David on ZED Talk

In this unfiltered episode of ZED Talk, I sit down with Zoe Walters to look at what’s going wrong in today’s workplaces.

From mishandled performance reviews and high-stakes redundancies to the ethical grey areas of AI-driven note-taking and issues around employee consent, this conversation shines a light on the hidden risks many leaders unknowingly carry.

Transcript of Zed Talk

Zoe: Hello and welcome to Zed Talk. This is episode two in series one and I’m joined today with David Greenhalgh who is a trusted and very, very respected employment lawyer. For me at least, 25 years we’ve been in each other’s pockets and I want David to talk about a few things. But first of all, David, introduce yourself.

David: Hi Zoe, thank you for having me on. Can’t believe you’ve only chosen me for issue number two, not number one, but I’ll live with that. Lovely to be on. Yes, I’m an employment lawyer. I’ve been doing it for 35 years now. I’m acting for senior executives, employers and employees. So seeing it from both sides. Yeah, happy to have a chat and see where we get to today.

Zoe: Brilliant. Well, you and I met recently at a lovely location in Shoreditch as we often, well not often, but we frequent and we meet every so often. We chew the fat about many things. Obviously nothing private and confidential, but just like landscape of market, what’s happening in the HR world, which is just always awesome. So I always love your company. And by the way, I mean, how could you be practicing for 35 years when you only look, you know, 21?

David: You’re a charmer. Such a charmer.

Zoe: But anyway, so one of the things that I wanted to ask you about, I think we’re in a time of a lot of change and I don’t think that’s going to really go away. Not certainly with a lot of the technological advancements and everything happening in that way. But really what is on your mind, what’s burning in your world at the moment? Would you like to share with us what’s kind of happening and what challenges you’re facing or trends that you’re seeing?

David: Yes, I mean, a lot of the work I deal with is repetitive in the sense of it’s the same issues coming up time and time again and has been coming up time and time again since I started practicing. So one thing which always comes up and continues to come up regularly is it’s the disconnect around appraisals and around people, managers often being too scared to give honest feedback and then how that then rolls forward and causes issues later, particularly where employees are then challenged around performance where it’s not been brought up with them properly before. And especially in the context of an exit where the employee will often take that, be shocked by the feedback. So that’s something that keeps coming up. And just generally, yes, around appraisals, feedback, redundancy, redundancy consultations. There’s been a recent case around considering an employee at risk for suitable alternative employment. So that redundancy process is always interesting and there are always new cases coming out of that. So those are two things which I’m finding interesting at the moment.

Zoe: Oh, OK. So this is something that I just heard is that these are things that are quite repetitive and they’re not new. However, they continue to be a thorn in our side.

David: Now, yes, the case law is developing and it’s always going to be a source of work for me because employers, I think it’s human nature, are often reluctant to tackle issues head on. And obviously, I know there’s training. I think you’ve delivered it, Zoe, around having difficult conversations. So it’s something that managers often need upskilling on. But even then, often that, you know, human nature is you don’t necessarily want to have a difficult conversation and tackle somebody head on about their performance. And maybe it’s easier just to give them a tick on the appraisal box and to park it for it to be dealt with later.

Zoe: Yeah. Well, I’ve been on the other side of that, which is, yes, where managers and I say it’s not an HR problem. It’s a company problem. It’s a leadership problem. It’s a people manager problem. Because typically I’ve always been in a situation where I’ve given the support to the line manager of the people or the person, whatever it might be. And they kind of skirt around the issue. And I don’t know that because I’m not always in those meetings. It’s a little bit he said, she said, they said and becomes quite a hot potato. So I guess you’re reminding me that throughout my career, I’ve often experienced this as well. And it’s just it’s confidence on the line manager’s perspective. I think that they’re just afraid of what to say, afraid of upsetting the person, afraid.

So, OK, on that score, then what would be really tangible, practical solutions for line managers or even for HR to help the line manager. Where do you think we can move the needle on this? I mean, it keeps you in a job, so it’s a double-edged sword, David, really. Absolutely. I mean, it seems to me training’s key because it’s training people with some worked examples of how they’re going to tackle that, where you’ve got an employee who’s very hard-skinned and perhaps doesn’t want to hear negative feedback.

