-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
Welcome to Workplace Geeks, the podcast that looks to unearth, salute and explore the world workplace related research and talk to the brains behind them. My name is Chris Moriarty, and it is my job alongside Ian Ellison to help us along this journey and connect those workplace dots. And it's been a busy few weeks for Ian and I. So, we were at the workplace event last week interviewing Dan Pilling of TSK Group in our first ever live episode. So that's coming up after this episode in a few weeks, so look out for that. But really, it was lovely seeing everyone and connecting with everyone.
Now on that idea of connection at this would be a good time to remind people how to get in touch, which can be done on LinkedIn, just look for Workplace Geeks and you can use the #workplacegeeks. But you can also email us on hello@workplacesgeeks.org. But on that we have an apology to make. Well, Ian has an apology to make because he's just realised that he hasn't been keeping an eye on the inbox. So, Mr. Ellison, what would you like to say to people like Dell Jephson, in Holden? Claire Rawlings, Rob Short, Stewart Watts
Ian Ellison
I am very sorry, folks. I clearly do not know how to work and online inbox. But now I know how to get in. I've discovered that we actually had mail. And that's super exciting, Chris. So, there you go.
Chris Moriarty
It is so whilst we're here. Why don't you read us something from the Workplace Geeks mailbag.
Ian Ellison
So, we really liked this one from Rob Short. So, Rob says amongst some other stuff, I've listened weekly to each episode of Workplace Geeks. And this weeks quite literally stopped me in my tracks. I've been seeking innovative methods in which to collect user insights of how and why workplace settings are chosen or not. And I've always relied heavily on the good old survey to try and capture the thoughts and feelings of my colleagues. Now, Harriet's approach of using participants imagery of photography to uncover the lived experience really triggered something in me to the point that I want to try and weave that style of approach into the work my team and I carry out. So that is, I mean, that's exactly what we wanted to achieve, isn't it, Chris? And I'm sure it's exactly what Harriet's after in that we want to inspire people to try stuff, and to explore stuff or to do new stuff. And you know, that's why we're here. So that's amazing.
Chris Moriarty
And it's, it's great to hear someone trying something else on the methodology front, trying something that they wouldn't have come across. And that's something we will be talking about in today's Pinder ponder. So, stay tuned for that, at the end when we talk about methodologies. So, look, everyone don't let these geeks and their slightly shoddy email experience put you off because as we've established in now knows how to work an inbox. So please get in touch. And particularly if something that you've heard has inspired you to do something different, I think that'd be a really cool thing to hear about. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the podcast and spread the Workplace Geeks love. Now on to today's episode in tell us a little bit about today's guests and their work.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so today we have Professor Susan Halford. She is a professor of sociology at Bristol University, and she's also the head of Bristol Digital Futures Institute. And I think it is safe to say a bit of a fanboy moment here. But I think Susan Halford might be one of my favorite academics Chris when it comes to workplace and hopefully by the end of today's show, listeners will understand why. So, we are going back in time to 2005 and we are going to look at a paper a piece of research that Susan did in the early noughties. And it was published in 2005 in new technology work and employment. That was the name of the journal.
We're going to do hybrid workspace, specialisations of work, organisation and management. Now, the two things that I want to pop out right now are yes, this is a paper about hybrid. And yes, it was written in 2005. That's pre-pandemic. That's considerably pre-pandemic. And there's a big message in here about you know, as we've always said on this podcast, standing on the shoulders of giants, recognising great work that's been done and using it to learn more. Yeah, it's it. This is a really, really lovely piece of work. So, when Susan wrote this, she was actually a senior lecturer in sociology at Southampton University. So, she's moved to Bristol since and when I found it, I was challenging myself to look beyond the industry boundaries that we quite often talk about to learn more about how other disciplines were thinking about and studying space and place. Now, before we get to the interview, Chris, could I offer our listeners a little structured guidance to this discussion with Susan
Chris Moriarty
I think that would be the responsible thing to do.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so it's 44 minutes long. And what I want you to do is think about this in three sections, right? Because this is a really chunky discussion. And it's super insightful. But if you think about it like this, three sections, the first section is all about what sociology is, and the value of thinking in sort of sociological ways to workplace and to work. So, it's quite theoretical, is deeply insightful, but it's also quite academic.
