Hello and welcome to Working It.
It was great to meet so many Working It newsletter readers and podcast listeners at the FT Weekend festival (as well as some fellow outdoor swimmers 🏊🏼♂️).
Don’t worry if you missed the sunshine and cute dogs at Kenwood House. We’re crafting two podcasts from the live panels recorded on the day: one about how to get a pay rise, with Claer Barrett and Jonathan Black, for Money Clinic, and the other — on mid-life career change — for Working It.
Read on for a look at why staff put so much trust in their employers — and the pressure that puts on bosses — and in Office Therapy we consider the tricky issue of too much flesh on display at work.
As ever, please email me at [email protected] with anything you think we should be covering, or what we’ve missed — and to alert us to cool stuff happening globally. Several people at the festival told me we are too UK-centric. Consider me told 📣.
I’m away next week and my colleague Emma Jacobs will be writing the newsletter.
Trust is wonderful — but it’s a risky business
Everyone’s back at work, the long slog to Christmas has begun and things look ever-worse on the “general uncertainty” front. Search the word “gloom” and you get nearly 7,000 results on FT.com ☁️.
Who, then, is going to ride in as the unlikely role model and inspirational leader for the jaded masses?
Your employer, that’s who. Or you, if you are a business leader. No pressure then 😰.
The percentage of staff who trust their employer is at an all-time high — 79 per cent, against an average level of trust in other institutions (business, NGOs, government and media) of 56 per cent. Media is bottom of the list, to the surprise of absolutely no one 😞.
These figures are in the latest edition of the Trust Barometer, focusing on trust at work, from Edelman, the PR consultancy. This workplace survey covered 7,000 people in seven countries including the US, Japan and the UK.
To go back to basics, what even is trust — and what does it mean to say “we trust our employers”? I was interested to see the wise words of Esther Perel, celebrity psychotherapist and podcast host, quoted by Edelman itself: “Trust is the active engagement with the unknown. Trust is risky. It’s vulnerable. It’s a leap of faith.”
Until I became an Esther Perel superfan, I would have defined trust as having “absolute faith in someone or something”, with no risk attached. Now I see the risk factor is key (is it just me — have you all known that forever? 🤔).
To go deeper on trust, I spoke to Edelman’s global chair of employee experience, Cydney Roach. If anyone knows what makes staff engaged and happy (or otherwise), it’s Cydney. She describes trust in a workplace setting as being like “equity in the bank”. Once an organisation has the trust of its staff, she says, it helps to sustain them in difficult times, and that in turn helps the business navigate “new strategies, new operating models, upheaval, constant disruption”. It gives the organisation more leeway, in short.
It’s not too much of a surprise that we trust our employers so much. “We trust the things that are closest to us — and almost all employees choose their employer,” Cydney says. Most importantly, “at a time of global uncertainty, the role that your employer plays in your life is one of economic stability” ⚖️.
How should leaders make the most of that trust — and build more of it? Simple, Cydney says: “Listen to people.” Staff have a huge amount of institutional knowledge and ideas that often remain unheard and untapped 🧏🏼♂️.
The ideal organisation, Cydney says, makes the most of its trust by including employee voices at governance level — something that’s still a rarity. (Working It recently covered the need for more HR and workplace culture representation at senior levels in organisations — but this is going a step further.) Listening, it seems, only goes so far.
There are exceptions to this rosy trust-bubble. Deskless workers (many of whom are frontline staff) can’t work remotely and aren’t in offices. They still trust their employer more than other institutions but the trust level is less than among other staff, at 72 per cent. More work to do there 💪.
What do you think boosts trust at work? Are you sceptical of the idea that we trust our employers to do the right thing? Has your organisation got worker representation at the highest levels? Let us know: [email protected].
This week on the Working It podcast
The cult of the “gifted amateur” has been a curse on the UK for generations, epitomised by the approach of the Oxbridge graduates who have run the country for many years. (My FT colleague Simon Kuper has written brilliantly about this topic in his book, Chums.)
The results of this amateur approach — plus a wider British refusal to take management and leadership seriously — add up to bad news for the economy and for the millions of people led by untrained managers.