And it’s how you frame the feedback with positive feedback about the things they’re doing well and things that might need some improvement, giving them a method of delivery that’s not as intimidating for the manager and training on how to do it and how to deal with tricky situations, it seems to me, has got to help.

And then it’s about them properly documenting what, you know, in terms of the message that’s been given, documenting perhaps the issues and areas for improvement so that a lot of the work I do is around where there are issues is where there’s failure to document. So we say document, document, document. You know, everything needs to be documented as far as possible because that’s when you need the documentation where you get to a situation where perhaps performance drops to an unacceptable level.

Perhaps you need to start looking at a performance improvement plan. Perhaps there’s a redundancy exercise where people’s performance becomes relevant in terms of scoring. Or perhaps it’s an exit conversation where you need to give the rationale for why somebody’s being exited and you need to give the proper business reason so you don’t get employees saying, well, actually, I think it was something in relation to discrimination or something like that. Where you’ve got a solid business reason around performance, you need to be able to document that. So if you’re ever challenged, you know, you’ve got the evidence ready.

Brilliant. So we’re going to go into what might be considered quite controversial because you know that I love that and our listeners will probably like that as well. So I’m going to smile a little bit and kind of go, right, okay, AI. So AI, for those that may not know, you have what we call note takers now. So note takers can come into online meetings and transcribe and record the meeting, right?

So there’s a couple of things here, which is that’s on the assumption that we’re doing an online meeting. So my question would be, would it be better for these conversations to be held online so that we can record them in their true nature that’s not modified and that we can absolutely use that as a paper trail? Is that ethical? Is that okay?

Well, I guess it depends, doesn’t it? The first thing with AI, any use of AI in the workplace is to make sure that the platform you’re using it on is approved by the business so that it’s ring fenced within the business. So you certainly wouldn’t want to be recording a meeting offline on a phone or on some kind of AI recording device because obviously that recording will be personal data of the employee and will then be held potentially on a platform that’s not your work platform. So it needs to be ring fenced. That’s the first thing it seems to me.

And then it’s a question of, do you want the whole meeting recorded? Because obviously that goes, but there’s two ways to look at that because managers may not always say necessarily always say the right thing all the time. So it might be better to have a kind of summary of the points that come out of the meeting that you then send to the employee on an email rather than have the whole meeting recorded.

It seems to me it goes both ways because if the whole thing’s recorded and the manager puts a foot wrong, then it’s recorded and it will sit somewhere on the system as a recording, which would then be accessible potentially by the employee on, for example, a data request or something like that. So there are pros and cons, it seems to me.

And okay, well, that’s a really good shout out because I don’t think that people will consider that there’s GDPR in that as well. So that is kind of like the personal data and how it’s stored and recorded if it’s not a company endorsed and ring fenced. It’s the same way if you have employees who are using AI to help them with their work, that’s why companies really need a policy around that to be really clear on whether it’s tolerated and if so, what AI platform can be used.

And again, many businesses now have their own ring fenced AI tailored system, which means that all the information’s captured and kept on their own data servers,but it’s in one place and it’s ring fenced. That’s very important. On that then, just staying with that thread, does there need to be somewhere where you have expressed consent from the employee to be able to also record? Well, yes. I mean, the privacy notice that the employee will usually get the employee to sign when they sign the contract of employment would probably need to be adjusted anyway to deal with because in that document you’re telling the employee how their personal data will be used during their employment. And if AI is something which is then going to be used in any way to process any of their data, then yes, it would probably need to be included, I would have thought, in the privacy notice.

Yeah, there’s a lot to be considered here and I think that there’s a lot of policies that need to be reviewed in relationship to how data is being used because, well, I mean, I don’t know if anyone’s observed, but Google actually is, you know, you get an AI response now, right? So AI is kind of embedded in so many things that we probably don’t recognize already. So there is a call to action for anybody that maybe needs to do a little policy review.

Do you do policy reviews, David, in your organization just so that we know if anybody needed to know?