The second section is all about the paper itself, hybrid, working the hybrid spaces in the way that Susan talks about it, and kind of what that might mean and what we might be able to learn from that past and present. So really interesting insights, which, despite being 17 years old, and about a particular case study, are super relevant to now.
And then the third section is like a free, accidental bonus section. Because at the end of the interview, when we were talking to Susan about the stuff she was doing now, what she then started to talk about was this amazing new space for innovation at Bristol University, which is just mind blowing, right? So, what we're going to do is we'll as always, we'll put the timings of these sections in the show notes. If you want to jump around to the bit that you're interested, then please do but I would also encourage you stick with this, listen to it twice, because honestly, the insights just grow, the more attention. And the more thinking that you give this interview. It's fantastic.
Chris Moriarty
And also listening to it twice will help with our listening figures. But do not draw any cynical conclusion to Ian's advice there. But he's right. It's it was that good. We've listened to it a few times, as you can imagine in the edit. And it really is great. And he is not over exaggerating. When he says about how amazing this space that Susan talks about at Bristol is it will literally blow your brains. And she's invited us down to have a look at it when it's open. So, who knows we might have a video to share with people we might get into multimedia, which will be very exciting. But look enough of us chuntering on let's listen to Professor Susan Helford.
-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
Okay, Susan, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast as I started the 10, just tell us a little bit about yourself, the work you do and some of your academic interests.
Susan Halford
I'm Susan Helford. I'm a sociologist at the University of Bristol. Actually, I'm a geographer. By background, you'll find that many people are geographers by background work for sociologists for many years, and I started working on digital transformations in the workplace about, well, actually 20 years ago, I suppose now, and more recently have moved on to a whole series of research exploring the digital transformation digital technologies, not only in the workplace, but in a much wider set of contexts.
Chris Moriarty
So, sociology, you've mentioned sociology there, and I think I probably speak for a section of our listenership where it's a word that I have come across an awful lot, and I could probably fudge an answer, someone pressed me on what it is. But given your expertise, can you just give us in relatively simple terms, what sociology means. And its relevance to things like organisational and workplace thinking?
Susan Halford
Yeah, sociology is one of those disciplines that people do feel uncertain about in comparison with something like maths or geography even that they feel that they know and understand. So, sociology fundamentally focuses on the world that people make, that we're how we make the world through our interactions through the things that we do as individuals, but also particularly through our collective actions, and social groups, and as part of wider societies.
And sociology focuses on the things that hold us together. So, the institutions, the cultures, the familiar everyday practices that we see ourselves doing other people do, we recognise that we understand what's expected of us and what's expected of other people. And we also look at the things that drive us apart. So, for example, processes of racism or xenophobia, homophobia, inequalities of all kinds, that do drive us apart. And as we know, only too well at the moment of creates really fundamental challenges for the for the organisation of the economy, and the social life, of the global society, really. So above all, what sociology does is it asks questions about the organisation of social life, how we make and remake the world around us every day, but also over time, so we're particularly interested in processes of social change.
Chris Moriarty
And how might that change how we might look at the workplace? You know, this is the kind of context in which we're sitting here today. So how about that change? How we look at things like workplaces? But equally, how would that compare to kind of more traditional views of Business and Management as kind of ideas and areas of research? How might the two things compare with each other?
