Office politics is not optional: learn to play the game or you’ll be its victim

Most of us disapprove of wily work machinations, but experts say ignoring power structures will hold you back writes Miranda Green in The FT

If there is one thing most people seem to hate more than politics, it’s office politics. Back-stabbing, conniving, sucking up and kicking down: being on career-enhancing manoeuvres makes people a target of derision among colleagues. This is often laced with envy if their machinations produce results. 

As the Divine Comedy put it in their 2019 song “Office Politics”: “Press the flesh, do the deal/ Book your place on the hamster wheel”. 

But in recent weeks, I’ve had a rethink, after being embroiled in holiday-period, mid-life job chat with friends and contemporaries. Many feel stymied, overlooked or are bored and miserable in roles they have outgrown. 

As with so much in life, when you reach the end of what the Americans (wonderfully) call the “pity party”, you need some constructive advice. Sometimes empathy is good. But sometimes it’s better to have a more bracing perspective. 

One shocking set of potential solutions (which I share in a spirit of passing on this useful jolt) came from consulting the most recent book by go-to theorist of office politics, Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford. 

In The 7 Rules of Power he warns that “people opt out of the quest for power” often because they see bad people seeking it or using it for ill. But they become victims of this decision, missing out on the benefits of playing the game. “A comprehensive meta-analysis of the effects of political skill [at work] found it was positively related to job satisfaction, work productivity, career success and personal reputation, and negatively related to physiological strain.” In other words, the consequences of holding back from the fray could be feeling unrecognised and unhappy, watching both your output and health decline — yikes. 

Prof Pfeffer is not one to sugar coat his messages. He has spent a lifetime getting his disciples, at Stanford and elsewhere, to accept what he calls the brutal realities: playing politics is fundamental to getting anywhere at work. Interestingly, resistance to this message is widespread — people prefer what he deems the soothing idea that the light of great work will shine, even under a bushel. 

The Pfeffer method is probably most suitable to corporate life. But there are tips for anyone seeking a route up, or out of an unfulfilling rut. They include making yourself and your achievements as visible as possible, projecting confidence and authority, and making sure you network, network, network: you have to become an invaluable conduit and contact. 

His first piece of advice, however, is to face up to the fact that this stuff is vital: you need to, in his words, “get out of your own way”. Don’t disapprove of people you see engaged in self-promoting stratagems, learn from them. And if your identity depends on belief in, as Pfeffer satirically puts it, “a just world and the ultimate triumph of merit”, you are in danger of sacrificing what you want from your working life. 

Don’t get me wrong. Unlike many others, actual democratic politics has been a life-long obsession and delight to me, but I am not totally sold on the Pfeffer method of mastering the work-based variety. Do not expect a memoir entitled: How I stopped worrying and learned to love office politics. While Pfeffer argues you can’t fight “the behavioural realities of power”, straying too far from your core values will make you feel dreadful. But I am convinced by one thing: hiding from the trade-offs you are already making will send you straight back to that pity party. 

Some prefer — and are better suited to — ploughing their own furrows. It certainly seems a better use of energy than a preoccupation with internal status games. But Pfeffer would probably think this is culpably naive: I suppose it’s your own fault if you haven’t learnt how to at least play the system in order to be left alone to plough that furrow. And by the way, you do need appropriate recognition and reward. Very few can eat or shelter under their ideals. 

Here’s his warning to the mid-life cohort: “The ability to do power becomes more important as your career advances.” If “at a certain level everybody is smart,” you need other ways to make your mark. 

And having to negotiate between your own and other people’s agendas is just part of adult life. This year, it may be time to act strategically to try and secure your place — if not on the hamster wheel, then least somewhere you won’t complain about.

How to avoid the return of office cliques

Some managers are wary of telling staff that going into a workplace has networking benefits writes Emma Jacobs in The FT

After weighing up the pros and cons of future working patterns, Dropbox decided against the hybrid model — when the working week is split between the office and home. “It has some pretty significant drawbacks,” says Melanie Collins, chief people officer. Uppermost is that it “could lead to issues with inclusion, or disparities with respect to performance or career trajectory”. In the end, the cloud storage and collaboration platform opted for a virtual-first policy, which prioritises remote work over the office. 