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the whole thing, what I’ve noticed with AI is very interesting is whenever clients come to me, I always say, how have you found me? Has somebody recommended you? And often it’s people being recommended. And then you get some people who say they found me on Google with, you know, SEO, you know, just a Google search. But within the last, it’s literally within the last three or four months, a massive amount of people are now, rather than saying Google, are saying they found me through an AI search. So they’re searching for the best employment law to help me with my settlement agreement, something like that. And apparently I’m coming upon, which is good, good for business, but it’s interesting that how AI is very quickly overtakes, almost appears to be overtaking Google as the place people go to search. Obviously, I’m not the only lawyer that’s coming up, just to be clear, but it gives them a selection. I’m on the list, luckily. But it’s just interesting how quickly the tide’s moving within a very short space of time.

Yes, I don’t think we can get off the train of AI, which is why, I mean, we don’t exclusively focus on AI on Zed Talks, but I think I want to expand, the intention is to expand the listeners’ view, because in my survey that I did, I shared a snapshot with you when we met, is in the participation results, only 17% of people responding to the survey were using AI, and they used it for very general and very light tasks, let’s say, or information. And that, to me, also, the question was why, what’s the problem? One of the problems is security and safety, and the almost like the validity, the reliability of it, and is it lawful? So these are one, it’s really important that we get clear about what the boundaries are, and I guess I’ve seen the EU regulations for AI, which may be very boring for some, but I can see that it’s going to get a lot more rigor, because we’re going to just come into a topic about performance valuation, which I would love your thoughts on in just a sec, but I think we’re going to see a lot more AI-generated processes, AI-generated playbooks, policies, all through AI, and therefore we may see some, again, backlash around what are you using AI for? Does it have weight in terms of legal ramifications?

So in the case of like, you just mentioned about employee, I’ll get my words out in a minute, in terms of… Appraisals and performance management.

Yeah, performance, but I mean, now we’re living in this hybrid world, so the same thing that we’ve got people at home that maybe can’t be managed in the same way that they did previously, that’s a change. Now we’ve got the, I guess, is it, do we need more than one appraise a year? Do we need appraisals? Are they appraisals? Are they pulse checks? Like, how do we need to move the needle so that we get better in evaluating our appraisals and how might AI be involved in that or the impacts of that? Just thoughts, general thoughts you might not have, case studies. I mean, I think, I mean, probation seems to go often horribly wrong because often businesses don’t, smaller businesses in particular,don’t always remember to diarise probation properly and they don’t manage people properly in the probation period again. So people are often left to the end of the probation period and they won’t be kept on, particularly with the changes upcoming to employment law. It may be that some employers just decide to cut their losses and not to continue people past probation periods if they think that the government is going to proceed with the change in unfair dismissal rights down to day one rights.

But often probation is not properly managed and people are allowed to drift on through probation. It’s not really taken as a serious way of checking whether people are fit for purpose going forward. And sometimes when I get involved in cases, I think, well, had that person been appraised properly during the probation period, they probably shouldn’t have ever got past probation.

And then it’s just a case of performance generally. Obviously, people are busy and ideally you want regular one-to-ones as well as it’s not just the annual appraisal. Appraisals should be ongoing throughout the whole year and little and often, it seems to me, so that there aren’t any shocks, so that there can be honest conversations about things that people are doing well and things that people need to improve. So they have the opportunity to improve without being ambushed with a whole avalanche of complaints if that’s the way it’s going.

So I think anything that helps that process, that makes that process more interactive and takes work off the manager. But obviously the manager is going to have to deliver the messaging for it to work. And that manager needs to have the tools to be able to do that. So maybe there is room for some kind of AI way of helping managers manage the appraisal process.

And it’s more than just diary reminders, it seems to me. Perhaps AI could update the manager on what the last feedback was, what the goals were, what might, you know, just basically to help the manager to review what they’ve done so far, what’s happened so far over the year, maybe in one-to-ones, and then to think about what this next one-to-one or appraisal needs to cover and get them up to speed quickly and with some ideas for things that they might want to suggest if performance is not going as well as they’ve hoped.

Yeah, it strikes me that AI is the tool to help sort of coordinate, but ultimately the line manager has to have that level of conversation, you know, it’s unavoidable. You’ve got to have that human delivery for it to work. That’s the danger, of course, with AI. It lifts it from being a personal interaction, HR, you know, human. It’s that human interaction, isn’t it? The more you AI, potentially you’re just moving away from human interaction and you lose the magic that goes on in a business and why people want to stay there because they no longer feel the love for the business and the brand, the more they get moved away from the people of the business and the core of the business. So that’s the risk of AI.

