Spending time with people you like makes most things more appealing, including work. If a job is sufficiently humdrum, camaraderie among colleagues can be the main draw. The support of friends can also encourage people to try new things. A study from 2015 by Erica Field of Duke University, and her co-authors, looked at the impact of business training given to Indian women. Women who attended the course with a friend were more likely to end up taking out loans than those who came alone.

The reverse also applies. Antagonistic relationships with co-workers are always likely to make working life miserable. A study conducted by Valerie Good of Grand Valley State University found that loneliness has an adverse effect on the performance of salespeople. Among other things, they start spending more on wining and dining their customers. The only thing worse than a salesperson who sees you as a way to make money is one who wants your company.

So friends matter. The problems come when managers see the words “higher employee engagement” and leap to the conclusion that they should try to engineer work friendships. In a report published last year Gallup gave the example of an unnamed organisation which has a weekly companywide meeting that spotlights one employee’s best friend at work. It’s not known if, in the q&a, others pop up to sob: “But I thought we were best friends at work.”

Startups also offer services to encourage work friendships. One monitors the depth of connections between people in different teams. It identifies shared interests (gluten-free baking, say, or workplace surveillance) between employees who don’t know each other and arranges meetings between them. You thought life was bad? At least you are not making crumpets with a stranger in finance.

It is a mistake for managers to wade into the business of friend-making, and not just because it royally misses the point. The defining characteristic of friendship is that it is voluntary. Employees are adults; they don’t need their managers to arrange play-dates. And the workplace throws people together, often under testing conditions: friendships will naturally follow.

The bigger problem is that workplace friendships are more double-edged than their advocates allow. They can quickly become messy when power dynamics change. The transition from friend to boss, or from friend to underling, is an inherently awkward one (“This is your final warning. Fancy a pint?”).

And friendships have the potential to look a lot like cronyism. A clever study by Zoe Cullen of Harvard Business School and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of University of California, Berkeley, found that employees’ social interactions with their managers could give their career prospects a boost relative to others.

The researchers looked at promotions of smokers and non-smokers who worked for a large bank in South-East Asia, hypothesising that sharing smoking breaks with managers who also indulged might give workers a leg up. And so it did. Smokers who moved from a non-smoking boss to a puffer were promoted more quickly than those who moved to another non-smoker. The authors found that social interactions did not just help smokers; socialising between male managers and male employees played a large role in perpetuating gender pay gaps. If firms are going to make friendship their business, they should worry about its downsides, too.

Bottom line is companies should facilitate interactions between employees, particularly in a world of hybrid and remote working. Social gatherings and buddy systems are reasonable ways to encourage colleagues to meet each other and to foster a culture. But a high-quality work relationship does not require friendship. It requires respect for each other’s competence, a level of trust and a desire to reach the same goal; it doesn’t need birthday cards and a shared interest in quiltmaking. Firms should do what they can to encourage these kinds of relationships. If individuals want to take it further, it’s entirely up to them.

We used to make things. Now we have meetings. On any given weekday some 50m meetings are held in American workplaces alone. The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week, a figure that has more than doubled since the 1960s. The number of meetings proliferated in the 1980s as Western economies moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries that seemed to require a lot of talking. And while covid-19 may have shut down the office (at least temporarily), it magnified the importance of meetings, which now take place on our laptops. During the pandemic we’ve spent more time in them than we ever did in person.

Despite their centrality to modern life, few of us have a good word to say about meetings. Surveys suggest we consider at least half the ones we attend to be ineffective – the same bores drone on, the people with something useful to say don’t speak and nothing of importance gets decided. In many office cultures, a meeting is a byword for a tedious, time-wasting exercise.

Frustration with meetings has fuelled a mini-industry in management books – “How to Hold Successful Meetings”, “Meeting Design” and “Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable” – dedicated to solving what one author labels “the most painful problem in business”.

Yet perhaps the sharpest analysis lies elsewhere. Though office meetings are a relatively recent phenomenon, people have been gathering to discuss decisions since Adam and Eve huddled over the forbidden fruit, and successive generations of poets and writers have chronicled the dynamics in their work.