As offices open, there are fears that if hybrid is mismanaged, organisational power will revert to the workplace with executives forming in-office cliques and those employees who seek promotion and networking opportunities switching back to face time with senior staff as a way to advance their careers.

The office pecking order 

Status-conscious workers may be itching to return to the office, says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at Columbia University and UCL. “Humans are hierarchical by nature, and the office always conveyed status and hierarchy — car parking spots, cars, corner office, size, windows. The risk now is that, in a fully hybrid and flexible world, status ends up positively correlated with the number of days at the office.” 

This could create a two-tier workforce: those who want flexibility to work from home — notably those with caring responsibilities — and those who gravitate towards the office. Rosie Campbell, professor of politics and director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, says that past research has shown that “part-time or remote workers tend not to get promoted”. This has been described as the “flexibility stigma, defined as the “discrimination and negative perception towards workers who work flexibly, and [consequent] negative career outcomes”. 

Research by Heejung Chung, reader in sociology and social policy at Kent University, carried out before the pandemic, found that “women, especially mothers (of children below 12) [were] likely to have experienced some sort of negative career consequence due to flexible working”. Lockdowns disproportionately increased caring responsibilities for women, through home-schooling and closure of childcare facilities. 

Missing out on career development 

Some companies are creating regional hubs or leasing local co-working spaces so that workers can go to offices closer to home, reducing commute times and the costs of expensive office space. Lloyds Banking Group is among a number of banks, for example, that have said they will use surplus space in their branches for meetings. The risk, Campbell says, is workers using local offices miss out on exposure to senior leaders and larger networks that might advance their careers. “People might say it’s easier to be at home or use suburban hubs but it might actually be better to go into the office. Regional or suburban hubs are giving you a place to work that isn’t at home but isn’t giving you any of the face time.” 

Employers and team leaders may need to be explicit about the purpose of the office: not only is it a good place for collaborating with teams and serendipitous conversations but also for networking.  

 

Mark Mortensen, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Insead, points out it is difficult — and paternalistic — as a manager to suggest an employee spends more time in the office to boost their career. A recent opinion article by Cathy Merrill, chief executive of Washingtonian Media, in the Washington Post, sparked a huge backlash on social media and more importantly, her employees, for arguing that those who do not return to the office might find themselves out of a job. “The hardest people to let go are the ones you know,” she wrote. 

Her staff felt their remote work had been unappreciated and were angry that they had not been consulted over future work plans — so they went on strike. 

Mortensen does not advise presenting staff with job loss threats, but puts forward a case for frank and open conversations about the value of time in the office. “Informal networks aren’t just nice to have, they are important. We need to tell people the risk is if you are working remotely you will be missing out on something that might prove beneficial in your career. It’s tough. People will say they sell things on their skills but you have to be honest and say that relationships are important. Weak ties can be the most critical in shaping people’s career paths.” 

The problem is that after dealing with a pandemic and lockdowns, workers may not be in the best place to know what they want out of future work patterns. Chamorro-Premuzic says that he fears that even people who are enjoying it right now, may not realise “they are burnt out. It’s like the introvert who likes working from home, they’re playing to their strength — staying in their own comfort zone.” 

Examine workplace culture 

As employers try to configure ways of working they need to scrutinise workplace culture and find out why employees might prefer to be at home. Some will have always felt excluded from networks and sponsorship in the office — and being away from it means that they do not have to think about it. 

Future Forum, Slack’s future of work think-tank, found that black knowledge workers were more likely to prefer a hybrid or remote work model because the office was a frequent reminder “of their outsider status in both subtle (microaggressions) and not-so-subtle (overt discrimination) ways”. It said the solution was not to give “black employees the ability to work from home, while white executives return to old habits [but] about fundamentally changing your own ways of working and holding people accountable for driving inclusivity in your workplace”. 

Some experts believe that the pandemic has fundamentally altered workplace behaviour. Tsedal Neeley, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of Remote Work Revolution, is optimistic. “Individuals are worried about their career trajectory because the paranoia is, ‘If we don’t go to the office will we get the same opportunities and career mobility if we’re not physically in the office?’ These would be very legitimate worries 13 months ago but less of a concern now.” 