And also, of course, it’s that whole thing about bias because AI is only as good as what’s being inputted into it and who’s inputting it. And, of course, we know that some decisions around employment, you know, if there is bias, perhaps sex discrimination bias or something like that, and that taints the AI modelling, then the whole process will be tainted. So you’re not really improving anything.

I think that’s a misconception as well, actually, so I’m going to touch on that for anyone reading or listening, is that, you know, the bias is only as biased as a person that’s inputting and we’ve all got bias. And what is normal to one is not normal to another. Now, the law can be quite black and white. We know that. But there’s also a nuance and there’s also a variation narrative context behind why people say and do the things that they do.

And I agree that bias is, I think we’re going to still have a way to go to help that. But AI is trainable and it trains because it learns patterns. But it also, it doesn’t determine if a pattern is good or bad. No. It just does the patterns. So we need to be aware that unless we qualify… If the pattern’s bad, then it’s just proliferating the pattern.

Yeah. Have you ever had, so I’m curious about this, have you ever had a case about a chatbot gone wrong? Chatbot gone wrong? Yeah. So a chatbot’s been embedded like a HR operations and it’s misadvised and you’ve had a case where somebody’s claimed because there was, you know, misinformation. No, I’m sure it’s happened. I mean, I’ve come across AI in the sense of people have been using AI without telling the organisation. And then it’s become apparent for whateverreason that that’s how they’ve been doing the work and that’s caused issues. But often, as I said, the employer is not always crystal clear with employees on what’s allowable and what’s not. of course, an employee under pressure trying to deal with work deadlines, if they find a way to do their work more quicker and get through more, then of course they’ll be very tempted to use it. So I can see why, but I’ve not had the chatbot situation. I’m sure it must happen all the time. I think it’s fine because one of the things that I talk about is putting guardrails in.

And guardrails may mean, listen, if you’ve got an organization where you have chatbots, and chatbots are giving information around all sorts of common things. So if you look at your FAQ, I always would say to any HR team, what’s your normal questions you get over and over and over and over again? And repetitive things, put in AI that can help answer those repetition because that will cut down your time. But of course, again, if you’re not monitoring what the AI is responding, then we can get into a bit of mischief.

It’s the same for recruitment, David, in terms of what’s your take on, because you talked about discrimination. I think that this is one of the outcries has been, and bearing in mind that AI is not new, okay? AI is something that’s been around for a very long time. And ATS, using ATS systems that have controls in them to select, to do whatever they do. This is not like the past year. This is years. Yes.

Have you had many instances where, yeah, it’s been a problem with recruitment? Well, there’s certainly been cases around that. I mean, I have had cases where employers, well, both sides, where employers have been sued for discrimination around the whole recruitment process. And often it will come down to whether the employer can document the process to be able to demonstrate that the reason why people have not been accepted or offered is objectively nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of discrimination.

And that’s when it comes back to what was your process? Can you document the decision that everyone was treated equally in terms of their application and no bias came in and there was no discrimination? And that’s where, of course, AI needs to be unpickable in the event of a challenge.

So that AI decision, I guess the question is how transparency around AI, how transparent and how easy is it to go back and unmask the process that was followed to get that AI outcome if the whole process has been done using some kind of AI platform? Because that’s the evidence that the employer would need to rebut any kind of allegation or claim of discrimination.

And I don’t know to what extent that’s unpickable and available to the user. I don’t know if you come across that. I don’t know to what extent with user AI, can you go back and get the data out to see how that decision was taken? Well, yes. Yeah, there should be a trace of, I mean, in terms of the platforms that are used these days, there is without a doubt, you know, traceability of that.

I wonder how this might drive in future of access requests because people would need to see the access request to get that data to evidence and show if there’s been any discrimination. So that makes me think, ooh, there’s enough. We might see a more increase in, yeah, in subject access. In subject access requests because if it’s within an AI platform, it would become searchable.

Of course, the benefit of AI and technology, of course, is that all these searches can now be very much automated process whereas many years ago, as you remember, you’re not so old as me, obviously, but I mean, it would literally be a physical process of searching. And now, of course, on an AI search, you can apply certain key search terms, you know, everything can be automated in a way that makes it much easier.