“The Iliad”, Western literature’s foundational text, kicks off with a meeting. The Greeks are nine years into the siege of Troy, a plague has ravaged their ranks and they gather to ponder the flagging campaign (good teamwork is conspicuously absent: Achilles, the Greek’s foremost warrior, comes close to killing the commander, King Agamemnon).

In detailing the twists and turns of this conference, and subsequent ones held by the Greeks, Trojans and gods of Mount Olympus, Homer nails meeting behaviour with a precision that management gurus today can only dream of. Where Homer blazes a trail, other literary greats follow: the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive. Time to put yourself on mute, turn off your camera and get reading.

Though “The Iliad” is ostensibly a book about bloody battles and an interminable siege, much of the action turns on arguments between key individuals. A little way into the epic, the assembled Greeks are once again holding a discussion on what to do about their stalemate (in fact Agamemnon has already resolved to have another crack at the walls of Troy). A commoner, Thersites, speaks up to make the case for cutting their losses: their ships are rotting, they already have plenty of loot and Agamemnon has already proved to be a poor leader. Isn’t it time to head home?

Odysseus, a high-ranking commander, orders Thersites to check his “glib tongue” and then beats him up for “playing the fool” and daring to “argue with princes”; the crowd delights at Thersites’s humiliation.

By inviting us to watch a reasonable argument dismissed with violence, Homer makes clear that the Greeks did not believe in a frank exchange of views. The meeting was a large one, but common folk were there to legitimise decisions already taken by their superiors. Such assemblies were clearly as frustratingly common in Homer’s time as they are in ours.

Encouraging junior staff to voice their opinions is one of the biggest difficulties modern managers face. Many, like Homer’s warlords, shut them down – truly open meetings are a nightmare to run. But getting the view from the floor isn’t just good for employees’ morale; it’s a way to gather useful information and different opinions. Any organisation that shuts down its Thersites is losing valuable insights. The Greeks took Troy in the end, but Thersites was right about the state of their navy: Odysseus, famously, got shipwrecked on the way home.

Bosses typically get to be bosses because they are confident in their own judgment and willing to assert themselves. That often means they become furious when they’re challenged – which makes it hard to step back and hold an open discussion.

Few works of literature dramatise this problem better than “King Lear”. Like “The Iliad”, the play opens with a meeting, as Lear discusses how to manage his succession. As with many managers, he has already predetermined the course of action: he plans to divvy up his kingdom between his three daughters. His only decision is how large a share to give each child, a judgment he will make depending on their answer to the question, who “doth love us most”. The real purpose of the meeting, it becomes clear, is for the old king to be lavished with “opulent” praise.

His two older children strive to outdo each other with performative sycophancy (no other joy, apparently, is as great as their love for their father). But Cordelia, his youngest – and the only one who genuinely loves her father, as the play goes on to demonstrate – refuses to flatter him (“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth”). Rather than hear her out, Lear flies into a rage, strips her of her portion and disowns her.

The snap decision testifies to Lear’s poor management skills. What comes next is even more of a no-no. Kent, the king’s most loyal aide, steps in to ask his master to reconsider his punishment of Cordelia. Lear silences him, warning, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” Kent insists on speaking his mind, saying he is duty bound to be “unmannerly when Lear is mad”. The king sends him into exile.

The figure of the overbearing leader who pays the price for his failure to countenance “the moody frontier of a servant brow” recurs throughout Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. In “Henry IV, Part I”, the rebel Hotspur is so unwilling to listen to counsel that his ally Northumberland blasts him for “tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!” In “Richard III” the king turns on Buckingham, his partner in crime, the moment that he expresses faint doubts about Richard’s schemes. Similarly, bosses who expect their underlings merely to back up their views – and leave them too frightened to contradict them – often make bad decisions.

Nowadays, leaders are better at pretending to listen to their subordinates. But fear of displeasing the boss still shapes most meetings. During the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy was so concerned that his national-security staff would rather say the right thing in front of him than work out the best strategy that he left the room for many discussions.