Chung co-authored a report by Birmingham University that found more fathers taking on caring responsibilities and an increase in the “number of couples who indicate that they have shared housework [and] care activities during lockdown”. This might shift couples’ attitudes to splitting work and home duties and alter employers’ stigmatisation of flexible working. 

Prevent an in-crowd 

There are some measures that employers can take to try to prevent office cliques forming. Some workplaces will require teams to come in on the same days so employees get access to their manager, rather than leaving it to individuals to arrange their own office schedules. Though this would mean team members might not get access to senior leaders or form ties with other teams that they might have done when the office was the default. 

Lauren Pasquarella Daley, senior director of women and the future of work at Catalyst, a non-profit that advocates for women at work, says senior executives need to be “intentional about sponsorship and mentoring” rather than letting these relationships form by chance. 

They must also be role models for flexible working. “If employees don’t feel it’s OK to take advantage of remote work then they won’t do so.” This means ensuring meetings are documented. If, for example, one person is working outside the office then everyone needs to act as if they are remote, too. 

Chamorro-Premuzic says managers should work on the assumption that in-office cliques will form. This means organisations need to put in place better measures of objectives, performance measures independent of where people are, as well as measuring and monitoring bias (for example, if you know how often people come to work, you can test whether there is a correlation between being at work and getting a positive performance review, which would suggest bias or adverse impact), and training leaders and managers on how to be inclusive. 

“We may not have tonnes of data on the disparate impact of hybrid policies on underprivileged groups, but it is naive to assume it won’t happen. The big question is how to mitigate it,” he says.

Do Indian Governors have 'Discretion'?

 

Returning to work in the coronavirus crisis: what are your rights?

Hilary Osborne in The Guardian 

 

Some people may be concerned about returning to work during the coronavirus crisis. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images


As the lockdown restrictions begin to be eased across the UK, more workers are being asked to return to the workplace.

The government has said that employees should only be asked to go back if they cannot do their job from home, so if you can, your employer should not be asking you to travel in to work.

If you do need to go to your workplace, your employer is obliged to make sure you will be safe there. Employment lawyer Matt Gingell says: “Employers have a general duty to ensure, as far as reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of all of their employees.”

Here’s a guide to your rights if your employer wants you back in the workplace.

How much notice should I be given that I have to return?

“If employees are unable to work from home, employers can ask employees to return to work and, technically, no notice is required,” says Gingell.

Solicitor and consumer law expert Gary Rycroft says there is no notice period written into law “but giving at least 48 hours’ notice should allow either side to have discussions and air any concerns or even official ‘grievances’”.

The advisory group Acas says employers need to check if there are any arrangements in place with unions or similar about notice. It advises: “Employees and workers should be ready to return to work at short notice, but employers should be flexible where possible.”

So while your employer could ask you to return straight away, a good employer would understand if there were things you needed to put in place first, and give you chance to do so.

What if I was furloughed?

When you were furloughed your employer should have outlined what would happen when it wanted you to go back to work, and this may have a clause saying that you have to return as soon as you are asked.

“The termination of the furlough agreement and when an employee will be expected to return to work will depend on the provisions of the agreement,” says Gingell. Again, though, even if there is no notice period, a good employer should realise that you may need some time to prepare.

If you have been furloughed under the government’s job retention scheme, your employer can’t ask you to go in and do ad hoc days, or work part-time. They would need to take you off furlough and renegotiate your contract with you.

Can they ask me to go back in part-time?

Not, currently, if you have been furloughed and they are using the government scheme to pay you. It only allows companies to furlough people for all of their normal hours, and bans them from asking you to do any work while you are off.

But if your company has not claimed government money to cover your wages, it can ask you to resume work part-time. Make sure you understand the terms of the request – your employer cannot adjust your contract without your permission, so if it is asking you to change your hours you should get advice.

Can they ask me to take a pay cut?

“The law here is the same as it would be if an employer made the same request in the normal course of an employee’s employment. Reducing hours and/or pay are deemed to be such fundamental changes to an employee’s terms and conditions that the employee concerned should be consulted and then agree in writing,” says Rycroft.

He points out that for some employers “this may be the only economically viable option”, and the alternative, if people refuse, could be redundancies. To make more than 20 people redundant there will need to be collective consultation.

What if I am in a vulnerable group or live with someone who is?

