Office life on trend? Not really

So another mid term break has come to a close, it all seems to be flying in so fast, no doubt helped by the fact that the shops have been pushing Christmas decorations since the end of September. I foolishly went into Pennys a couple of weeks ago to buy Halloween decorations and left with Christmas decorations in my hands instead ( a lovely Late Late Toy Show blankie thank you for asking). The place had been completely cleared out of Halloween and the freshly arrived Christmas decorations were being picked over by those annoying people who always snag the best stuff and are only thrilled when you ask them where they got it from (Pennys, hun).
And with Christmas comes pressure. And most of that pressure lands on women. To produce the idyllic Christmas day, to have cherubic children wrapped up in matching pyjama sets (and now course a Late Late Toy Show blankie as well). Most of us are smart enough to know it is completely ridiculous and far from it we were reared but still it takes a better woman than me not to be sucked in. For most of us we are also working (hello quarter end), trying to see all the relations, lose a stone for the big day and have an Insta fabulous table setting. Our rational minds know that is impossible but still the gnawing feeling of not ever having done enough is nearly always present.
But sometimes a trend comes along that is so completely nonsensical in its own right that it sort of snaps you out of your stupor and make you sit up and think “you must be fecking kidding me”. This trend has been bubbling along for the last couple of years and it is of course the complete nonsense that is foraging for Christmas decorations. I am not talking about picking blackberries on a summer day but rather the completely insane idea that a grown working woman will not have an ideal Insta fabulous Christmas without heading down to her local verge and cutting out branches and twigs. Now obviously if you are super crafty and have been doing this for years then knock yourself out. I am more speaking to how the bar for perfection is always getting higher. The expectations and pressures society puts on ourselves are beyond the point of what is possible. We talk a lot about expectations and values in our Female Leadership course and how to manage them. Sometimes it helps just to articulate what those expectations are and sometimes even just saying them outloud makes you realise how completely unrealistic they are (which brings us back to forgaing).
Talking of all that is possible/ impossible, I attended the Tangent, Trinity’s Ideas Workspace Generative AI workshop last week. It was very well organised and pitched perfectly. There were a few gob smacking moments I thought I would share here:
Microsoft have spent $10 Billion Dollars on the exclusive license of Open AI
60% of Microsoft code is currently written by AI
Less then 10% of companies are using AI at scale
The number one barrier for AI Adoption is Cultural Resistance
All very interesting stuff and lots of food for thought. Expect to see more from us in this space.
Till next time,

Ciara

Reading

I pre ordered Adam Grant’s new book “Hidden Potential” ages ago and promptly forgot about it until it appeared on my doorstep a couple of weeks ago. Am only half way through but not really loving it so far, can’t say there is anything massively new or insighful in the book? I could be wrong and I know Adam Grant is a huge deal, I saw him being interviewed on Oprah (Oprah!!) recently but so far it is nothing I haven’t heard before? What does everyone else think?

Watching

It’s football season! The Beckhams, Wagatha Christie all totally enjoyable & completely voyeuristic. It is an insight into how the press works, how incredibly misogynistic the press coverage was/is but also how lots of money and time can make you look pretty fantastic at any age.

Listening

This Diary of a CEO episode was recommended to me, it is an interview with Scott Galloway. I don’t agree with all of it and I certainly didn’t appreciate the language sometimes but it made interesting listening and I did think there were some good points in there. Always good to listen and read outside your echo chamber anyway which is something we recommend in our Unconscious Bias training. Easy to say, harder to do!

Can you hear that sound? It is the sound of people very slowly being dragged back into the office five days a week. They are clinging onto their newly decorated home office spaces and looking longingly at their nespresso machine but slowly and surely the pressure is on to return to “normal” life. The summer is over, the kids are back in school and office life is on trend.
Covid upended the working world. All sort of jobs in which it was completely unimaginable to do from home all of sudden had to be done from home. As I have written before however it was not covid which enabled remote working for office workers it was the internet. The ability was always there just the will wasn’t. And will, the desire to do something, is a little like culture; you can’t see it but it is actually the most important thing in the room.
I once worked for a very brief and dismal spell in an unhappy HR department in a stagnant organisation. Coming from Tech I was not used to how things were “done” in this particular organisation. I quickly learned however that my main job was to say no. So if someone came to me with an exciting and interesting proposal it was never allowed because it was “setting a precedent”. It didn’t matter what the proposal was, it could have been an ingenious plan to retain talent, treble profit and slash operating costs it simply couldn’t be done because it would involve “setting a precedent”. Setting a precedent is of course just a nice way of sighing inwardly, saying we really couldn’t be bothered doing the work involved and couldn’t we just keep things the way they are?
And so it is with hybrid working. It is harder to manage, it needs you to work at it, to invest in training and most importantly it needs you to be innovative and flexible, to work with individuals but also manage the core of the business and keep the organisation energised. It is hard and it is the exact opposite of just keeping things the way they are. An inability to manage hybrid working competently is not just a lack of skills but also I believe a sign of greater stagnation within an organisation. An innovative culture, will, desire to do something different are all lacking and working in an office five days a week is an outward sign of that. The result? The slow attrition of top talent and a lack of innovation all round.
Till next time,
Ciara

Watching
The brilliant Australian comedy Fisk follows a middle age woman launching a new life after her husband left her for an older woman. It is perfect TV, hillarious and only 30 minutes long.
Listening
The very funny Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame has launched a podcast featuring older women called “Wiser then Me”. Just when you think the podcast market must be completely saturated along this comes a very clever take, the hour long episode features older women sharing their wisdom, unsuprisingly the episode with Jane Fonda is a cracker.
Reading
Everything. A long glorious summer of books, no doubt helped by the rain and the deletion of LinkedIn and Insta the first day of the summer holidays. One of my favourites was Yellowface by R.F. Kuang with a very well written tale which delves into racism, cultural appropriation and the publishing industry. It is witty, fast paced and makes you think. On the other side of the spectrum I absolutely hated “Strange Sally Diamond” by Liz Nugent. Everyone in my book club loved it so I am out on my own here.