And AI, I’m sure there are programs that allow AI to filter through data requests to take out any exemption material and things like that. I’d probably always recommend there’s some human checking over that. But in terms of speeding up the process, I’m sure that’s available as it is in terms of, you know, court processes and discovery of documents, you know, a lot of the process can now be automated.

Yeah, and I thinkthat, so one thing I stand by for anyone listening that may be shaking their head going, you know, AI shouldn’t be involved in recruitment. I don’t think any AI should be involved in any decision making at all when it comes to selection of who’s best for a job. I mean, AI in some way we can correlate it to an assessment, right? So we can say an assessment is trends, patterns, data, all put together, dependent on your answers gives you a profile type or an assessment of. And so I think that in some way is very similar that you shouldn’t be recruiting somebody based on an assessment result or, you know, whatever it might be. And again, that’s not new. That’s been happening a long time. It’s an indicator. And that’s what AI can do is great aggregator of information, analysis, all of that good stuff. It doesn’t take away the decision. So it can do comparison brilliantly, data analysis. What it can’t do is make the decision.

And I know in a job market now, which is incredibly tough, lots of people are, you know, in uproar that they don’t get past the first block, you know, that they even LinkedIn easy apply, for example. Lots of people would say, yeah, well, you just go into this mass machine and you don’t really get, but that’s not an AI thing. That is something that’s been happening a long time. It’s just, I think it’s highlighted because there’s so many applications for one job. But is it not always been a form of AI that it’s just, it’s like a filter? I don’t know. I’m sure I don’t know how it works, but I’m assuming that AI is being used as a kind of filter and then to produce a short list, is it? Is that how it works?

So AI has evolved from machine learning. So machine learning has specific patterns and trends that it uses over and over again. It doesn’t think for itself. It just applies the same thing over and over again. What makes it different with AI is it’s another level based on training. It takes on new information and uses that and then basically starts those new patterns with new information becomes trainable. So in a very light version.

And so what we need to remember is, again, coming back to the bias thing, is if you don’t quality control and measure the impact and what’s happening with AI tools, then you’ve got no guardrails. And of course, you’re going to come into mischief. But if you’ve got that and it’s got and it has these regular safety check on it to see that it’s not. Yeah. And there are plug and play platforms that do have are useful for this and that recruiters have been using a long time. We just have to remember that AI is not new. Spotify was predicting the songs that you wanted to listen to when they started years ago. So it’s just become more on steroids, you know.

So, yeah. And this is the thing that might come up. And I wonder your take on it is we don’t know what we don’t know. And do you have a sense or any thoughts on what might become hot topics when it comes to employment law with AI specifically, knowing what you know?

Well, you just kind of hope that somehow AI can help the tribunal system because the tribunal system is on its knees already post COVID. So you’ve got massive delays in the system. So probably taking a year to get to final hearing. And then if the government goes ahead with the proposal to reduce the entry level for an unfair dismissal, so you only need to where they’re from day one. There might be something around probation periods, but they’re going to make it much easier for people to bring claims that they don’t need two years anymore. Then there’s going to be a massive flood of tribunal claims. And if AI can somehow help manage that, that would obviously be amazing for the tribunal system, just looking at it from that angle. So I think that might be where AI could help massively. I’m not entirely sure how, but hopefully there is a way that it can be utilized to make the system work better because otherwise people just won’t be able to get justice. And waiting for a year to get perhaps two years even to get to tribunal is not a system that’s going to, it’s just not sustainable for it to be running like that. So hopefully that’s where it will come in.

In terms of, I think it will just, it will play out that more and more systems will become automated.And I guess it will become, there’s a risk that there’s a human disconnect generally in the workplace in terms of processes and feedback and people. You know, employees don’t want to be managed by machines at the end of the day. So it seems to me the organizations that will succeed and be able to maintain recruitment and branding in the sense of employee branding will be the ones that marry AI nicely and mesh it in properly with the ethos and the brand of the business so that they still keep the human side, but they use AI to everyone’s advantage, but hopefully without the disadvantages.