Today’s chief executives tend to follow King Lear, not Kennedy. According to one study, the person running a meeting generally speaks for between a third and two-thirds of the time allotted to the session. As the authors of this survey noted: “Even in egalitarian Denmark, we very rarely observed meeting participants challenge their leaders’ right to speak as much as they please.” King Lear created a “stage of fools”. Try not to do the same.

Anyone who thinks keeping a group discussion on track is easy would do well to study “Lord of the Flies”. William Golding’s novel follows a bunch of schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. Meetings become central to their attempt to structure their mini-society, and they adopt a rule that anyone can speak if they’re holding the group’s conch shell (a prefiguration of Zoom’s yellow halo).

They clearly believe that more voices would improve the group’s decisions. It is a great, democratic experiment. But it fails.

Ralph, the boys’ putative leader, finds it impossible to translate talk into action, and laments the frequency of meetings at which nothing is achieved. “Everybody enjoys speaking and being together. We decide things. But they don’t get done.” His words will resonate with many modern managers.

The inability to manage discussion also results in a two-tier system. As Ralph observes, “practised debaters – Jack, Maurice, Piggy – would use their whole art to twist the meeting.” This leads to less adept speakers becoming marginalised. As Jack puts it: “It’s time some people knew they’ve got to keep quiet and leave deciding things to the rest of us.”

We have all experienced the situation whereby a few individuals dominate – and people who talk first and frequently in meetings tend to have an inordinate impact on the flow of discussion. Individuals who love the sound of their own voice are not necessarily well liked by others in the group, but we generally listen to them: people tend to think of them as influential by default. And talkativeness feeds on itself. Studies show that the more someone contributes in a meeting, the more they are likely to be asked questions. We seem to assume that people speak because they have something useful to say. So it was with Golding’s tribe on the island.

The problem with letting meetings run wild isn’t just that quieter (and less white and less male) voices are marginalised. Counterintuitively, you’re not as likely to learn anything new. Garold Stasser, a social psychologist, has shown that when there are no rules to meetings, conversations tend to be a rehash of what everyone already knows. Meetings without order don’t achieve anything except the entrenchment of powerful personalities, as Piggy learned the hard way. You can’t save a civilisation – or bring light to the darkness of man’s heart – with a conch shell alone.

At the start of “Paradise Lost” Satan and his army of fallen angels convene, much like Homer’s Greeks, in order to work out how to turn their fortunes around. Satan has just led the infernal rabble in a spectacularly botched rebellion in Heaven and now they’re literally stuck in Hell.

Unlike Agamemnon, Satan seems genuinely keen to come up with a strategy that everyone supports (not for nothing was John Milton an advocate of the parliamentarians in England’s civil war).

When Satan opens the floor to debate, four arch-demons make their case. Moloch advocates “open Warr”. Belial, whom Milton describes as an artful and cynical speaker, suggests that they do nothing and hope God sees fit to forgive them. Mammon argues for abandoning any idea of returning to Heaven and instead building an empire in Hell. And Beelzebub counsels sending a demon to Earth to seduce or destroy this “new Race call’d Man”. The issue is put to a vote.

This emphasis on collective decision making characterised many literary meetings after Homer. Influenced by the ideals of Athenian democracy, playwrights such as Aesychlus and Euripides depicted meetings in which the outcome was decided by the mood in the room, not the most senior person there. The result wasn’t always the right one, but the procedure was represented as admirable.

In Hell, the diabolical assembly chose to precipitate the fall of Man – which turns out to be the option Satan was most in favour of all along. Some scholars have suggested that Satan manipulated the vote. But perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge that, in getting people to vote for his preferred outcome, Satan was simply really good at meetings.

Management by plebiscite is not, of course, a viable option for most companies. But Satan knew what he was doing. It’s a good idea to ask everyone in the room to register their opinion at the end of the session, even if you don’t have a yes-no question – you can ask people how likely they think an outcome is, or to rank the various options presented. As well as giving people a sense that their voice matters, consulting a wider group gives leaders access to a collective judgment that – as a large body of literature on the wisdom of crowds shows – is likely to be a good one.

