Shownotes

Reams have been written in the recent past about the future of work. But, long before COVID upended beliefs on WFH and remote working, Hoxby founded in 2015 had a vision to create a world of work without bias; without the barriers to inclusivity created by the 9-5, one size fits all system. Today, this hugely successful social experiment has a workforce of over 1000 people spread across 30 countries and works with some of the world's biggest businesses including Unilever, Merck, Amazon Webservices, AIA, Warner Media etc. 

Full disclosure I have been stalking Hoxby for years and last year when I launched The Purpose Room it was hugely inspired by what it's founders were trying to do. 

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to have a wide ranging conversation with Ben Foulkes MD Hoxby Futureproofing. Listen to him speak about on the future of work; hierarchies; relevancy of HR; on what makes organisational culture; fostering creativity & innovation in a dispersed workforce etc👇🏾

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Memorable passages from the episode: 

👉🏾 So Hoxby's purpose is to create a happier and more fulfilled society through a world of work without bias. And that really manifests itself with a, a principle, if you like, that everyone should be able to choose when and where they work. So for those, that don't know Hoxby it's a little bit of a social experiment. It's not your typical organisation. There are no employees for instance. Everyone within Hoxby is a freelancer. So we avoid the employee-employer, relationship and that dynamic. And we come together in teams to work on projects. And we do that with some of the biggest companies in the world, like Unilever and Merck and People like this, and smaller businesses as well. And we do it across a range of services from marketing comms and PR to strategic consulting. And I lead the future-proofing, which is the sort of strategic consulting arm of the business. 

👉🏾 Yeah, it's a good question. It's a word I've been hearing an awful lot more. Everyone's talking about future-proofing at the moment. Organisations face a whole bunch of different forces. And a lot of them have been accelerated by the pandemic over the last year. So we've seen technology has radically changed the way that we can and the way that we enable work. So everything from cloud computing through to the video conferencing software which we're using right now to AI and how it's fundamentally changing the way that jobs and tasks can be performed. You've also, on the other hand got the way that people work. So an awful lot of forces are changing the way our careers, and we're going to be potentially pandemics, permitting, living longer, working longer, having this one job for life notion is a little bit archaic and a little bit that's certainly going to change. So what we're seeing is workforce demands really shifting to wanting more flexible ways of working, to be more purpose-driven to use our time for a meaningful end. And then also to be able to pick and choose a bit more about, about when and where we work and, and to be more like that. So you've got these kinds of forces and the fact that we need to, we organisations need to be cognisant of that to, to adapt.

👉🏾 And what we're seeing is that actually, it's organisations that are more agile and more able to adapt are more likely to survive in the future. So in the past controlling natural resources, controlling factors of production and scale and economies of scale were really important. Today it's much more about agility, agility to respond to technology and agility to respond to the needs of the workforce. And so Hoxby future-proofing helps clients to understand these forces and to adapt to it. So it's sort of two things it's really, how do you both actually be truly agile and then how do you kind of create the right conditions to empower people? And we'll come on to that I'm sure in a moment, but we have to change, if you like, the way that organisations are structured to be more agile and then they also have to change the way that you empower people in order to enable collective intelligence.

👉🏾 Yes. Absolutely so we've been working with a client at the moment? A lot of the work that we've done at the moment has been obviously to do with remote working and the shift to that. And actually, one thing is really getting the leadership team to understand what are the forces at play and how can they respond to that. And how does that play out within their own organisation? So setting the direction, creating the vision for the future where the organisation needs to move. And then also acting upon it. So getting clear around the purpose of the organisation and how that is communicated throughout the organisation. Understanding the cultural impacts and looking at different cultural programs that need to be initiated to be effective in the future. And then thirdly, also looking at structure. So actually we're seeing a big shift. A lot of organisations have announced that the shifts to distributed working, remote working more permanently and actually really challenging themselves about what structure makes sense for their organisation in the future. 

👉🏾 It's a good question. About a hundred per cent I think it can be an inclusive because I totally take the point that there are certain jobs that you need to be in a certain place to do a hundred per cent. But I think what works though is the freedom to choose. But the freedom to choose as an adult it's not to just walk off base and go and hole up in Bali or something like this. It's actually, a mindset. And it's also a mindset shift from both the person the individual, but also the organisation. So instead of dictating to the workforce, you must be here between a certain time, et cetera. It's allowing people to recognise the needs of their job, their task, and then to make that adult decision. So even in industries where for instance that you clearly need to be there, like take a surgeon, absolutely you need to be in the operating theatre to be able to operate on that all day. With certain technologies that may or may not be the case for 20 years in the future. But today obviously you do, but actually, an organisation could look at this differently. If you had a pool of surgeons all potentially available, people can pick and choose when they were able to come in and operate. And actually you wouldn't necessarily need to have one person doing an awful lot of administration to work out and schedule all the rotas together. If you allow people to make those decisions, you can restructure organisations to enable this. 

