By John Ashcroft
Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, recently spoke about the effects of home working on creativity and relationships. Reflecting on the need to work from home due to Covid-19 he concluded that
“the past six months have certainly depleted my social capital: I do not feel I know anyone at work better than six months ago and most a little less well.” Knowledge is one of the five core domains of our approach to assessing relationships and there are two important elements to this. One is that what we know about people informs the way we manage those relationships. If we know someone, or an organisation, well we are better able to interpret their responses, anticipate the impact of our decisions on them and access their skills and knowledge. Not knowing people means that we are more likely to end up saying:
- ‘You should have asked me…. I could have told you’. Opportunities are missed when we don’t know the knowledge, skills or contacts that others could contribute.
- ‘I’m shocked….’ Individuals and organisations are not always what they seem. Their activities in other areas may surprise us and cause us to question our original assessment of them.
- ‘I thought it would help …’ Good intentions can go wrong when the needs and circumstances of others, and the impact of actions on them, are poorly understood’
- ‘I assumed that you …’ Limited knowledge of the pressures people face, their capacity or priorities can lead to false assumptions and misunderstanding.
But relationships are also the way in which we get to know an organisation. Informal channels are key to sharing knowledge. Davenport and Prusak’s classic study Working Knowledge: How Organisations Manage What They Know showed that although idle talk in the workplace has often been considered a waste of time, it is the way the organisation’s knowledge network updates itself and tacit knowledge is shared around the organisation. This is echoed by Haldane:
“I always knew that I picked up a lot of information from the unscheduled time between meetings, when informal and sometimes chance conversations take place. Having now lived without them for 6 months, I now realise these informal non-meetings were often my main source of information. The informal chat in the 5 minute walk from the lift to my office often contained more useful knowledge than the subsequent one-hour meeting in my office. The other week I spoke to the Bank’s new crop of graduates. When I was in their shoes, almost all of my knowledge came from informal conversations in the pub with my graduate cohort on their jobs, bosses and experiences, rather than from listening to talking heads like me. This year all of that is lost and, with it, a significant down-payment of social capital. Those losses are being replicated among organisations right around the world. This social capital, once lost, will be difficult to reacquire.”
There are ways in which video calls between staff working at home can build better knowledge. We’re more likely to see children interrupting or catch a glimpse of home environments. But these don’t replace all the chance off-line and overheard conversations that help us to get to know people and what’s going in an organisation. So as we face the possibility of prolonged absence from the offices over the winter what might we do to avoid further erosion of the social and relational capital?
We can’t rely on what Haldane calls the serendipity of chance encounter. Being in offices, meeting face to face, social encounters – all offer a wealth of opportunities and we can scan the environment for clues and signals about who and what we might need to know. Now knowing and being known has to become a more intentional process with respect to both who we encounter and what is disclosed. At RF we’re a small team of seven, but even so the time to intentionally catch up is easily squeezed out. In larger organisations the task is even harder. Its one reason we’ve been investing in our ability to map organisational networks. Knowing who is more likely to be isolated and who are the key bridging connectors informs the process of intentional knowledge management. These two networks, of similar size but very different levels of cohesion, illustrate the different challenges. One revels distinct sub-communities, people who are isolated, and those who only connect to the wider group through one person:
The other is a much more cohesive interconnected group where it is likely to be easier for everyone to be able to know what’s going on:
Even just knowing this may help to ensure that those who are more isolated do not become even more disconnected.
