American View: Can You Really Improve Worker Morale with a Tasty Curry?

Future of Work12 Mar 2024

One of the truths all leaders must learn is that attitude surveys can’t be fully trusted. That’s not to say that surveys are inherently evil or functionally useless. Rather, they’re only as useful as their design allows. In my experience, far too many attitude surveys are crafted clumsily, allowing analysts to draw completely logical – and completely wrong! – conclusions. This experience tracks with advice I received as a sociology undergrad: careful engineering could always deliver exactly the result the survey taker wanted based on how their questions were phrased and how the possible answers were limited.

This is not to say that I don’t use surveys in my work because I do. I’m just careful to distrust any obvious “conclusions” derived from the collected data until we’ve had time to explore, clarify, and validate the data and to find the gaps in our thinking. I believe the same caution applies to survey data provided by vendors, service providers and PR flacks. It’s not that I suspect third parties’ motives to be sinister; rather, I worry that the conclusions offered might not be wholly accurate depending on how their data was collected, parsed, and explained. I can’t blame a company from offering up data that shows their products rock. They want to sell you something, otherwise, why would they go to all the trouble?

This subject came to mind last week when a press release hit my inbox from an amazingly named PR agency named “Brave Bison.” I mean, come on! With a name like that, I had to look. It turned out that the sender of their release – a lady named Tihana– had sent me a listicle style piece “revealing” why “desk workers” in the UK feel unproductive at work. I’m assuming from context that “desk workers” in this article refers to us low-level wage-slaves in the fabric veal pens. Right! That’s a subject I’m perpetually interested. Good on Tihana for sussing out something that would get my attention.

Long story short, Tihana article referred to a study from a company I’d never heard of called “Currys.” This confused the heck out of me; I couldn’t work out why what appeared to me to be a food processing company would be interested in cubicle farm productivity. I lost a half-hour delving into the company’s history before realizing that they weren’t trying to flog tasty Indian food as a cure for low employee morale. The outfit appears – from the site linked in the article – to want to sell home office equipment and furniture to remote workers instead. Bummer. ^[1]

Dangit, now I want a curry. The power of suggestion wins again.

Anyway, the top 11 “distractions” listed in the Currys article ^[2] suggested that “talkative colleagues” are the largest reported productivity-sapping distraction facing a thousand or so surveyed UK workers. I’m not about to suggest that the Currys data is wrong; for all I know this data might have been peer reviewed in The Lancet.

That said, I am curious how the options available to survey respondents was operational defined. For example, did “talkative colleagues” refer to in-person conversations in the waist-high woven labyrinth? Or to yakking co-workers on Zoom calls? Both? Neither? Even though I emotionally agree with the high-level complaint, the category as published is a bit vague for my tastes. Personally, my hearing loss makes chatter in my immediate vicinity extraordinarily distracting; that’s why I prefer to work remotely where the only “chatter” in my office comes from my dog – something I know how to “translate” by tone alone.

Another distraction listed halfway down the report’s table was “tiredness.” Now, I wholeheartedly agree that fatigue is a killer distraction. I’ve been sandbagged by chronic fatigue since I caught COVID and it’s a bloody nuisance shambling through a long meeting like a business school zombie. I prefer working remotely since I can do things in my home office to mitigate fatigue stress that I could never get away with in the office. For example, I can stand up and walk around during a meeting to keep from losing focus on the speaker(s). I can even switch my audio over to my phone and wander into my kitchen to make a coffee. Try walking out of an executive boardroom in the middle of a lecture to get a beverage and see what happens.

Still … I don’t see any reasons listed for how the survey respondents were expected to define “tiredness.” “Fatigue” can come from working long hours, to being overstressed, to having clinical issues like myalgic encephalomyelitis. It’s a sitcom trope that having small children at home is an inescapable cause of chronic exhaustion and dull wits. Then again, so is struggling with a strained marriage or living under a bullying supervisor. Without teasing apart the data to understand why people are claiming that “tiredness” is affecting their productivity, we can’t really do anything about it. Especially not from a high level.