No special rules have been put in place to protect people in these groups who are asked to go into work but some already exist – if you are disabled or pregnant, for example, your employer has extra obligations.

Rycroft says some employees may be able to argue that it will be discriminatory to force them to attend work outside the home. “It is all a question of degrees, in terms of how the employer can show that they have listened to legitimate concerns and made reasonable adjustments,” he says.

If you are pregnant your employer is obliged to make sure you can do your job safely. This can mean allowing you to do your job from home, or giving you a new role which can be done remotely. If your employer refuses either of these options, and you do not feel safe going into work you should take advice. Employmentsolicitor.com says that you could be able to argue for a medical suspension on full pay, which will allow you to stay at home.

Living with someone who is vulnerable or especially at risk is not necessarily a reason an employee can refuse to return to work, says Rycroft. “However, you can, as an employee raise a grievance and ask to be listened to and hopefully a compromise may be agreed, such as unpaid leave or using up annual holiday. But if an employer can show that a workplace is safe, the employer may insist on an employee attending.”
What if I have childcare to worry about?

Legally, you can take time off to look after any dependants – these could be children, or older relatives. This time is typically unpaid. If you are currently furloughed and your employer does not have enough work for everyone to go back full-time, they may agree to leave you on furlough so you can continue to earn 80% of your normal pay.

What information should they give me in advance?

Rycroft says there is no law saying that employers should provide information before you return, but the government guidance to employers recommends that they do. He says this information – written or verbal – should cover how they are making your workplace safe in light of the pandemic. So you should be told what is happening to ensure social distancing and hygiene. “This will allow employees to understand how their health and safety at work is being addressed.

Can I refuse to go back?

Yes, if you believe there is a real danger to going to work. “If an employee refuses to return to the workplace due to the employee reasonably believing imminent and serious danger and is then dismissed for that reason the employee could, depending on the circumstances, have a claim for unfair dismissal,” Gingell says.

“The requirement that the employee has to believe that there is imminent and serious danger, does limit the right.”

Otherwise, you cannot refuse. “If someone refuses to attend work without a valid reason, it could result in disciplinary action,” says Acas. But you may be able to make other arrangements with your employer – perhaps you can use holiday or take unpaid leave, or if you have concerns about something like travelling at peak time, they may be willing to accommodate different shifts. Your employer does not have to agree to this, but it is worth asking.

What if I am worried when I see my workplace?

Rycroft says that under section 100 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 employees may leave a place of work where there is an imminent health and safety danger. So if, for example, you return to find social distancing is impossible, you could argue that this is a reason to leave your workplace.

But in the first instance you should try to resolve the issue with your boss. Gingell says: “Employers ought to to listen to the concerns of individuals and be sympathetic and understanding.”

If you do not get anywhere with this, you should take advice. If you are in a union, it should have a helpline you can call if there is no rep to speak to on site. Acas is another port of call, as is Citizens Advice.

“If the employer has breached the implied obligation to provide a safe working environment and/or trust and confidence an employee could, again, depending on the circumstances, resign swiftly as a result and claim constructive unfair dismissal,” says Gingell. But he says you should get advice before taking this action.

“Another option for employees to consider is contactIng the Health and Safety Executive, which enforces health and safety legislation,” he says.

Do team-mates have to get along?

October 27, 2013

Cricket players or comrades in arms?

Samir Chopra

 

Dressing room or office cubicles?  © Getty Images

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Jonathan Wilson's analysis, here on the Cordon, of cricket's workplace and the "unrealistic" expectations of player relationships it seems to generate among fans made for some very interesting reading.

Fans, of course, expect player relationships to be far more cordial and chummy than they actually are, or even could be, because - among other things - they view cricket through an imaginative and hopeful lens, one that refracts and distorts and magnifies and colours in all sorts of ways. We view cricket not as a series of prosaic encounters of bat and ball wielded by salaried men, but rather as the stage and setting for a variety of noble encounters that resolve archetypal conflicts. We populate this stage with a variety of stock characters: heroes (our side), villains (their side), damsels in distress (the nations the players represent, which need rescuing from all manner of insults), scapegoats (those on our side who fail us and must be blamed for the defeats that could not possibly be our just fate), traitors (see:scapegoat), village idiots (sometimes umpires, sometimes opponents, sometimes selectors, sometimes our own team), magicians, gnomes and wise men (the captains, and now increasingly the coaches, all capable of changing the fortunes of nations and groups of men with mysterious incantations and potions). And so on. 