Susan Halford
That's a really big question. Because there isn't one thing called sociology, sociologists take many different starting points when they're looking at the world of work or organisation. So for example, we might look at very long term changes, for example, the transition between feudal societies, capitalist societies, the rise of mass production in the organisation of work, the shift away from that, or the rise of the platform economy, for example, all of those are areas of research that sociologists would focus on, in understanding those processes of social change, that I described to you earlier how the organisation of work has changed over time, what that means for different groups of people, and for a whole variety of aspects of identity identities, how we understand ourselves, how we understand other people, how work gets done, productivity, technical innovation, all of those kinds of things. So, we might start with those very big long-term processes.
But sociology is also really interested in the everyday and the micro practices, how things happen through routines through everyday practice. And the really obvious when I was researching as an organisational sociologist, and I used to describe this to people in organisations who weren't academics, I would say, Well, if you gave me your organisational chart and list of policies, would I understand everything that goes on in your organisation? And they'd say no, you wouldn't. It's important to see those things. It's important to know the formal structures and the formal policies, but actually, if you want to know what goes on, you need to go and spend time in the organisation you need to talk to people you need to understand the cultures, the informal practices and understandings and so on. So critically, what sociology does is it connects that those big processes with the little processes, if you like, I mean, that's a simplistic way of putting it but we're interested in looking at how big structures and systemic changes are connected to the everyday and the things that people do in the workplace, whether as managers or as workers or as anything in between.
And you know that that can be very similar to some kind of management studies. So if we think about critical management studies, very, very interested in the labour process and changing forms of organisation of work over time, if we think of a more business school kind of approach that tends to be less critical, and that words overused and think, but it tends to focus more on how things are, and how we can kind of improve business systems or improve customer satisfaction or improve maybe employee experience and satisfaction as well, but doesn't tend to ask the deeper questions about why is work organised this way? Who benefits from work being organised this way? Or how else could it be organised? What other alternatives and forms of organisation might there be?
Ian Ellison
The paper that we were really interested to talk to you about today is called hybrid workspace, re specialisations of work organisation and management. You wrote it in 2005. And I think the big elephant in the room, and we might as well just declare it right now is you wrote a paper about hybrid working hybrid workspace back in 2005. And whether that's the same hybrid working that has become kind of common parlance today, or whether it's something different, that's something that we'd really love to get into. It's a, it's a paper, which essentially presents a case study of a, organisational workplace work setting in the north of England. It's based upon an anonymised insurance organisation, but it’s true facts its real life. And you essentially did a deep dive into what it was like to start working in a hybrid fashion, just to get us started, could you kind of summarise that piece of research for us?
Susan Halford
Yes, as you said, it's a long time ago. And it was quite interesting to go back and look at it. So, it was a piece of collaborative research was undertaken with a large insurance company, as you say, there was interested in moving to a mixture of home based and office-based work. And for myself, at that time, I was very much an organisational sociologist, from a geographer by background, as I've mentioned. And I was really starting to work in a variety of ways about workspace and workplace and bring those two disciplinary backgrounds together. And it was a really, really, really good opportunity for me to explore in real time, because I followed process of transition in the workplace that I was studying over a period of just over a year, from before anything had happened to, you know, a year into the process for them.
So, it was a great opportunity to look at the interrelations between that say, for simplicity sake between space, how space shapes work, and how work shapes space. And to follow that process, as it were, it was unsettled. So, sociologists and probably other social scientists, were often really interested in these moments of change, because they highlight for us things that are taken for granted. And we find the people who we talked to suddenly seen things that they didn't see before, because the familiar the routine, the habitual has been disrupted, and they start to reflect on the organisation of everyday life. And I think if I had gone into that workplace and said, tell me about space, you know, six months before, they would have probably thought I was a bit mad, but because it had become a very live issue. This was a fantastic opportunity. So, that's a kind of background.
At the time, I suppose it was the early 2000s. It was published in 2005. But you know what that means the research was done 2001 2002, there was a lot of work going on about home working, and have been for a while, and a variety of home workers. There was increased interest in the digital, particularly online mediation organisation, so the virtual, and there was all kinds of claims being made and speculation about what that would mean. In particular, as we moved away from conventional forms of homeworking like peace working in the textile industry or stuff like that. But as we move to see more white-collar work, but it was quite speculative. It wasn't particularly well documented empirically. And there was nothing as far as I was aware of that I came across that focused on the combination.