Corporate executives cannot understand the culture of their own workers so long as they remain isolated and recognisable. Every management tier between the C-suite and the mailroom distorts the common picture of reality to suit its own needs. Hence why executives are often considered “out of touch” … they literally are by the inescapable nature of their role and rank.

Finally, there’s the problem of answers to the survey premise that don’t appear on the list of top “distractions” but definitely exist in real life. When Tihana pinged me to see if I had any questions, I responded “I’m curious why no one mentioned ‘work that actually matters’ or ‘a supervisor who isn’t a petty dictator with anger management control issues’ as reasons for lessened productivity.” ^[3]

Per my first tongue-in-cheek query, I recommend reading anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Though Graeber has his critics, I’ve found that his arguments have merit … especially over here in the USA. Two of the most common reasons I’ve heard co-workers share for why they quit their jobs were “my function is pointless” and “I spend too much time doing meaningless administrivia instead of doing my ‘real’ job.” If you’re looking for a productivity sapping “distraction,” there will be few more pernicious and exhausting than a Sisyphean daily routine. Yet those reasons don’t appear.

As for my second example, I’ve been arguing for years that dysfunctional office cultures are a plague on morale, esprit de corps, and professionalism. The aphorism “people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses” might not be quite as influential as Pinterest boards might suggest, but it is a strong source of stress that cripples productivity. When you’re too busy trying to dodge a bad boss’s temper tantrums or petty abuse, your productivity will suffer.

Neither of these factors showed up in the Currys data so I’m curious about their survey methodology. How did “social media” make the top eleven list, but “demoralization” didn’t? There must be logical reasons, but I don’t want to assume what might have happened. I’m guessing that the possible answers provided prevented the above-mentioned possibilities from showing up in the data. Or, perhaps, some or most of the survey respondents didn’t feel safe listing their real answers since they were taking the survey at work … where they knew their online activity was being monitored and that “disloyal” statements might bring retaliation. Or maybe the thousand respondents were all from a limited range of industry sectors that are less affected by crippling bureaucracy. I don’t know, since the article only shows conclusions and not methodology.

I remember reading an analysis of survey data back during the first Dot Com Boom that spoke to “best practices” in office design (or something like it). All the survey respondents had been single twentysomething tech bros from the San Francisco area. As such, their claimed priorities were worlds apart from the priorities of married adult parents who made up most of the workers in the companies that the article was attempting to influence.

On the whole, I’m not suggesting that this analysis was flawed or deceptive. I’m only using it as a convenient example of why I don’t fully trust published attitude survey data. I believe that such sources are useful for prompting introspection and debate. That alone is a darned fine reason to read press releases like this one. That said, I think these “conclusions” can only be treated as suggestive, not authoritative. They’re great conversations starters, not prescriptions.

If you want to improve your worker’s productivity, you first must understand the combination of factors and stressors affecting their work. That includes everything from their health to their home life to their interpersonal relationships to the nature of the work they’re assigned. Nothing is cut-and-dried when it comes to understanding behaviour. More importantly, every echelon aggregated above that of the first-line supervisor distorts the findings beyond the point of usefulness. At best you can identify some actionable general common issues like “the tea service in Slough is subpar.”

Which brings us full circle to my original misunderstanding. I really do wonder if a lovely curry would be a more effective restorative for some workers than “natural lighting” or “a tidy desk.” I suspect it would be for me … although I suspect that being allowed to tell an exasperating chatterbox to get bent without triggering a stern discussion with HR would be much more satisfying. To each their own.

^[1] I’m a little disappointed; I thought the idea that “a lovely curry will help alleviate a crap day at the office” would be a killer sales angle.
^[2] Which is repeated in full on the linked site if you’re interested.
^[3] Tihana hadn’t replied to me by the time I finished this column. I’m still curious to hear what she has to say about the survey’s design choices.

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