Life’s Biggest Regret, The Results From Mandated Return To The Office & WFH Reduces Financial Misconduct

6 August 2023 Newsletter

“But what I’ve seen to set apart great teams from good is a brutal focus on prioritization. This means generating an absurd amount of ideas and throwing 99% of them out of the window, to focus on the 1% that have the highest impact.” — Erik Bernhardsson

Hope you’re Thriving!

It’s been a fantastic week with a lot of meetings and a 2-day strategic planning workshop in Adelaide. It’s funny how sometimes themes emerge through a week’s work. This week two topics kept popping up – building an effective mid-management team that adds value and making weekly team meetings more effective.

Note: Last week, there was a broken link to the Uber Future Forecasting story. Rather than email you again, here’s the link.

Avoiding Life’s Biggest Regret

This week I came across an article that I thought you might enjoy.

The article, by the world-renowned leadership expert Marshall Goldsmith and author of What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There, explains how he had a near-death experience that led to the realisation of his greatest regret.

From the article:

“I wished that I had done a better job of recognising and thanking all of the people who had been so nice to me. As it turns out, this is a fairly common regret. For example, the most common regret children have when their parents die is, “Why didn’t I thank them more for all of the nice things they did for me?”

In thousands of 360° feedback reports on leaders, the item “effectively provides positive recognition” is often listed as an area for improvement. It is often closer to the bottom in terms of direct report satisfaction than the top. One of our clients managed to leap from being in the bottom six percentile of the company to the top 6 percentile in his direct report feedback on “effectively provides positive recognition.”

When asked how he did it, he gave us a simple roadmap that we have never seen fail:

• List the names of the key groups of people that impact your life—both at work and at home (customers, co-workers, friends, family members, etc.).
• Write down the names of the people in each group.
• Post your list in a place you can’t miss seeing regularly.
• Twice a week—once on Wednesday, once on Friday—review the list and ask yourself, “Did anyone on this list do something that I should recognise?”
• If someone did, stop by to say thank you, make a quick phone call, leave a voicemail, send an email or jot down a note.
• Don’t do anything that takes up too much of your time. As a business leader, this process needs to be time efficient or you won’t stick with it.
• If no one on the list did anything that you believe should be recognised, don’t say anything. You don’t want to be a hypocrite or a phony. No recognition is better than recognition that you don’t really mean.”
• Stick with the process. You won’t see much impact in a week—but you will see a huge difference in a year

Read the article here: Marshall & Kelly Goldsmith: Avoiding Life’s Biggest Regret

 

The Results From Mandated Return To The Office

I was with an executive this week, and he was perplexed about why an employee might have resigned because they asked employees to be in the office five days per week. It’s not an uncommon conversation, and people tend to fall into three camps.

Either they are adamant about offering WFH as a perk, they aren’t too fussed but will provide flexibility to employees who ask, or they are adamantly against it, citing cultural or productivity reasons.

None of these are wrong; however, there can be consequences.

This week, I came across an interesting article that outlines some of the results of mandated return to the office.
Some of the interesting results were:

• Almost half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated.
• Almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment.
• 76% of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules.
• The displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one to that of experiencing a 2 to 3% pay cut.
• 42% of candidates would outright reject roles that lack flexibility.
• 28% of employees would leave a job for better flexible work policies.

Read the article here: We’re Now Finding Out The Damaging Results of The Mandated Return to Office

Less Likelihood of Financial Misconduct When Working From Home

In another interesting twist, a study released this week found that employees working from home are much less likely to perform financial misconduct.

Imagine a trader, comfortably ensconced in a cozy home office, engaging in remarkably fewer instances of financial misconduct than their counterparts in the tumultuous trading floor. It’s a plot twist that could give a Hollywood scriptwriter a run for their money.

This dramatic revelation was born from the meticulous analysis of data from one of the top five U.K. banks. During the year-long period of lockdown, researchers scrutinised misconduct reports relating to 162 traders.

The resulting data unveiled a startling truth: traders working from home had a modest 7.3% chance of sparking a misconduct alert, while their office-going brethren had a spine-chilling 37.6% probability.

In other words, the hallowed office often hailed as a paragon of professionalism and integrity, was home to over five times more instances of misconduct than the remote workplace.

Both the previous article and this one talk about the impact of cognitive biases and how they could have second-order consequences such as attrition.

Read the article here: New research suggests bankers are 5 times less likely to engage in financial misconduct when working from home

LSD or Workflow Management Software

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Keep Thriving!

Brad Giles