Thinking about work

Every lunchtime at London’s Canary Wharf, some of the world’s most successful companies go into battle with their latest weapon in staff retention – the canteen. Brandishing wood-fired pizza ovens, continental style coffee bars and vouchers worth £15 a day, they hope to reach not just their employees’ stomachs, but their hearts.

It’s all a long way from the dark days of the early 20th century when the idea of the workplace canteen was little more than a figment in the imagination of the social reformer. But it was enough to inspire Robert Hyde, founder of the Industrial Welfare Society, which in 1919 set about campaigning for workplace facilities – beginning with canteens – for workers in industry.

Today the organisation, better known as the Industrial Society and as the largest independent training body in the country, is returning to its campaigning roots under its new boss, Will Hutton. Author of the best-selling The State We’re In, former editor-in-chief of The Observer, and a long standing advocate of the need for greater social responsibility within corporations, Hutton will ground that return with a new focus on the Industrial Society as a ‘think tank’ on the future of the world of work.

‘The society has gone back to its roots as a campaigning organisation. That was how Robert Hyde conceived it, but we had lost that in the last 15 years, and that is one reason why I joined,’ says Hutton, who became chief executive in February this year.

‘Our campaigning comes straight from our focus on how people can be best led and communicated with, how teams can be organised, and how they can be empowered. It is what the society is all about,’ he says. What we’re doing now is saying “lets raise the profile of that and lets add value by building up the thinking component behind the Society”.’

To that end, a dozen people have been hired to, ‘scope the future of work.’ That means thinking about what future trends will be in both private and public arenas and, says Hutton: ‘what we [the Society] think would make working life more empowered.’

A core theme is the creation of ‘the just company’, where an exclusive focus on shareholder returns is mediated by consideration of the corporation’s responsibilities in areas such as health and safety, the environment and the fair treatment of employees at work. Hutton argues that the idea of the just company and workplace have to be addressed because, quite simply, ‘that is the story of our times’.

‘What is really interesting in the year 2000 is that everyone running a company – and not just the FTSE 250 companies – has to face two conflicting trends; a focus on shareholder value and working assets harder, and, at the same time, a decline in public intervention. Business is taking on more and more of what was done in the public sector, and companies are invited to become citizens.’

But as businesses gain a new centrality in contemporary life, so they gain citizenship responsibilities. Hence their reputation in areas beyond pure financial performance becomes critical. ‘Being a well run international oil company means being obliged to say what your approach is to the environment in order to have legitimacy as a trading organisation,’ says Hutton.

For Hutton, grappling with such issues is a natural extension of the campaigns the Industrial Society fought to improve the workplace in its earlier days. ‘The Industrial Society has always been about this,’ he says. ‘Social audits, how companies can best be led, corporate social responsibility and so on – these are the 21st century versions of what the society did 90 years ago.’

And they are not just ideas, but issues that are already making themselves felt on the boardroom agenda. ‘The business case is already quite pressing,’ says Hutton. He cites new rules that mean from the beginning of this month, pension funds will have to declare their attitude towards socially responsible investment. ‘There will be harder questions asked about what you are doing,’ warns Hutton.

Our campaigning comes straight from our focus on how people can be best led and and how they can be empowered

Will Hutton

Meanwhile, the current inquiry in to company law reform, due to be completed in April next year, could see companies required to publish ‘a raft of additional information over and above financial information,’ says Hutton. ‘Companies will have to publish their approach to health and safety, the environment, the workplace – this will all be in the public domain.’

He also cites the 100,000 cases of employee grievance handled by the Arbitration, Conciliation and Advisory Service (Acas) last year, many of which, he says, ‘are to do with whether a company is a good employer’.

‘It’s a pretty impressive business case,’ says Hutton. ‘It also happens that there is a tighter labour market and people want to work for companies that have good reputations.’

This month, the society is set to hold a major conference on a second core theme in the Industrial Society armoury – the work/life balance. Hutton is a member of the committee set up at the end of January to advise on the development of the government’s campaign to promote a better work/home balance for employees.

While he challenges the assumption that long hours are associated with higher productivity – citing the damage on performance and personal life that long hours wreak even on those ‘senior executives who work 80 hours a week or more because they want to’ – he recognises that there are very different assumptions made about the relative merits of working and non-working life. ‘It’s an intriguing debate. A lot of people choose to be at work because life is not necessarily so great. And some would say work is what gives us status.’

But equally many people associate work with something negative and non-working life with something good. ‘Others will point out that there is a whole other world which revolves around community life, picking the kids up from school, etc,’ says Hutton. ‘We want to redefine the issue in terms of time sovereignty. People may want to work hard, but they need flexibility so they have choice. If they choose to work until late one night so they can leave early to see their kids another day, then that should be OK. We want to increase the emphasis on outcomes, rather than hours present at the desk.’

Hutton argues that there are already a number of major corporations looking at changing their approach to working hours, including international banks and global accountancy firms. Accountancy and consulting worlds have tended to lead the way, he says, partly because of the way they work, with the consultant able to complete much of their work away from an office desk.

Given his concerns for the better management of people at work, what does Hutton make of the growing trend in the UK, fuelled largely by dotcom style businesses, to create much more informal and fun workplaces in the name of greater employee creativity?

Some of this, says Hutton, is a feature of tough recruitment conditions, adding that it is no accident that tight labour markets in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s saw the birth of pension funds. But there is something more long-term going on behind the trend that, in Hutton’s view, is to be welcomed. But he warns against taking the model too far.

Work, he says, should be somewhere to express yourself, where ‘we can act on the world’ and ‘locate our being-ness’. Changes to the way we dress at work and so on indicate an aspiration for a shared value system between employers and staff that Hutton welcomes. But he warns against a situation where work becomes ‘too attractive’ and ‘employers want every bit of us’.

In the USA, he says, there is some evidence that things have gone too far, citing the company where the happy worker is one that is hugged four times a day.