For reasons that appeared entirely more clear and logical at the time, I ventured to my gym not once but twice yesterday. With utter predictability, my creaking frame is now complaining bitterly about the experience. Despite this and apart from the rather silly business about weights, machines and personal trainers, I rather like my gym. It’s entirely down to earth, several things don’t work (yes, yes, including me) and the clientele is not clad exclusively in figure-hugging lycra.
But although I’ve been going there for several years now, I am on no more than nodding terms with a handful of people. Rather than my innate and honed grumpiness, I put this down to bubbles. The sorts of bubbles we encounter and sometimes create around us. I find it easier to pass the time at the gym with some earphones in. I guess I could dispense with them but I fear my fellow gym attendees would be less enthusiastic about my lovingly curated playlist of early 70s west coast rock than I tend to be.
And yet this is a bubble of my own making. I can no longer engage naturally with those around me. I have retreated within my own space. That, I find, is easier and easier to do. Clearly, it does not stop with gyms.
Smart phones are an obvious bubble. We find it all too natural to revert to our phones for entertainment, news, communications. On tubes and trains, we sit transfixed, less likely than ever to interact with those around us – particularly as they themselves are doing exactly the same thing with their own phones. Food is another social opportunity around which we are increasingly placing bubbles. Whether it’s taking out these same smart phones at the restaurant table or not even venturing out of our homes at all and relying on the likes of Just Eat or Deliveroo – we find the cosiness and the accessibility of the bubble too alluring. With pubs closing at alarming rates across the country, we increasingly drink, as well as eat, within such bubbles.
The existence of bubbles, however, is not limited to the home. They exist all too regularly within the working environment. And, for some organisations, there’s little or no shortage of them.
Let’s take the diversity bubble. Bubbles tend to exclude and divide more than they include. Much progress has been made across diversity but much work remains to be done – whether about pay, application bias or progression. But look around your organisation. Does gender, ethnicity, physical impairment, neurodiversity or age mean that certain people feel excluded even as employees? Do they find themselves sitting outside this bubble?
How about your internal communication channels? How inclusive do they feel? Does everyone within your organisation understand your vision, purpose and direction? Your EVP even? Are you making use of channels which are accessible to all or just those in head office, a particular function, a particular country or a particular hierarchal level? And when was the last time you audited this? If you haven’t engaged with your people about how internal communications flow around your organisation, it may well be you’re sitting either inside or outside bubbles of your own.
I regularly engage with external candidate audiences through focus groups and interviews. Regardless of age, gender, seniority, industry, everyone but everyone is looking for greater working flexibility. And why not? One particular barrier to this is the potential bubble of home working. Do your communication channels function effectively enough to ensure that home workers or those working remotely feel included? Do such people feel they are out of sight, out of mind, out of the loop? Do they feel they are considered when promotions are being allocated?
I’m indebted too to that font of all resourcing knowledge, Mervyn Dineen, who reminded us on Twitter just this week of some Bersin research about job hunting from last year. Apparently, two thirds of all employees suggested it was easier to find their next job outside their current organisation rather than within it. This feels like a terrible indictment of internal progression accessibility, particularly given the prevailing talent economy. It feels like yet another bubble – I am where I am within my current employer, but I can’t see myself progressing. I can only break out of such a bubble by leaving.
The sense of employees being stuck within constraint bubbles was emphasised this week by HR Hour and their Towards Maturity research and a survey amongst L&D leaders, 54% of whom believe that learning is not a management priority within their respective organisations. Without training and development opportunities, there’s little wonder people are more inclined to see their next career move as being outwith their organisational bubble.
One of the key means of addressing bubbles is a strong organisational culture. A behaviour and value set that stretches right across the organisation, that promotes the purpose of that employer, whilst simultaneously functioning as its glue. A culture which everyone in the business understands, recognises and feels a part of not apart from. Not something that simply happens to them but something they can actively contribute to. A culture which inspires, which both frees up and opens up the organisation. A culture which reaches out and unifies.
And a strong culture has greater reach than the physical constraints of one organisation. Researching this piece, I came across the outdoor clothing retailer, Patagonia and a rather lovely discovery it was too. To be perfectly honest, the allure of camping, base jumping, mountaineering and the like continues to prove elusive to me. Accordingly, of all the retailers within my browsing history, I would have to look closely to find Patagonia.
Shame on me because this is an organisation not only promoting a fantastic culture internally – in addition to a raft of perhaps more predictable employee benefits, they will even pay the bail (just once) of any employee arrested during an environmental protest. And it doesn’t stop there. If a mother has to go on a business trip, the organisation will pay not only for her child but also for their nanny to accompany them. There’s any number more examples of how an internal culture shouldn’t simply act as another internal bubble but reach out – my favourite one was their suing of the Trump administration as it attempted to drastically reduce the size of two Utah national monuments.
Patagonia are justifiably proud of the culture they reinforce every day within their organisation – but they want to extend those cultural norms outside the walls of their business. In that way, their people feel like Patagonia people whether they are at work or at play. Their people don’t have work bubbles and home bubbles – they are themselves wherever they are. And Patagonia enables exactly that.
They’ve created a purpose-led culture integrated throughout their organisation. It shapes the value proposition and creates trust, loyalty, retention and engagement – for a range of audiences, be they customer, employee, new joiner, even investor.
There’s no shortage of reasons for the existence of bubbles. Technology can create them – and, when used appropriately, erase them. The current societal conflict and friction probably encourages us to seek the solace of protective bubbles. Entertainment certainly encourages them – box sets and the dropping of multiple episodes of a particular programme inspire us to binge watch within our bubble. They also reduce common experience programmes, where the office conversation is dominated by everyone having watched the same content the evening before.
There is clearly a time and a place for an appropriate bubble – who doesn’t relish a cosy sofa with the curtains drawn on increasingly cold and dark autumn evenings?
But they can only corrode and divide the working environment. The development of an open, healthy, trusting and empathetic culture which bonds and unifies, regardless of gender, age, geography, race, function and ambition has to be the aim of an organisation which wants to blow away the bubbles.
Finally, your EVP can be something of a bubble itself. Whether you’ve done much work to validate this recently – of course you have – it’s important to provide your EVP with the oxygen of external exposure. I’ve very recently been lucky enough to develop some research on how a number of global food and drink players take their career messages to different candidate audiences. There was a staggering mixture of the truly impressive, engaging and candidate centric. Such efforts stood out demonstrably next to careers sites with broken links, tired and dated messages, little or no attempt to localise messaging and a general assumption that candidates would beat a path to their door and ATS.
I suspect some of the reason behind such aloofness, is a sense of insularity. Organisations, all too often, do not grasp the external attitudinal currents influencing how they are perceived and how their EVP is being processed – another bubble in operation.
EVPs, then, hidden and obscured deep within their own organisational bubble.
Think about the bubbles that exist within your own organisation, what culture could be doing to break them down and make sure your EVP is out there making a clear, compelling and unambiguous statement.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 