Deep in the laws and commentaries of the Talmud, there is an unusual provision about capital punishment: if all 71 judges in a capital case agree that the death penalty should be imposed, then it is automatically taken off the table.

This seems counterintuitive, given that courts today often insist on unanimity to convict someone of murder. But the Talmudic principle embodies an important insight about the perils of consensus: if everyone is seeing things a certain way, you may well have missed something important.

When you look back at famously bad decisions made by small groups – the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, Enron’s board of directors signing off on risky accounting practices – it’s striking how sure participants were that they were right, and how little disagreement was voiced.

Arthur Schlesinger, an adviser to Kennedy, noted that in the discussions that led up to the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, meetings “took place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus”. Information that might have disrupted that accord was excluded or rationalised away. The longer people talked to each other, the dumber they became. Meetings didn’t open minds, it closed them.

You sometimes need an active strategy to avoid groupthink, which arises from a toxic but beguiling combination of conformism and positive reinforcement. When the judges of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court in Temple times, passed their verdicts, they would speak in reverse order of seniority, so that less experienced judges wouldn’t tailor their opinions to fit those of senior ones.

More recent management experts like Kathleen Eisenhardt and Jay Bourgeois actively encourage a “good fight” in meetings. Arguments can be a sign that participants fundamentally trust each other and are working towards the same goal – that’s what allows them to express substantive differences of opinion.

It takes a rare leader to see discord as a boon, however. Alfred Sloan, the legendary boss of General Motors from the 1920s to the 1950s, was one such maverick. “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here,” he said at the end of one board meeting. “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.” Agamemnon would probably have had him thrashed.

A new study shows that, in tech, over one-third of professionals admit they have issues with depression. Specifically, 38.8 percent of tech pros responding to a Blind survey say they’re depressed. When you tie employers into this, the main offenders are Amazon and Microsoft, where 43.4 percent and 41.58 percent (respectively) of employees say they’re depressed. Intel rounds out the top three with 38.86 percent of its respondents reporting issues with depression.

I’ll point out the top three companies may not be entirely to blame for the depression concerns of tech pros. All three have large footprints in the Pacific Northwest, where the shorter daylight of Fall and Winter contribute to Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. This narrow window of daylight, along with routine overcast or rainy conditions, can throw off a body’s circadian rhythm. Seattle psychiatrist David Avery tells The Seattle Times that less daylight can also affect the brain’s hypothalamus, which directs the body’s release of hormones such as melatonin and cortisol. (It’s worth noting Blind didn’t identify any geographical data about respondents to its depression survey.)

There are similarities between this depression survey and other Blind studies. Over one-third of tech pros report being depressed; over half say their workplace is unhealthy; nearly 60 percent report burnout. An anonymous Dice survey shows most tech pros are dissatisfied with their job enough to consider seeking new employment elsewhere. In other words, across the industry, there’s a strong sense of dissatisfaction amongst tech pros.

At least when it comes to users, tech companies seem to realize their products have an impact on mental health. At WWDC 2018, Apple introduced App Limits, a method to reduce how often you use your phone, particularly the apps on it; it seems to focus in particular on social media, which has been proven many times to directly link to depression.

The upside to this survey is that most tech pros aren’t reporting depression issues. While that’s wonderful, we can’t overlook the nearly 40 percent of tech pros who admit feeling depressed. If you feel similarly, please reach out to a mental health professional for guidance and best practices to deal with your depression the right way.

More details: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/12/03/39-percent-of-tech-workers-are-depressed

“LONELINESS is a crowded room,” as Bryan Ferry of the band Roxy Music once warbled, adding that everyone was “all together, all alone”. The open-plan office might have been designed to make his point. That is not the rationale for the layout, of course. The supposed aim of open-plan offices is to ensure that workers will have more contact with their colleagues, and that the resulting collaboration will lead to greater productivity.

Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, two Harvard Business School academics, set out to test this proposition*. The authors surveyed interactions between colleagues in two unnamed multinational companies which had switched to open-plan offices. They did so by recruiting workers to wear “sociometric” badges. These used infra-red sensors to detect when people were interacting, microphones to determine when they were speaking or listening to each other, another device to monitor their body movement and posture and a Bluetooth sensor to capture their location.