👉🏾 Absolutely. I mean, it's a big question to sort of unpick, let me try and put two angles to it. So firstly absolutely. Some structural inequalities exist and we see this today. We've published recently a report through the Hoxby foundation that looks at a bunch of different groups from people, with disability, to people, with mental health problems, to chronic illness, to carers, et cetera, who we call the ..... work gap, which is the difference between the number of people who want to work and who actually can. And we've seen that actually, a lot of traditional office work practices, it's clearly creating some structural barriers to these people being unable to find work. So, it's something like 29% is the gap for disabled people so a significant nearly one in three people can't find work and that's partly sometimes because, you know, they can't get to the office or, or there are certain times that they can't be online for one reason or another. And if you break these notions of the nine to five and of work being done in a specific place, then that might actually be able to break it down. So definitely there's some cause for hope. 

👉🏾 I would also say that the inequality is a huge huge challenge and it's not one that we should lay at the feet of capitalism or modern structure it's embedded in human nature and we've been doing some, research as part of the book that we're writing at the moment on this. But very much embedded in human nature. Hunter-gatherer societies were quite egalitarian back in the day, but as soon as we started creating surpluses, we started giving perhaps our dark side the chance to start wanting more than the other person start creating hierarchies and pyramids and, and these sorts of things. So there is some inevitability of some sort of hierarchy and some sort of inequality there developing, the key thing you want to have though is a hierarchy that is based around competence. Not around dominance and not around age or gender or, or some other characteristic. And so you want to give everyone ideally equal opportunity and then allow the best people to rise to the top. 

👉🏾 So you take the surgeon example again, when you need a heart transplant, you want the best surgeon there to do that operation for you. You don't want that to be sort of arbitrarily chosen all because they are certain superficial characteristics, like age or gender or anything like this. It's really important we give equality of opportunity. And in order to do that, we also need to recognise, sort of the dominance dynamics that can play out in organisations. And we need to kind of really try and challenge those and question those. 

👉🏾 It's a very complex problem. I think how I see it or would like to see playing out in the future is that certain things, we talked a little bit about dominance dynamics and therefore you know, yes men and people like hiring people just like them. And then you get into problems where you don't get diverse leadership teams and you don't get the diversity of perspective and range of thought that enable organisations to solve big problems. And there's lots of research that shows diversity is really important. So we need to challenge that. We need to become aware of the biases. And the things that we have in organisations. And then we also need to do things, like we need to avoid where we can labelling and stereotyping and treating people as a group, rather than as an individual and based on sort of arbitrary characteristics which are not related to their ability to actually do the task. So I'd love to see a move much more towards treating people completely as individuals towards giving people a fair crack, or fair opportunities. And I see a lot of the structural ways and just beliefs that we hold about work, actually hold us back a little bit from doing so. And we talked already a little bit about some of those beliefs are - that we need to go to the office in order to be productive or certain timings. If you have caring obligations, then it's really hard to be online at certain times, if we're constantly structuring our day as a series of back to back meetings, there are certain people that that's really not going to suit, and that is detrimental, not just for the individuals and the people who kind of get left out of that system, but also for organisations themselves, because they don't get access to that talent. They're not employing the best people for the job. They don't have the diversity of perspectives, which enables them to solve more complex tasks. And there's some great research that Matthew Syed has been leading around this, the book Rebel Ideas that we draw a lot from. But with the types of challenges organisations are facing today, you do need that diversity of perspective. You can't just have everyone agreeing with what the leader says is the right thing to do. Or even just the leader, employing a bunch of people that he feels comfortable working with, or she feels comfortable working with because they're just like themselves and they have the same educational background, the same way that they look at certain problems. So I see it as a lot more as individual. And also hopefully a lot more as, as a competence hierarchy and allowing people to come to the top without having to formalise that what we do often is we give people roles and titles and then that's it, and we move up the ladder in a very linear sort of a way. But I might not be the best person for the next project that comes in for Hoxby. So I should work under or with someone who's got more experience in that industry. And we try and be a lot more flexible in that sort of way of working, which I think can help. 

