On Work, HR, Cheese and Leadership

Over the last couple of weeks, I have delivered keynotes for a banking event, an HR events and I was a guest on a couple of leadership podcasts and I have to admit that I am re-energised and hopeful! There’s hope for humanity in the workplace! There's swell in the "woke HR/people" movement. There's mass, people are resolute to see lasting change. So many people with their hearts in the right place that I can’t begin to name them all or give you examples but overall, the sheer quantity of people who were saying the right things was overwhelming. I genuinely have renewed hope in spite of the absurd rhetorics in the UK that sees the government have ideas about the value of working from home.

Said rhetorics, if you missed it, sees the Prime Minister of the country have a stance on productivity to the sound of collective eye rolls. In what could forever be linked to his name as his contribution to the momentous world of work change moment that he missed, he offers an illustrious example where, when he was working from home himself, his sense of urgency seems to have been sorely missing and as a result, his actions were slow and he was less scintillating than his usual scintillating self:

“My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing.” -said Boris Johnson having clear decided to risk being confined to history as the purveyor of office work productivity advice despite his propensity for distracting cheese.

So the fact that there are people out there who take the topics of human work seriously despite misguided and irresponsible "leadership signals" in chatter such as this one, is really good news. There are people out there who are concerned with the right topics:

What are real outcomes for us? When and where should work best happen so we accomplish those?