of disability, can prove that Doing so violates his dignity or creates a humiliating or humiliating environment.

In short: 😱. Get some legal advice.

Do you have a question, problem or dilemma about office therapy? Do you think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: isabel.berwick@ft.com. We are all anonymous. Your boss, colleagues or subordinates will never know.

Five stories from the world of work

It doesn't pay to be a working-class professional: Belita Clark addresses the issue of class in her column, suggesting that coming from a lower socio-economic background is the factor most likely to hold people back in their careers. Lots of interesting reader comments too.

Does diversity really lead to better results? Consider football. A well-researched and nuanced column from Stephen Bush, delving into the arguments for and against managed programs to increase the numbers of people on teams (including sports teams) from different backgrounds.

Ending low wages: How the UK responded to the demand for higher wages. Delphine Strauss always writes excellent, in-depth articles about employment—in this case an analysis of the success of the minimum wage—and what comes next.

AI keeps making mistakes. What if it can't be fixed? The AI ​​hype machine has been going into overdrive in recent months, but in this sobering article, writer Henry Mance suggests we may be at peak AI – and identifies some of the issues facing large language models (like ChatGPT).

Lunch break: Midday sound baths in London: I'm a big fan of sound baths, which just require you to lie back and listen to the soothing sounds of gongs and crystal bowls. It's so relaxing (and maybe therapeutic 🤷‍♀️.) This is a great collection of the best brunch sessions in London to de-stress.

another thing . . .

In a chilling essay, “The Therapist Who Hated Me” (Ion Magazine), Michael Bacon recounts the experience of discovering himself portrayed as a negative case study, 11-year-old “Leon,” in the published work of Edna O’Shaughnessy, the famous child psychoanalyst.

Michael's therapy-loving parents had him attend sessions several times a week with O'Shaughnessy, even though he was not depressed or disturbed. He recounts how she distorted his completely normal reactions to being forced to spend time with her—he made it clear that he would rather play with friends or even do his homework—to suit her psychoanalytic belief system.

A word from the business community

Last week's newsletter written by my colleague Bethan Staton asked readers for tips on managing unmanageable inboxes, especially after returning to work after a long break. Bethan returned from a long trip to find 3,000 new emails in her FT inbox.

I loved this idea from Claudio Calcagno:

I've almost always managed to keep my inbox pretty tight, but one effective way to manage large amounts of unread emails in my mind is to sort them by sender. You can usually delete very large amounts of emails very quickly this way, and once your inbox becomes more manageable, it becomes easier to focus on the groups of emails that require more attention.

I wish I had gotten this advice years ago🤦🏼‍♀️. (Current inbox status: 363000.)

Finally. . .

I'd love to see Working It readers and listeners at the London School of Economics on the evening of 23 April for a 📣free📣 event to launch my book, The Future-Proof Career. It's an informal 'conversation' format with one of my favorite workplace experts, Grace Lordan, founder of the Inclusion Initiative (read her FT articles here), whose chair is Professor Conson Locke.

You can join IRL or online — just sign up here — and say hello 👋!