Yeah, I think you’re raising a really good point and that’s why we must be really cautious about running off and just plug and play in. Like we need to, for example, we might need to fix one thing very quickly. I always say be careful if you’re going to fix one thing, you’re not looking at your business holistically because you solved one problem, but you run the risk of creating 20 more. And that is my fear when I hear, I had a few calls today actually around people wanting to demo me some products. And I say, you know, brilliant. I’d love to know what you do and it’s a very vanilla product and it says it does this. And I’m like, well, I think it’s going to cause a lot more problems for some people than others. It depends on your brand. It depends on what you’re doing. It depends on your values as your company. There’s so many components. And it’s just not a one size fits all. And that’s what scares me a little bit about people going, I’ve got FOMO. I now need to put A in my business because I’ve delayed it for so da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And therefore we’re in a bit of a hole now. But you know what? Maybe that’s being a bit negative of me because I’m seeing people going and going, I don’t want to pay for AI. It’s too expensive to have something bespoke. So I’m just going to do something that’s the… I urge people to think very carefully about just going down that route because it might cost you a lot more over time.

So yeah, I just got my soapbox a little bit there, didn’t I? I think the thing, you’re right. It’s got to be, you’ve just got to be mindful of what the business is, what the brand, what the ethos of the business is and not lose your way, I guess. So yeah, trying to get the advantages but just making sure you’re not cutting across what the business is actually about and why people want to work there.

Do you think also, David, I know that we’re coming up to the end of our session. I’m incredibly grateful for your time. Do you think that the legal system in general is so archaic? I’m going to use these words, archaic, old fashioned, out of date and just dinosaur, historical? Historically, but certainly not now. I mean, I think so many things, technology is being used in so many positive ways in the law and it’s, you know, there’s so many new products are coming on the market to help law firms, to help lawyers. And of course, you know, some areas of law will become more and more AI-able and that’s inevitable, it seems to me. But you’re always going to need lawyers to help, you know, with certain areas. And because of AI, some areas will become more cost effective for clients to access because, you know, the time of the lawyer will be reduced down and some of the more basic work, background work as it were, can be dealt with probably by some form of AI going forward. But certainly you’re always going to need negotiators and, you know, that kind of work.

Yeah, I think we’ll move full circle and people will probably hear me say this again and again. You know, we will be very pro-AI and we’ll all be gallivanting towards it. And then only a matter of time, we’ll strip it back. Most of my career has been about centralisation, decentralisation, centralisation, decentralisation. That brings about change, organisational change. This is another organisational change about how we work. And I guess to some description, it will come full circle that it will be back in human. Already we’re seeing people being driven to the workplace, back to the workplace. Because why? Because we’re more, well, there’s a couple of statistics here. According to ONS, Office of National Statistics, we are more productive than ever, but we’ve got the worst mental health than ever. So when we look on balance of that, why do we want to come back to a workplace? Well, because it’s healthier. It will be healthier because of human connection. So I’m convinced thatthere’s a balance. I’m convinced that we shouldn’t, I think that we’re a bit like plants as ourselves. I’m a shrub, you might be an orchid or a cactus, because when you know what kind of plant you are or flower, and I know this seems a little bit off topic, so follow me just for a second. If you go to a garden centre or a nursery and you look at a plant, it’s got a little plastic thing in it that tells how much water, how much sunlight, what conditions that the plant needs. We don’t come with that as a human, so it’s our job to figure out what conditions we like best. If we know what flower we are and we know what conditions we love to work in and be in and thrive in, we can just adopt and put ourselves in those conditions.

Well, I think is a much more adult way of being told how to work. Like, this is your output, this is your outcome that we want you to achieve. We want you to be happy doing it, so go put yourself in the place where you can be so brilliant at what you do, and we love it. I mean, we are far away from that kind of workplace. However, I’m convinced that that would have some good returns. Not science-based, of course, but what would your view be on that, David, if we thought along the lines of that?

I just think, I agree, you want to get the best out of people and you want people to love their work and being at work or doing the work, but I guess sometimes people don’t necessarily know what’s best for them, fall out of COVID. I mean, we are a tribe of people and we’re supposed to be with other people, and I think for some people being at home, working from home is probably not in their best interest, but they may not necessarily understand that or may not appreciate it.