At the first company, the authors found that face-to-face interactions were more than three times higher in the old, cubicle-based office than in an open-plan space where employees have clear lines of sight to each other. In contrast, the number of e-mails people sent to each other increased by 56% when they switched to open-plan. In the second company, face-to-face interactions decreased by a third after the switch to open-plan, whereas e-mail traffic increased by between 22% and 50%.

Why did this shift occur? The authors suggest that employees value their privacy and find new ways to preserve it in an open-plan office. They shut themselves off by wearing large headphones to keep out the distractions caused by nearby colleagues. Indeed, those who champion open-plan offices seem to have forgotten the importance of being able to concentrate on your work.

Employees also find other ways of communicating with their fellow workers. Rather than have a chat in front of a large audience, employees simply send an e-mail; the result (as measured at one of the two companies surveyed) was that productivity declined.

Cubicles do not offer a great work environment either; they are still noisy and cut off employees from natural light. But at least workers have more of a chance to give their work area a personal touch. Allowing plenty of room for pictures of children, office plants, novelty coffee mugs—these are ways of making people feel more relaxed and happy in their jobs.

Such comforts are completely denied when companies shift to “hot-desking”, as 45% of multinationals plan by 2020, according to CBRE, a property firm, up from 30% of such companies now. Workers roam the building in search of a desk, like commuters hunting the last rush-hour seat or tourists looking for a poolside lounger. If you planned to spend a morning quietly reading a research paper or a management tome, tough luck; the last desk was nabbed by Jenkins in accounts.

Hot-desking is a clear message to low-level office workers that they are seen as disposable cogs in a machine. Combine this with the lack of privacy and the office becomes a depressing place to work. Workers could stay at home but that negates the intended benefits of collaboration that open-plan offices bring.

The drive for such offices is reminiscent of the British enthusiasm for residential tower blocks after the second world war. One British wartime survey found that 49% wanted to live in a small house with a garden; only 5% wanted a flat. But flats they got. Architects, who fancied themselves as visionaries like Howard Roark, the “hero” of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, competed to create concrete temples for the masses to occupy. As David Kynaston, in his book “Austerity Britain” recounts, the desires of the actual residents were dismissed.

The real reason post-war architects built flats rather than homes is that it was a lot cheaper. And the same reason, not the supposed benefits of mingling with colleagues, is why open-plan offices are all the rage. More workers can be crammed into any given space.

Some people like them, of course, just as some like living in tower blocks. The only option for everyone else is to kick up a stink until executives change their minds and provide some personal space. In other words: workers of the world, unite. So you can separate again.

Margaret C. Whitman. the board chairman and chief executive officer of HP revealed that she will be stepping away in February from the lightning-rod job she has had for the last six-plus years. She will be replaced by 23-year HP veteran Antonio Fabio Neri, the current president of HPE.

HPE's stock has risen from $9.88 on its first day, Nov. 1, 2015, to $13.95 on Nov. 30, 2017. HP Inc.'s has fared even better; on Dec. 3 2012, it was $5.90; it was $21.45 on Nov. 30, 2017. Investors should have no complaints, but critics say Whitman raised the value of the stock by cutting costs at HP, and they have a point. But the company has been managed by her and her team to stay in the financial black while revenues have leveled off and declined--mostly due to competition from smaller, more nimble new-gen software and hardware companies.

In her six-year tenure, Whitman had to do what managers universally hate to do: oversee the layoffs of employees. At last count, the number of those let go amounted to nearly 85,000. HPE and HP Inc. together still employ about 250,000 people worldwide. Eighty-five thousand! That's more than too much displacement for anybody to have to handle. Firing even one person is difficult.