The vision of cricket afforded by these lenses is one that cricket writers, going back to the game's earliest days, and television producers and commentators in more recent times, have drawn on and embellished. It is one whose moral universe is relatively unambiguous, whose human relationships follow smooth, predictable trajectories; its decision-makers experience little cognitive dissonance, whether ethical, strategic or tactical; where rough edges are miraculously smoothed out by good intentions and ceaseless striving. The only reward our heroes expect is adulation and fame and the gratitude of adoring nations.

I do not mean to suggest that such is the fan's consciously distorted view of a game; rather it is that every fan's experience and interpretation of the game is not without its component of unconscious or subconscious fantasy imposed on its visible proceedings.

One set of prominent stock characters that populate this stage for the fan are drawn from stories of adventure and war, where "bands of brothers" or "comrades in arms" face adversity and the enemy as a united front and ultimately emerge triumphant. A magical brew of togetherness is stewed, one made more potent by mutual respect and affection and something called "team spirit"; it overcomes all opponents. Among this band of brothers, there is fraternity and camaraderie; there is much backslapping and shoulder-to-shoulder support; there are handshakes and there is mateship; everyone has someone's back. This a bunch of soldiers, united together, perhaps like the "pal battalions" of Kitchener's Army, going off to fight the good battle.

The modern team knows of this image and it draws on it in its public-relations exercises and its team-building manoeuvres; there is talk of visiting war memorials and cemeteries; "boot camps" are conducted, sometimes in jungles, sometimes in mountains; team members speak glowingly of the dressing-room "atmosphere", one made especially salubrious for some by long hours of drinking together; players speak glowingly of their trench buddies and their "partnerships".

In this understanding of the game, the workplace picture of men and their trades, engaged in work for wages, possibly drawn into all manners of conflict, on or off the field, with their co-workers or "management", is a jarring disruption. It is not one that sits comfortably with our imagined conceptions of what takes place on a cricket field. It is not how we "enjoy" the game. It is not how the game functions for us, or how we make sense of, and ascribe meaning to, the "hallowed 22 yards" far away, dimly glimpsed, out there in the middle.

-------OCTOBER 21, 2013
Do team-mates have to get along?

Jonathan Wilson in Cricinfo

Not quite Michael Clarke's scene, if Ricky Ponting's book is to be believed  © Getty Images

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There is often an assumption among fans that team-mates are all great friends. After all, whenever we see them, they are forever hugging each other or high-fiving, and most of them are incapable of getting through a post-match interview without talking collectively of "the lads" or "the boys", and insisting that "the spirit" has never been better.

Our own experience of sport, whether it's a frenetic five-a-side on a Thursday night or a leisurely 35-over game on a Sunday, tells us that the people you play with, while there might be the odd niggle - "Why will Mike not stop hitting it long?", "When did Tom last buy a round?", "Will Steve ever stop banging on about that trial he had with Leicestershire in 1972?" - are essentially people you quite enjoy having a drink with afterwards. 

Ricky Ponting's comments in his autobiography on Michael Clarke come as a reminder that among professionals those niggles are often far more serious. "Away from cricket, he moved in a different world to the rest of us," Ponting wrote. "It never worried me if a bloke didn't want a drink in the dressing-room, but I did wonder about blokes who didn't see the value in sticking around for a chat and a laugh and a post-mortem on the day's play. This was the time when we could revel in our success, pick up the blokes who were struggling, and acknowledge the guys who were at the peak of their powers. Pup hardly bought into this tradition for a couple of years and the team noticed."

The tone is reasonably diplomatic, and Ponting goes out of his way to stress that Clarke wasn't ever "disruptive" and that there was no suggestion he was slacking or not putting in the effort in training, but the episodes with Simon Katich and Mike Hussey suggest just how deep that frustration ran. Clarke was not, for want of a better term, one of them, and reading between the lines, the more traditional players wondered whether he felt himself better than them.