So, you know, we could talk about how, what was it like to be in a workplace full time? What was it like to work from home full time, but nobody was looking at? How was it both? Well, for anybody who was mixing those spaces of work, what did what did that feel like? What did it look like? What challenges did it pose to the organisation? What were the consequences of that hybridity? And I remember at the time thinking, Oh, hybrid, that sounds a bit a bit fancy. You know, that sounds a bit a bit of a word that people don't use, and it wasn't being used at the time and it's quite fascinating to me how it's just become part of, you know, everybody knows what we mean by it, now
Chris Moriarty
Did you when you use the word hybrid from what you're saying there Was that? Did you get that from somewhere else? Or was that something that this as part of this study, you said, well, that felt like the right word? Are you the one that kind of plucked it into existence? Are we talking to the person who invented and coined the term hybrid workplace? I'm looking for Workplace Geeks exclusive.
Susan Halford
I wasn't aware that anybody else was using it. Although it had been used before, but I it may well have been, I don't know. It just seemed the right word. I think if it came from anyone, I'm not conscious of what the roots were, it does come from. So geographical theory and spatial theory about hybrid space, maybe.
Ian Ellison
So, it might have been almost like a semantic because talk in particular areas about particular things. Maybe it felt right to you, even though you kind of went well, this feels a bit weird. For the outside world.
Susan Halford
It just felt like the right word. It didn't feel like hybrid, both in the sense of multiplicity, but also in the sense of relationality. So, you know, when you're breeding from a hybrid road, or something like that, you know, you're creating something new, out of preexisting things. And that just felt like exactly the right word for what was happening. And for what I was finding in the study, which was not only where people now working from home and in the office, and not only were there differences in the experiences of those two works, spaces, and what happened in them, but the fact that they were working in two different spaces changed what happened in the other spaces. So, there was a kind of relationality, across these different spaces, which hybridity seemed like the right the right word,
Chris Moriarty
Which is a much deeper definition than what's kind of come out today. Right? Which kind of you just kind of feel like it's lazily talking about two locations, right? It's like, there was one, there's now two, and you can pick between them. But while you're talking about there is always a genetic level, that they're sort of influencing of one on the other, right, it's actually creating something new not to separate things.
Susan Halford
I think that's right. I mean, I think the second part of that, right, creating something new, my guess is that when people use the word hybrid, now, they mean a whole range of different things by it. It's a convenience, that's a flag of convenience. And it will have very superficial uses and meanings. And I hope and probably believe that we'll also have some more in depth, thinking about it.
Chris Moriarty
So, just going back to this study, there was, you know, some bits that you've when you're talking about there, there was a moment when I was reading it through that I found interesting, and going back to your original kind of introduction there about sociology and the kind of small bits that influence the next bits, but there was one that really, you know, whether we would count this in, as an example of one of those small changes, but I found it interesting that was this this kind of initial suspicion about this from the employees, you know, they wondered about, well, what, you know, why is this happening? And, and what, what's the intentions here, the organisation and sort of this mistrust immediately that something didn't look right, and all the rest of it.
And I guess that's something that it would be easy to take for granted, hey, look, we're offering you this new way of working, you're going to love it and not realising that some people might because of their past experience, sit there and go. Well, hold on a minute, what what's that all about? So how did you see that that kind of cynicism, melt? What was it that kind of got people more, not more on board? Because I mean, the numbers were pretty good. But in terms of take up from, from what you've put the study, but what was it that kind of shifted this cynicism out, and got people engaged with the project?
