No chairs, no email, no hierarchy: the new rules of the workplace

Beds, dogs and treadmills are in; hierarchy, chairs and group emails are out. Richard Godwin on the changing face of the modern workplace
Being arse-bound encourages lethargy...
Richard Godwin3 July 2014

Trust your employees

The central balancing act for all managers comes down to this: do you structure work around your employees or do you structure your employees around their work? Control freaks prefer the former; hence such innovations as the time sheet, the zero-hours contract and the Korean firms of the 1980s that stopped serving soup in their canteens as it made workers go to the loo too often, thus decreasing productivity. Let’s Go Crazy Holdings, a Kennington-based marketing and technology company, takes the opposite approach. The founder, Callum Negus Fancey, 24, allows his employees unlimited paid leave and says he now reaps the benefits. ‘Our main aim is to make everyone feel like their own boss,’ he says. ‘If it’s raining, they don’t come in — and I’m fine with that. Likewise, if they’re going to a wedding, I really don’t want them to miss it. It’s about removing friction from people’s lives.’ He is much persuaded by the ideas of American motivation expert Dan Pink, who showed that workers need three things to feel motivated: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Negus Fancey doesn’t measure the time his employees put in, but the product they put out, so they might as well be working from a beach somewhere. ‘If you get all your work done, we don’t reward that with more work. We don’t want workaholics. We want people who are motivated by what they’re doing.’ He says it averages out at nine hours per day and six weeks’ leave per year.

No sitting

Heard of Sedentary Desk Syndrome? If you spend half your life sitting behind a desk, chances are you’ve experienced it. Not only does being arse-bound encourage lethargy, bad posture and mayonnaise stains on your crotch, but there’s a growing opinion that our buttock-centred lifestyles are responsible for everything from obesity to heart disease (people who sit down at work have twice the risk of cardiovascular disease). That’s why standing desks are becoming so fashionable, endorsed by everyone from Donald Rumsfeld to Google, which offers them at its Central Saint Martins campus. At Net-a-porter, all meetings are held standing up, which cuts business back to essentials. Or you could take it a step further and invest in a walking desk and ping emails around while pacing at 2mph. Susie Forbes, principal of the Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design, swears by hers — and after Victoria Beckham paid her a visit and Instagrammed herself on it, orders went through the roof.

Flatten your hierarchy

While Elle editor Lorraine Candy was on maternity leave last year, she hatched a plan. She wanted to ‘future-proof’ the magazine by bringing down the divide between the print and the digital operations and creating a new culture of collaboration. The first step? She abolished her own office. ‘I’m probably the only glossy magazine editor in the world without one!’ she laughs. ‘The others are all highly suspicious.’ Now, like each of Elle’s 42 members of staff, she sits wherever there is a free desk. At the BBC, hot-desking has reportedly led to W1A-style tensions, but Candy describes the atmosphere as much more playful, closer to a Silicon Valley startup, with music, Wednesday running clubs and yoga classes in the fashion cupboard, which is now the centrepiece of the office. ‘I absolutely hated sitting in the office, not knowing what was going on. It’s made me a lot happier and a lot more informed.’ It’s also a lot more efficient: ‘My designers don’t need to book a meeting room to ascertain whether I want to have a pair of Prada silver shoes on a certain page. They can simply ask me. As soon as you reduce the amount of meetings you can get the workflow moving a lot quicker.’

Sleep on the job...

Sleep on the job

New-media queen Arianna Huffington recently unveiled two nap rooms at the offices of The Huffington Post. Apparently, they’re much in demand — and downtime helps rather than hinders creativity, according to researchers. ‘If we want people to be more creative, we need people to be able to do less,’ says UCL brain expert Vincent Walsh. ‘Companies should allow naps in the afternoon. They should get rid of the habit of clocking in and clocking out. Let people come in when they want. If they want to work through the night, let them.’