Whitman's tenure at Hewlett-Packard was marked by a major split, a big spinout-merger, numerous acquisitions and several division sales that changed the legendary 78-year-old Silicon Valley company forever. The company was forced to evolve all through the first decade of the 2000s, when it made a $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002 under then-CEO Carly Fiorina and a subsequent $11 billion acquisition of British analytics firm Autonomy that turned out to be a huge mistake. HP spent billions acquiring some promising companies during Whitman's time on the board and as CEO. They include 3COM (networking, 2010), 3PAR (data storage, 2010), Vertica (database analytics, 2011), Eucalyptus (cloud management software, 2014), Aruba Networks (mobile networking, 2015), Simplivity (hyperconverged data center equipment, 2017), Cloud Cruiser (cloud cost management and optimization, 2017) and Nimble Storage (flash and hybrid data storage, 2017). The spinout-merger of HPE's software business into Micro Focus, which became official Sept. 1, was another major milestone in Whitman's time at the helm.

The Autonomy deal was not a high point. It made under short-term CEO Léo Apotheker, who came from SAP and turned out to be ill-suited for the job. He lasted less than one year (2010-2011) before being replaced by Whitman. At the time, HP had fired its previous CEO (Mark Hurd, now at Oracle) for expenses irregularities, and appointed Apotheker as CEO and president. At the time, HP was seen as problematic by the market, with margins falling and having failed to redirect and establish itself in major new markets, such as cloud and mobile services. Apotheker's strategy was to dispose of hardware businesses like Palm and move into the more profitable software services sector, a strategy competitor IBM was also enacting at the time. As part of this strategy, Autonomy and its analytics franchise was acquired by HP in October 2011. HP paid $10.3 billion for 87.3 percent of the shares, valuing Autonomy at around $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion) overall, a premium of around 79 percent over market price. The deal was widely criticized as chaotic attempt to rapidly reposition HP and enhance earnings, and had been objected to even by HP's own CFO. Other problems eventually surfaced surrounding Autonomy, including allegations that it oversold its capabilities to Apotheker and other HP executives. After Apotheker was fired in September 2011, HP had to write off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. Litigation surrounding the ill-fated deal continues to this day. This is the unsettled scenario in which Whitman arrived in the CEO chair, although as a board member she certainly had to see some of the problems coming. Repercussions of these problems are still being felt today.

The 61-year-old Whitman, listed by Forbes as having $3 billion in assets, is stepping away from a hot-seat job that earns her about $20 million per year ($4.86 million of that in salary). She has served CEO tenures at both eBay (1998 to 2008) and HP (2011 to 2018), taking some time off from business in 2009 and 2010 in an unsuccessful run as a Republican for governor of California. In fiscal 2016, after the company split into two--HP Inc. and HP Enterprise, in 2015--she earned a cool $35.6 million, which included stock options worth $11.7 million alongside restricted shares worth $19 million if she meets certain performance requirements. Whitman, who will remain on the HPE board, has planned ahead, downsizing from her large Atherton estate to an apartment in Palo Alto, Calif. and a mountain home in Telluride, Colo.

Reid was hired at the age of 52 in 2002 as the director of operations and director of engineering. In 2003, he was demoted, and in 2004 he was fired, when he was 54, according to the lawsuit.

In his lawsuit, filed in July 2004, Reid said he worked closely with Google founders Sergey Brin, then 28, and Larry Page, then 29, and that he was fired because he was not a "cultural fit" with the company. According to the lawsuit, Page, who was almost 31 at the time, made the decision to fire Reid.

...one of Reid's supervisors, Urs Hoelzle, who is 15 years younger than Reid, and others, told him his opinions and ideas were "obsolete" and "too old to matter." He was also told that he was "slow," "fuzzy," lethargic," "did not display a sense of urgency" and "lacked energy," according to court documents. Reid said he was also called, "an old man" and an "old fuddy-duddy" by his colleagues.

Reid, who has a doctorate in computer science, said he was given a positive review by Google's vice president of engineering, Wayne Rosing, who wrote Reid's only written evaluation. Rosing, who was 55 at the time, described Reid in the review as having "an extraordinarily broad range of knowledge concerning operations, engineering in general, and an aptitude and orientation toward operational and IT issues."

Details: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9041081&source=NLT_MGT&nlid=23