Susan Halford
I mean, at that particular workplace, there was quite a strong kind of labour history. So, I think the reaction was, was framed in some way by that history. At the time, I think it was very cleverly implemented by the management team, actually. So, at the time, that the program was introduced, they moved from one office to another and they reduced the number of desks. And people were also less kind of identified with the new space. It made it easier is that point about disruption again, because the habitual have been taken for granted have been disrupted, it didn't feel so much of a reach to do a further disruption, as it would have done had they gone from where they've been working for the past 10 years to this new kind of situation.
It was a very strong message management that people were expected to do is at least two days a week. There was no compulsion. There was no compulsion, but there was a strong message that they were expected. And it was managed from a managerial level that was quite close to the people who are working from home, so they were actually people that they knew reasonably well. And despite this kind of strong labour history at that level, in that kind of short jump of the hierarchy that was involved between people working from home and those who were managing them, the team leaders, you know, there were some strong relationships. So, I think that really helped.
Plus, I think people pretty quickly were kind of taken aback by the advantages that they felt that they were occurring. I wrote a different paper from the same study about fathers, and about the impact of working from home on fatherhood and fathering practices. And then it was quite profound, really, and then quite affecting how the fathers described the way that it changed how they could be fathers with their children. And right at the end of that, that there was the potential withdrawal of the homeworking policy. And I seem to remember writing something that saying that they saw this as a perk, that unearned perk that they were amazed to have, but never expected to keep.
Ian Ellison
This is maybe a little bit trite for a sociological professor. But the minute you said that Susan, I thought, you know about Lewin's kind of unfreeze move refreeze kind of change model, just that simple idea that in a period of flux, other things become possible. And one of the things that lots of people talk about off the back of the pandemic is, we would never have learned what was possible had, we had no choice, because we just wouldn't have chosen that option. But all of a sudden, we can now see it.
Susan Halford
Yes, that's right. There's a lot of you know, during a pandemic, there was a lot of sociological writing and thinking or propolis, thinking about this being a moment of change. And this being a moment that would open the door on a previously unimaginable way of life, and would reset things in some way, open up things that were never thought to be possible. And, you know, to some extent, it has done that. But at the same time, we do see very familiar patterns, as well have limits on that have controls on that, of how that's mediated and moderated by some of those other power relations and social relations, for example, around gender, and experience. And this is a broad brush. But I think almost all of the evidence is showing that the experience for women working at home during the pandemic with young children. And of course, there are exceptions, but women's experiences heavily gender, statistically, there are heavily gendered patterns. So, there's plenty of old in the mix. And plenty of familiar social relations and power divisions, as well as new.
Ian Ellison
This was a case study for a satellite office of a national organisation. And you undertook a really rich mixed methods deep dive into that community of people. So why did that feel right? And what did you get from that kind of work? What sort of insights, Chris and I come from a profession in an industry, which celebrates the huge datasets, it celebrates the quantitative data, often almost over all others. And here is another example of a really rich qualitative study that unearth all sorts of lived experiences. So why is that important? And why is that? Why is that valuable to do work like that?
Susan Halford
Well, you know, for myself, I think that you choose the methods that allow you to answer the questions that you're asking. And, you know, I'm absolutely in favor of quantitative research, when you can answer the right questions and mixed methodologists myself, very much so. And if you're in the paper, you will note that there was some statistics reported from the workforce Labour Force Survey, which I think, actually included data on around 50 55,000 people, which showed a really interesting pattern, it showed this, this category of hybrid workers was actually larger than the category of people that were working from home all of the time.
And that it was a phenomenon of a significant scale. So, it showed us the pattern, they showed us that something was going on, but it didn't tell us why it was happening, or what the consequences were, or how it was being organised. So, if you want to really dig into those questions of meaning, and everyday processes of change, you have to do qualitative research. You have to have sick, rich description, you have to be able to go back to people and say no, but why do you say that? Or what happened? Or who was looking after kids at home? Or you have to, you have to be able to know the right questions to ask. And it was such a new field at the time, there wasn't standardised instruments that you could use to measure that in a large quantitative data set. Even if there was I would say what you would get then is a really good description across a large number of people that wouldn't understand the processes, the meaning, the values, the experiences, because those are very hard to capture only in numbers
Ian Ellison
You'd get to the what, but you wouldn't get to the why essentially
Susan Halford
I mean, the classic distinction is between patterns and processes, or between description and explanation. I think both of those binaries are probably a bit too blunt. But you know, there's still some treats and then there's still some, some value in recognising that.