On this week’s Working It podcast I talk to Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, about what might help improve things, and to FT Whitehall correspondent Lucy Fisher about the government’s lack of interest in this area. Meanwhile Brooke Masters, US financial editor, tells us what we can learn from the US.
Office Therapy
The problem: The trainees in my client-facing team dress smartly but the women often wear low cut tops and/or very short skirts. Have professional workplace clothing norms changed? Is this a result of the pandemic not letting young people get experience of office life?
Should I have a word with them informally? Should I ignore it or even pass upwards? Help.
Isabel’s advice: You can ignore it and hope the trainees start to “read the room”, or ask the HR department to step in. Dress expectations — for everyone, not just women — could be explicit in company-wide guidelines. Do not get personally involved. This is a minefield 🤯.
I asked FT fashion editor Lauren Indvik for her view on the new clothing norms (her Fashion Matters newsletter is brilliant — do sign up 👔).
“Coming out of the pandemic, fashion has definitely got sexier in the conventional sense. Skirts are shorter, fabrics are sheerer, and a revival of ‘Y2K’ styles has ushered in the return of low-rise jeans and bare midriffs, particularly among teens and twenty-somethings poring nostalgically over images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton,” Lauren said.
“Meanwhile, work wardrobes are becoming still more casual. So I’m not at all surprised that young employees with no experience of pre-Covid office environments are perhaps struggling to ‘read the room’. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still a time and a place for professional attire.”
Got a question, problem, or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: [email protected]. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.
Five top stories from the world of work
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How the next generation is breaking into boardrooms: There’s still very little age and race diversity at board level, although there are lots of initiatives to try to change things. Anjli Raval talks to would-be non-executive directors and the people trying to help them step up.
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Why companies need to raise their game on skills training: Upskilling and training are often boring and thoughtlessly delivered (even when boosted with virtual reality headsets and the like), observes Emma Jacobs. A lot more work — not to mention skill — should be focused on this area.
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One year in a struggling state school: The FT’s Jen Williams spent a year visiting a school in Oldham, in the north of England. The resulting article is a tribute to the tireless work of the staff and evidence of the hardship facing many people in the UK.
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The bosses helping staff through long-term illness: When leaders are open about their disability or long-term sickness, it sets the tone for the rest of the organisation. Alicia Clegg investigates how these businesses keep more people in the workforce.
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How not to network: lessons from my summer in the city. A heartfelt column from Miranda Green on how her efforts to schmooze fell on stony ground — and some tips on how to do it better. Contains a mention of Carole Stone, the “networking queen” (who else remembers when she was everywhere?).
One more thing . . .
Next time someone tells you that business is boring, point them to Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn, on Apple TV+. It’s not every documentary that features a legendary CEO being stuffed into an instrument case. The back-story is all here — from Ghosn’s humble roots to global superstardom as chief executive of carmakers Renault and Nissan, then hubris and downfall as Japanese prosecutors swooped.
This four-part series is based on a book by a couple of Wall Street Journal reporters (who give a wry overview of events) and features compelling interviews with Ghosn and his wife Carole, plus the other key players caught up in the saga.
Last week’s newsletter about mid-life career shifts, and “middlescence” as a distinct phase of life, prompted several people to write in and tell me that I should have attributed the invention of “middlescence” as a concept to Barbara Waxman, a gerontologist, coach and “life-stage expert” (I love that term).
My apologies for that omission — I had no idea. Over to Maria Jane, chief impact officer at The Odyssey Group, founded by Waxman:
“Thank you for recognising the importance of this term. We’re starting to see a growing shift and understanding that life after 50 — once deemed a crisis leading to inevitable decline — is ripe with power and potential.
“In Barbara’s words, ‘we now live long enough to through something akin to adolescence more than once — when we experience the reckonings associated with mid-life. It’s best termed middlescence. It’s similar to the state of adolescence, but this time with wisdom.’”
Thank heavens for wisdom. I for one could not manage another adolescence-style rollercoaster without it. (Or, let’s be honest, without the additional age-related benefits of money and legal drinking 🍷.)
Read the full article here