👉🏾 It is a huge ask and maybe it's a bit idealistic. I don't know, but I think you do have to have a bit of a vision for, for how, things can be different. What is the future of work is obviously such a broad question? And there are so many predictions about this. I don't know if I almost should be making one, but most of them I think 

will be wrong. You know, people predict that technology will automate everything. People predict that they will create a bunch of new jobs. The truth is, no one really knows. But what is also true is that we shouldn't be and organisations are not bound by restrictions of the past so we can rewrite some of the rules and explore new ways of working that are better for society that are better for the environment. And for individuals that work in them. 

👉🏾 One of the big orthodoxies, the big beliefs that we've had that work gets done in an office has been very successfully challenged over the last year, right? A huge number of people who thought that they could only ever possibly work in office have been found that that was just a belief, it wasn't the fact. And those we can keep challenging. So I would say it's organisations that embrace that, and actually allow people to experiment. To push the boundaries and to challenge, that again, to succeed in the future. Because we're going to need to empower people to do that, to make these choices and discover these things for themselves.And that hopefully will lead to more people feeling a greater sense of autonomy, a greater sense of fulfilment from the work that they do. There’s David Graeber book about Bullshit Jobs apologies for the language, it's his title. But you know, a huge number of people feel very frustrated I think at work, at the moment they feel they're doing ultimately perhaps pointless tasks. And it's not that it's the wrong thing to do. They kind of have to do it because it provides a family, it's because there's obviously some demand for it but, it's not necessarily that meaningful. And I think we're definitely gonna see a shift towards people wanting to use their time for more meaningful pursuits. And we're also gonna see a shift of people wanting to have that flexibility and that autonomy to do it. And I think organisations that empower people to make that choice. Are ultimately going to succeed, because they will be the ones that talented folks are drawn to. They are organised in ways that take advantage of the new opportunities and things that come up. Whereas they think they can control everyone and that they're going to keep their structure and not challenge the way that they've always done stuff. They'll be left I think in the dust.  

👉🏾 It's a good question. I wouldn't want to sort of stereotype or label based on a generation necessarily, but certainly, I would say. It's really hard to see these beliefs if you grow up in a system of them, and with lots of people thinking the same way. So perhaps to that, we see that in this, in sort of different cultures, the way that different cultures think about a certain way that things have to be done. And until you actually travel or see some people doing things differently, you kind of don't see if you like the pot that you're in. And that's perhaps really important. So younger generations of people who are growing up completely digitally immersed if you like in, in their phones and screens in being connected to people in sharing everything that they do online. They're seeing a different way of working for sure. And they're probably showing other maybe older generations that there are different ways to work, to communicate, to collaborate, to spend our time ultimately, and, there's some people who will see that and think brilliant I will adapt to that and they will change their way of working. Others who will think actually the traditional way is not for me. And so they won't join those organisations and I think the organisations that don't adapt. Whether it's the younger generation, but it's really just the folks who are experimenting with new ways of doing things. If they don't adapt to that, then there isn't much of a future. And we see this, I think to call out one industry to call out the law industry. I really think that they're really struggling through the pandemic. I know a few friends, certainly in different firms. It's really shone a light on, on what was a very traditional style of management of knowing when people were there and how they're doing work, of whether the work that itself was so meaningful of the way that people were treated. I'm not saying all law firms, I'm sure there are some good ones out there, but it really is throwing up a big challenge and the number of people wanting to go into that environment. No one wants to sit on zoom for 15 hours a day And you see that compared to your other friends, people who are able to work where they choose and to collaborate in different ways and to work in different ways then I think the choice would be quite stark. 

👉🏾 Yeah, I'd almost broadenit out slightly as well. Like I agree with you I dislike the term HR and I also slightly dislike the way that if you like managing people or human capital and human resources is outsourced to a specialisation. I think I could also apply it with technology to sort of an IT department as well. So you could almost broaden out into sort of a range of what are called maybe back-office functions or something like this. And I think too much of this specialisation, too much siloing of these functions is a huge challenge. It's presenting a huge challenge to organisations to be agile enough to adapt to whether it's changing workforce needs, whether it's changing technology they struggle to do it. So I don't believe that an organisation should be responsible for just managing people you can look at a number of successful companies from even Semco in the 1990s in Brazil, which is actually a very mixed workforce blue collar, white collar. Octopus energy today, which is a bit more of a sort of a digital start up in the energy world. Which have dispensed with HR functions almost entirely I believe in that one was in the press recently. But, I think rather than telling people what to do, whether that's an HR department, writing rules and procedures for people, or whether that's an IT department prescribing these are the only technologies that we use, we should enable people to make that choice. Like people are comfortable with, with technology now you know, they're capable of buying their own laptop. There are some amazing providers out there of all sorts of different types of technology services. So