Chris Moriarty
Doing that brings a different experience to the reader, you know, someone who was coming to this fresh, you know, you made a statement. But then I, and I, you know, maybe it's just me but as I'm reading the comments that you then sort of punctuate those findings with, I was hearing different voices, it was almost like a like a tele ad, you know, we've sort of faceless voiceovers coming in and telling your story, it conjures up for the reader, not just the researchers, I guess the reader gets to see something that's, it's like a drawing that's got colour and depth to it, as opposed to just caliber a stencil of a of an image., right. And so, I think that the there's benefit for the reader as well isn't
Susan Halford
That's a really nice way of putting it. And, you know, I used to do, I went through a phase of presenting papers from this research, actually using the voices actually editing the voices. And it was incredibly time consuming, I didn't carry on doing it, but I loved doing it. Because when you could actually hear, rather than me reading out the voices, you actually have heard those voices, it was very, very evocative. And, you know, you can say 53% of people there saw, you know, you know, have some kind of some kind of statistical measure that helps you to describe something, but when you see two or three sentences of someone describing their everyday life, and the nuance and complexity and connections that can be made through language, and experience. So, it's not just words that you or I are writing as fiction, we might better at it me. But you know, it's really embodied and embedded experience. And that speaks, you know, it's very powerful way of communicating experience that I think statistics doesn't do. And quantitative research does other kinds of things that qualitative research can't do.
Ian Ellison
So, when you do choose to undertake research like this, and you have the opportunity and the privilege to work with an organisation to sort of go deep, essentially, and, you know, learn about what's really going on, what sort of ethical considerations do you need to be aware of that perhaps you don't at a surface level?
Susan Halford
Fundamentally, it's just questions of consent and anonymity. Other two things, so making sure both the company and people participating understand the terms on which they're taking part in the research, they understand what's going to happen to their data, they understand how the data will be stored, who else might or might not be able to see it? What will happen to any identifying stories, if you like that come up with there's a particular story in a different paper, which I found really, really poignant about somebody who worked at this organisation who had been a refugee, in the first Iraq war, his family had been in the first Iraq war.
And there was a quote where he said something like, you know, I lost my family, we lost everything, why was I going to care about losing my desk. It was a kind of really profound statement about the kind of lack of territoriality that he had and how we found the other people's attitudes, some of the other people's attitudes, who were less embracing of it, and hard to understand. And I thought, well, maybe you'll never know who that person was. But his colleagues if they could be bothered to go and read the sociological article, which they probably didn't.
But if they could, they would know exactly who he was. So, I had a specific consent process with him and I went through this is exactly what I want to use, from what you've said, this is exactly how I propose framing it. Are you happy for me to use it? And he said, Yes, fine. When you make lots of money from your article, you can share it with me. And I said, fine. When I make that money, I will share it with you.
So, you know, it's partly standardised processes. And it's partly being situational ethics. And certainly, in my world, situational ethics is a very much more well understood and well embedded process now, which is that you're not done and dusted. Once you've got your ethics are proven, and you're always going to face ethical questions. And so, you just need to have very good ways of managing those in the ongoing process.
Chris Moriarty
Looking at some of the findings, and you you'd sort of chunk up the findings into sort of areas around relationships and managerial practices and stuff. Just looking at some of those findings, how would you relate them? What do you think the significance are, of them is to today's context, you know, we've already touched on the fact that we, you know, we've got a kind of an example of what you were looking at 17 years ago, we've got it, we're living it now. So, if you could take some of those findings, how would you apply them to some of the challenges people are talking about some of the headlines that we're reading, how would you apply them to today's context?
