Meet me in the bathroom 🚽

Hello and welcome to Working It.

You may be celebrating a workplace Valentine’s Day🌹: 60 per cent of us have had an office romance.

While these figures represent a snapshot — a 2023 Forbes survey of 2,000 US workers — it’s clear that online dating apps have not yet eclipsed IRL flirting. I am very much here for your “I met my soulmate at work” tales: [email protected].

Let’s not, though, forget what happens when workplace love sours. I once worked in an office where we physically shifted the desks around so a couple who were mid-break-up didn’t have to eyeball each other across the monitors 👀.

Read on for the privacy-related reasons why many workers are resisting a return to their desks 🚻, and in Office Therapy we advise someone who thinks they are being ostracised by a new boss.

Is an en suite the next work perk?

I’ve seen a few things in recent weeks that suggest a surprising reason why so many people resist returning to the office: they only like to use their private bathroom at home. It’s just one of the “hygiene” factors — see also noisy workspaces and annoying colleagues 😤 — that are deterring people from a full RTO. Or, in some cases, from any return at all.

It seems that nobody has missed the pre-pandemic norm of communal bathrooms at work, those cold places of sorrow, embarrassment and non-privacy. (Especially for North Americans. Can someone living there explain why your restrooms have enormous gaps round the doors? 🤷‍♀️)

Most recently, a survey by a remote work job site, Jobera, (at least it’s clear about its biases) asked WFH workers for the main reasons why they didn’t want to go back to offices — and found that for 19 per cent of respondents it is that they “are so into their own bathroom that they’d rather just work from home”.

Our collective privacy mania is also creating a mini-boom in those noise-cancelling one-person call booths that are popping up everywhere. (I can see two near my desk at the FT.) The Wall Street Journal recently devoted a whole feature to the phenomenon, noting that in many workplaces it’s common for users to hang about in them well after their calls end. (I’d call that “pod hogging”. Oh good, another workplace etiquette problem to navigate . . . 😮)

Co-CEOs of giant architecture and design firm Gensler, Andy Cohen and Diane Hoskins, say that having private workspaces, as well as places to be collaborative, are indeed the top priorities for workers. It’s a strategy, they say, that “addresses the top reason employees come into the office, as identified by Gensler’s research: to focus on their work”. (For those in search of more inspiration, Andy and Diane have a new book out: Design for a Radically Changing World.)

Why has bathroom design taken so long to improve? And what sort of office design is going to attract people back? For a big-picture view I asked Lloyd Lee, managing partner at Yoo Capital — the developer behind the giant Olympia site in London. Lloyd says:

“Like most major turning points, the pandemic did not change the workforce but instead it exposed already-existing deficiencies about how we were working in our built environment. If people often spend significant time designing their homes, why should we not do the same for where we work? When people are asked to commit a major part of their waking hours to their jobs, they should feel the place where they work is of great quality, thoughtfully designed and a comfortable environment to focus on working.”

I love the idea that the time and effort going into designing workplaces — and their bathrooms — might catch up with the effort that goes into our homes. It makes sense. But I regret to inform you that trend spotters have noted a return to old-school cubicles and partitions. So not exactly what the forward-looking designers have in mind — but it’s certainly cheap and quick 💨.

Has your office got an amazing bathroom? How can cash-poor managers do a makeover of offices so that they have more private spaces? . . . And have you found a solution to stop people hogging the call booths? Email me: [email protected].

This week on the Working It podcast

We all have our frustrations at work, and some of them will focus on the ways that organisations make it hard, sometimes impossible, to get things done. The bigger the organisation, the more you’ll find your creativity, ideas — even your expenses payments — blocked or slowed down. Siloed thinking, bureaucracy and well-meaning leaders who make things worse: all of these add up to “friction” in the workplace.

On this week’s Working It podcast, I talk to Huggy Rao, a professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and co-author, with Bob Sutton, of the new book The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Huggy is enormous fun — and gives lots of useful takeaways on how to do things better. Then I chat to my colleague Andrew Hill about what happens when organisations have too few structures — and not enough friction. Want more? Andrew recently wrote in the FT about Bob, Huggy and the idea of friction.