Jarrod Kimber wrote in the first issue of the Nightwatchman about how Clarke is representative of a shift in Australian masculinity from hairy-chested beer-swilling to manicured cocktail-sipping, and that probably didn't help, but the truth is that in any team there's a player or two who has to shoot off immediately after play, whether because they are too busy or because they have promised their wife or just because they don't much like sitting around having a beer. When things are going well, that's not a problem; when things are going badly, you can guarantee they are the ones who'll be slagged off in the clubhouse afterwards.

The issue then is chicken-and-egg: do they not hang around because they are self-centred in how they approach the game, or do they become self-centred because the rest of the team regards them with suspicion?

Of course, in this regard the major difference between professionals and happy weekend amateurs is the stakes. We grumble about a team-mate who never passes or scores too slowly because it might cost us the game and because we want to be involved as much as possible. A Test cricketer fumes about it because he is playing for his nation in front of an audience of millions and because defeats can cost contracts.

Yet does it really matter if team-mates get on? The great Dutch football coach Rinus Michels, architect of Total Football, pioneers what he termed the Conflict Principle: he felt if his players became too comfortable they would lose their edge. Look at most workplaces. While you will get groups of friends, most people just rub along and wouldn't dream of socialising with their workmates once they had moved on to a different job.

Dressing rooms, it's easy for fans and amateurs to forget, are just workplaces. Everybody is fighting under one banner, and yet at the same time they are fighting for preferment with each other. If you do lose the game and the pressure comes for changes, you don't want to be the one whose match figures were 0 for 185, just as when cutbacks come in an office, you don't want to be the one whose sales figures dropped by 10% over the previous year. Football club dressing rooms are probably even worse, given the frequency with which players move on: why stick up for the idiot winger who never tracks back when the chances are you'll be playing for different teams next year anyway? It comes as no great surprise when the combative Roy Keane says he made no friends in football, but it's rather more startling when the genial Niall Quinn, seemingly the epitome of the tough but easy-going, hard-drinking Irishman, admits he didn't either.

So long as players aren't wilfully undermining each other - as the crowd favourite Len Shackleton did when Sunderland broke the world transfer record to sign Trevor Ford and, fearing for his status, began delivering crosses so loaded with spin they were impossible to control, before turning to the fans and shrugging - it doesn't seem much to matter. If you don't deliberately run them out or start texting details of technical flaws to the opposition, it doesn't much matter whether you'd go to their wedding - so long as things are going well. Under stress, fault lines will always be exposed.

So what is team spirit? Does it exist and is it important? It's clearly true that certain players for certain countries - and particularly nations that are in the process of rebuilding after revolution or war: Croatia in 1996 and 1998 or Bosnia today in football - do at times seem inspired by notions of patriotic duty, but for the most part team spirit seems something of a myth, a nebulous togetherness generated when things are going well. As the former Tottenham and Barcelona striker Steve Archibald once noted in a moment of unusual eloquence, perhaps aided by a wistful translation into Spanish and out again, "Team spirit is a chimera glimpsed in the moment of victory."

Home Office is now a tool for stirring up racial tension

Dave Garret in The Independent 01/08/2013

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen some very visible signs of the Government’s “hostile environment” crusade. There have been vans out on the streets with threatening slogans and, reportedly, non-white people being visibly stopped and searched.

The Home Office is responsible for community cohesion. Yet we are increasingly seeing what appears to be hostility towards non-white immigration, which will do nothing but incite racial tensions and divisions within otherwise rich and diverse communities.

This has to change. We urgently need a more balanced public debate on immigration, free of political agendas. Without it we risk eroding the very foundations of communities across the UK.

The Government has now made the Home Office, who are also responsible for community policing and safety, a highly visible, taxpayer-funded tool for stirring up racial tension and community unrest. The method and location of these stunts make it hard to believe that they are not targeted at non-white communities, but, whatever the truth, they are certainly perceived that way.

Refugee Action wants to see a more balanced debate about immigration, and believes the Home Office has a huge responsibility to avoid adding to its toxicity. At least in the interests of balance, we’d like some vans which say: “The NHS would collapse without foreign-born staff,” or “the Office of Budget Responsibility says that migration has a positive impact on the sustainability of public finances” or “without immigration Britain would be without tea”.

Dave Garratt is chief executive of Refugee Action