Susan Halford
I think the most obvious thing, so a number of things. The most obvious thing is this point about relationality. And I think it was I use rather clumsy language. It looks to me now but about the spatial package of working lives. So actually, it really matters what kinds of combinations of workspaces people have available to or have foisted on them or, you know, the package of works places that people are working within really matters. And these multiple spaces change the way that people do work or change the way that people organise work. And they change forms of sociability in the workplace, and they change forms of management, how management is perceived, and is done. And so, I think all of those things are absolutely relevant to the to the president thing. Cause it's very, very different. And we just went into lockdown, and people suddenly went from five days a week in the office to five days a week at home. And that's not in terms of this. That's not hybrid workspace, you know, that was that was a binary flip from one kind of thing to another. I suppose I'd argue that they're still how people understood working from home, under those bizarre conditions were still shaped by their experience of the office. So, you know that there's still a relational aspect to it.
But as we move back now, into that hybrid workspace, I think there's a very poor understanding gently of what it means to be combining different spaces, or even more fundamentally, what the spaces of work mean, spaces are not simply substituted law, that they're not irrelevant, or just a backdrop to what people do, they're actually part of what people do. And being at home makes a difference compared to being in the office compared with being in a cafe on a train or, or whatever it is. The other thing I laughed at in the paper was the kind of incredulity of the way I wrote about Wi Fi on the beach. And obviously, what people can have all the time now, but it seemed amazing in 2005.
So, you know, I think I think I do think it is to look at that package, look at the combinations very seriously, to understand how space impacts on what people do, how they do it, how they feel about it. And it's not just physical space, of course, I mean, as an old geographer, what, you know, it's the combination of physical space with social space, and cultural space. It isn't just whether you've got the right DSC tests on your chair and your and your table, and whether you've got a quiet space, or you're working on the ironing board, you know, because of course, there's been this very huge disparity in terms of people like me who've got a nice office, I can work in a nice space where I can shut the door, and many people don't have that. So, but it isn't just the physical space important. Specifically, it is the social and cultural aspects around the organisation of space that really matter as well.
Ian Ellison
The words that I'm hearing loud in that are kind of function and symbolism the space, wherever it is, the location has very different roles. And it's easy for organisations, I think we see it in our industry quite a lot, you get very focused on the functional bit because that's the bit that you can provide. That's the bit that you can refurbish, refit, change, manage. That's the that's the tangible stuff, right. But how it then affects how people work, how it then enables them or inhibits them, how it affects their psyches, how it affects their psychological contracts, all of those things play a role as well.
And we need to understand those right now. It feels like the hard work starts now with this modern current iteration of hybrid, it feels like whilst we've been binary, the lack of choice has meant it's not actually something we've had to grapple with. Whereas now the hard work really does start.
Susan Halford
I think that's right. And in I think we went through I don't know if you experienced this, but you know, during the first phases of lockdown, we went through this kind of organisational almost euphoria, I suppose that we've actually done it, you know, we've got people working from home, and I worked. another project I'm doing right now is with another insurance company. And they moved their call center, from a physical center to home in 48 hours, they had all their call handlers working at home talk about things that people would have said was impossible. Only a few short months before the idea that you would have call center workers doing their calls from home that would have been seen as for most not all, but as quite a difficult thing to do.
And then we went through a phase where people thought, well, this is easy, this is fine, you know, we're never gonna go back to the office again. And we have this kind of sort of rash of people selling off office space and not renewing their contracts on office space, because why would you it's really expensive, and travel and blah, and all of that. And I think about 18 months in or maybe a bit less than that people are like, oh, you know, this working from home all the time. It's got some problems and some challenges, and I can't wait to we can get back in the office again. And, you know, thank goodness, we did keep some of our office space. And thank goodness, you know, if we've got call handlers who are new or who are facing particular challenges, actually, it's probably quite good thing for them to come in, spend some time in the office and then go back home again. So really recognising the value of the hybrid space, but I don't think it's very actively managed on the whole. I mean, that's a good example of active management, but I don't think it's actively managed or well understood at the moment.