*I have 10 copies of The Friction Project to give away. Email [email protected] with “Book Giveaway” in the subject line before tomorrow (Thursday) at 5pm UK time. We will then pick the winners at random from all entrants and will be in touch if you are successful.

Office Therapy

The problem: My boss was made redundant so I now report to our department head. This person has always been offhand with me. The thing that has happened, already, is that I have not been invited to the regular group team leader meetings. I complained the first time and was told it was an oversight. The second time, I realised I was being excluded. Any ideas? If I confront the director, they will deny everything.

Isabel’s advice: This sort of “bullying by exclusion” is surprisingly common — and it is bullying, if this is indeed what is going on. Make a note of everything, as soon as it happens, as a first step.

I asked Jonathan Black for his take on your problem. He’s the author of the Dear Jonathan advice column, a regular guest on the Working It podcast, and is the head of Oxford university’s careers service. He has seen it all, work-wise, and suggests a different perspective:

“We have all been through a very traumatic event in 2020-22 and the effects of that are still with us: in the workplace this trauma is compounded by uncertainties of WFH versus being present in the office, and outside work we witness friable social fabric and unethical behaviour in our institutions. All of this can make us more sensitive than we might have been before the pandemic: quicker to see slights, take offence, make assumptions and jump to conclusions.

“Let us start by assuming simple human error: the invitations to this meeting may have been sent from an automated list, not yet corrected, and it was indeed an oversight to leave you off the list. You could drop a note to all attendees before the next meeting (replying to the first email you had), apologising for missing those meetings (give your boss a “golden bridge”), asking for any minutes of those meetings, and confirm the date/place of the next one. The boss may of course respond by clarifying the invitee list has changed.”

And if that invitee list has changed? You’ll be able to move to the next steps — taking external advice from a union or lawyer, or the HR department (if you trust it) — and decide what, if anything, to do next.

Got a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: [email protected] or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Quiet hiring: why managers are recruiting from their own ranks A shift to skills-first rather than qualifications-first hiring and promotion is having an impact internally in companies facing skills shortages, write Bethan Staton and Emma Jacobs. Internal promotions are the key here.

2. Wharton tops the FT’s 2024 MBA rankings: Wharton business school, part of the University of Pennsylvania, has regained the top spot, followed by Insead in France and Columbia in New York. The rankings take into account a range of measures including value for money and gender diversity, as well as alumni pay.

3. Professionals find their competitive streak in group fitness challenges: As fitness and total personal optimisation go mainstream, especially for younger male executives, Emma Jacobs joins competitors at Hyrox, an elite event in Manchester.

4. Meet the psychologist who first identified imposter syndrome: A short interview by Marianna Giusti with the now 85-year-old Pauline Clance, about the origins and development of imposter syndrome, which she first named in a 1978 paper she co-authored as “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness”.

5. What a cultish coffee gizmo says about 21st century capitalism: A wonderful column about the Aeropress, a smart, portable way to make a perfect cup of coffee. Pilita Clark talks to its happy inventor — who refused to upsell, sell out or move manufacturing to China.

One more thing . . . 

Kara Swisher has been reporting on — and analysing — the tech scene for three decades. She warned about the rise of the “fleece-clad adult toddlers” in Silicon Valley, and also warned her early employers, the big US legacy media companies, that their advertising-based business model was about to be destroyed. Intelligencer has a compelling long extract from Kara’s forthcoming Burn Book. It covers her early adventures in tech reporting — back when nobody wanted to see what was coming 🙈.

A word from the Working It community

Last week’s newsletter about the importance of better listening (and why that’s so hard to do) brought in great tips from readers on how to listen better — at home and at work. I especially liked this, from Julia Nowicki in Madrid, on how our physical presence matters:

“I am currently training as a certified professional coach and I have learned that sitting up straight with your legs in a 90-degree angle, both feet firmly on the ground and hands in your lap is hard — and feels orthopaedic, even. But with time, the back muscles strengthen and that precise body posture is literally inviting other people to open up and talk more vulnerably.

“This posture is also great because you’re alert and it facilitates really listening to what is being said — sending the right signals — as opposed to a slumping body leading to a slouchy and scattered mind, wandering off the tangent.”