Be good to your women

Deloitte, one of the Big Four professional ser-vices firms, has recently introduced a policy of ‘agile’ working. Employees are now allowed to opt for three- and four-day working weeks, work from home and take ‘time out’ — four weeks of unpaid leave each year in addition to the standard five weeks of paid leave. ‘It’s not just about working fewer hours, it’s about changing the way of working,’ says Emma Codd, a managing partner at the firm. ‘A lot of our workers now come from Generation Y. They’ve grown up working remotely and they realise it’s not an impediment if they’re not sitting in an office.’ It is working mothers, who traditionally used to leave the industry once they had children, who have responded the most positively. Many take their ‘time out’ during the school holidays. ‘It will benefit everybody, but we do believe it benefits women,’ says Codd. ‘I’ve got five-year-old twins and I try to work from home one day a week. On that day, I still deliver — in fact, I probably get more work done than I do sitting in the office — but I also get to feel like a mother.’ This is all focused on a long-term aim of increasing the number of female partners at the firm to 25 per cent by 2020 and 30 per cent by 2030. ‘It’s very clear that the greater range of voices you have at every level, the greater the benefit. Why wouldn’t you want to have that?’ she asks.

Get a campus

Once upon a time, offices were dark, cramped places: Dickensian clerks scribbling in grottos of books. By the mid-20th century, the open-plan model was in the ascendancy. These days, however, everyone wants to work on ‘campus’. Firms such as Google and Pixar try to replicate a university environment, complete with cultural events, educational programmes and design that encourages informal interactions. The idea is that chance meetings lead to chance conversations between departments, chance insights and, hopefully, chance innovations. The ideal is the famous Building 20, a scrappy dumping ground for odd academics on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that gave rise to everything from Noam Chomsky’s theories of linguistics to Bose stereo systems.

Stir the pot

Second Home is a new working space in Spitalfields, which is due to open in October. Rohan Silva (who used to work for David Cameron) hopes he can nurture the next generation of startups by manufacturing serendipity: ‘The thinking is that creativity comes from the collision between different worlds,’ he says. ‘That’s what is so incredible about London: it has fashion, tech, design, finance, advertising, media, all in one place. We want to be a microcosm of that.’ Second Home will feature a number of carefully chosen firms in different fields, each operating in its own private ‘sanctuary’, lined with hydroponic plants. However, the building will also be highly ‘networked’. In the centre is a 100-capacity auditorium for holding talks, gigs and events. There will also be a greenhouse restaurant for the occupants’ exclusive use and an on-site team whose job is solely to ‘stir the pot’ and encourage the fashionistas to flirt with the techies.

Abandon email

The rumours of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated, but there are encouraging signs that the endless, tedious, pointless trails of ‘cc’ s may soon be coming to an end. Slack, a new messaging system that operates more like instant chat, recently attracted $43 million of funding. The ‘chat platform’ sits in the middle of your screen and brings conversations out into the open, so everyone can pitch in. The advertising tagline is ‘Be less busy’, which sounds delightful… if only everyone would stop posting annoying Slack messages on your screen.

Half-day summer Fridays are the new...well ... Fridays

Keep your employees entertained

Ping pong is a Shoreditch cliché, while free cupcakes tend to result in childish tantrums, but a few playful touches can go a long way to humanising an office. At Martha Lane Fox’s co-working space Sohost there’s a company dog to pet, while the Shoreditch tech business Mind Candy has a treehouse. We particularly like the homely, cerebral atmosphere at Memrise HQ in Hackney, where there’s a four-poster bed, an Aga and live jazz.

...But don’t try to be their mates

At Clerkenwell-based tech startup OpenSignal, the interview reputedly includes questions on the cult sitcom Arrested Development. If you’re a fan, you’re their kind of person. If not, sorry. That may make for top bants, but it also sounds very likely to result in tedious in-jokes and dangerous ‘groupthink’. As for cult Californian yoga company Lululemon, where ‘educators’ give employees lectures on willpower and motivation, let’s just say there’s a fine line between caring and creepy. The best firms respect the work-life boundary. Give us the summer Fridays at Asos — where everyone takes half the afternoon off — over the culture of office drinks. Remember: you may be having a caipirinha at your desk, but you’re still at your desk.

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