I’m not a fan of presenteeism for the sake of it either, but also what I’ve certainly have seen is that where you’ve got people working from home, the generation of up-and-coming employees are just not getting the access to the knowledge and to the, just by osmosis of being around the more senior employees because they’re not there because they’re working from home. So there’s a massive knock-on effect for the younger generations upcoming because they’re just not getting access just by being in the same room or by overhearing or being asked to step into a meeting where people are not physically present and people are not necessarily as visible when they’re not physically present.

So I think there are, you know, I can see the pros and cons. I think it’s a really difficult balance, but I can also see why some companies are taking the approach of making people return because that company’s either decided that people aren’t as productive, rightly or wrongly, or that actually it’s better for everyone to have at least a certain period where people are together working together as a tribe.

Yeah, and that comes full circle back down to an appraisal stuff. Like, how do you really monitor how somebody is? I mean, I use OKRs, for those that don’t know that, in the clients that I have at the moment, I use objective key results, which is a collaboration goal-setting methodology. And this takes the onus away from an individual. Everybody understands very transparently what their goals are and that they have unified goals. We lose, we win. It’s not an I, it’s a we. And that makes it much easier to see where performance is going really well because the employee has to feed into those, what I say, the OKRs. They have to have their say of what their contribution is. So it’s almost like they’re saying, well, this is what I’m going to do in response to the goal that you’ve set. So it makes it a little bit easier for them to apply what they see they feel as their contribution and they’re less likely to go off the boil, as I might say.

I do think that that has a massive, being working from home or remotely, should I say, has a massive impact on appraisal evaluation. And that is archaic. I don’t think we’ve caught up yet with a modern system that is evaluating output rather than effort and where you’re working. I’m not sure. So, and you know what, maybe somebody will have a comment on that or have some view on that. And I’d love to know or discuss with somebody about this because I think it’s quite a juicy… How do you capture how people are doing if they’re not physically present? How do youcapture that? Absolutely. And I know for remote teams, I can’t get into the nuts and bolts of who and what, but I have known teams of people to really struggle. If you look at the old Tuckman model, which is forming, storming, norming, performing, mourning, we’re more in mourning than we are in anything else because we haven’t got it right. We haven’t got the blend right. And so I’m seeing a lot more disharmony, which I think has, again, I’m not statistically driven here. I can’t draw the correlation because I haven’t got written a paper on it. But I believe that that is affecting mental health. And so one drives the other. If you’re not happy in all areas of your life, then it’s all areas of your life.

And it’s also hard to pick. I mean, people are creatures of habits as well. So if people have been working from home and they’ve got used to that, even though it may not necessarily always be in their best interest to be in that environment, the problem is they’re then used to that. And it’s very difficult for them to say to people, come back to the office because they perceive that to be an erosion of their freedom. And it’s a very difficult thing to do. And that’s why some of the employers are doing it so hardline, I guess, because they just have to insist on it.

And they have to. I think that when we live bureaucratically and kind of allow people to just, you know, plant themselves, we do need structures. We’re creatures of habit. We need structure. We need frameworks. Do we need to be micromanaged? No. At the same time, we do need to consider that we’ve got Generation Z and Alpha coming in our workplaces, which have very different habitual characteristics. Their socialization skills is very different. They have different desires. So that that is a whole nother topic for another day, isn’t it? Another day.

And also the other thing on that, I just say is that obviously what you don’t want is the more senior people being told they have to come in, but they’re not actually coming in because they’ve got more leeway. They have more power to just say I’m working from home. Whereas the more junior staff that really need the more senior staff around to mentor them, to by osmosis to learn from them, are then being potentially forced to go into the office. But then they’re not getting the advantages that should come with that because the more senior people are not actually going into the office.

Totally. I’m with you. There’s a lot more. David, would you come back at another time? Of course. I’d love to. Because I think that there’s so many things that will come up, but I’m so appreciative of your time for today. Not at all. It’s been lovely speaking to you. Thank you very much for having me on. Obviously, employment law is a massive topic, so I always love to talk about it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would love you to come back and maybe anybody listening here has some burning questions and that they want to connect with you. Of course, your details will be, I’d say, in the description in YouTube. But it’s been absolutely delightful. So thank you so much, David. I appreciate you. Thank you very much for having me on.

Yeah, and I will say thank you. And for those listeners, I hope you love the show. And tell us what you want to hear and what you want to know because this show is all about for you. And thank you. Until next time, bye for now.

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