Many years ago, a Partner in a law firm in Cayman charged into the office of their IT director and said: “I want you to block all access to the internet, my team are spending too much time on there instead of working”. The response of the IT Director was blunt: “that is not an IT problem, that is a Leadership problem”.
I loved that story and it has always stayed with me.
We then recently heard this bs from House of Fraser (article in The Guardian here, quote edited for brevity):
Frasers Group has banned staff from working from home on Fridays after claiming social media posts showed they were relaxing during working time. The retailer has asked staff to be in the office all week, ending a flexible working policy introduced during the pandemic. An internal memo, sent by the company’s chief operating officer, said “Frasers Friday” had become “an unproductive day of the week”, saying “too many examples of people or teams not being contactable when they need to be … and colleagues who via their social media profiles are demonstrating they’re not treating Friday as a working day”.
The answer to this is to look at Leadership and Management issues, not to force people back to work in the office on Fridays, which will drop motivation even further among their 25,000 employees.
I work with Leaders who are laser-focused on their leadership and leading their people. The number one issue for them is and will continue to be People, attracting, developing, motivating and retaining people.
Command and Control is dead, it is time for Open Leadership (see core post here)
How focused are you and your business on the motivation and inspiration of your people? Oh, and are you making them all come back to the office five days per week so you can control their activities?