The process that the managers went through, which was oh, I don't know how I'm going to do this, how am I going to manage people, you know what, they were going to be cutting their grass or decorating their living rooms not working, you know, how will I manage it. And first of all, that isn't what happened. And you know, if it's well documented, now, people actually were very scrupulous about working hard. Management's saw that, but I also felt it really, I really enjoyed, actually the thoughtfulness with which those managers started reframing their management practices in this kind of virtual walk about and this, there was an element of care, actually, I would say, in the way that those managers took responsibility for their staff under these new conditions.
Now, empirical question, how is that during the pandemic? And how does that vary between different sectors between different workforces between you know, etc, etc, etc. So, I can well imagine that what you say is true in certain places, people oh, that's just too difficult. That's just, that's just getting them back in and, you know, go back to the old ways, but I would really like to see a project that maybe a comparative project that took some different use cases across different sectors. I know that there's been some research done by a very large telecoms company, which was HR practices during lockdown, which was not quite the same thing. But it was about specifically about HR. So, I guess some of them are doing this work. But I really think there needs to be empirical research on it.
Ian Ellison
Okay, so the one thing that I'm really interested in and it's, obviously it's a pretty obvious question, but hybrid, the way you conceived of it back then, the way you observed it as a potential thing that hadn't been researched and the way you went about researching it, learning about it, and hybrid that we have, we're becoming now as a consequence of something we had no choice about. Is this the same hybrid? Or is this a different hybrid?
Susan Halford
Well, I think for whom is the question. So, for me, conceptually, I think there's a lot of similarities. Because conceptually, managers lineman emphasising the need for an empirical research because conceptually, you can come to ascribe a field or a set of issues. But actually, the content of that field is an empirical question. So, I think, conceptually, this distinction of multiple workspaces and the relationality between those spaces, and the impact that, that has on the work tasks, kind of workplace sociability and management, conceptually, I'm sure all of those things are still part of where we are now. But what's going you know, what sits inside that in terms of what Chris was talking about, you know, even you hear people talking about the experience, the kind of richness and the depths of what that feels like, how it's done, what the effects of it are? Big question mark
Chris Moriarty
I guess, what would be interesting, I mean, you you've touched on, you're a geographer, sociologist. And this is the paper from 17 years ago. And you've touched on the fact that you've moved on to sort of different areas of research and study. So just what is it? That's what's inspiring you now? What's, what's keeping you busy? Now? What areas of interest are you looking at the moment?
Susan Halford
Yeah, I mean, it's been really interesting going back to that paper and kind of seeing where it took me after that. So, I came at that study, because I was interested in organisational space. I came out of that study being much more interested as well in digital technologies and the kind of intersections between technology space and work, and particularly how technologies were disrupting and reconfiguring space, spaces of work, and what that meant for workers and how work gets done. And then I spent probably 10 years researching, perhaps surprisingly, in Norway, on digital innovations in health care, nothing to do with patients, but entirely to do with the workforce, and how digital innovations were shaping and reshaping work workplace relations, the organisation of work across the healthcare system in Norway, which at the time was very, very far ahead.
And that in turn, led me to a massive new stream of work when I was back at Southampton, which is where I was before, focusing much more broadly on digital technologies and social change. And in that case, I spent probably 10 years researching the internet, the kind of trajectory of the internet, the web, social media, what we used to call big data in the olden days, and of course, the resurgence of artificial intelligence on the back of rising computational power and these vast volumes of data that have been generated largely through social media, web browsers, etc, etc.
Throughout that process, I became absolutely committed and will remain for the rest of my working life. I have no doubt, to interdisciplinary collaboration across social sciences and engineering. Because actually, if we want to get under the skin of how the social and the digital are really interwoven, and I would use the word intra related, it's not that we've got the social and digital to separate things which occasionally bump up against each other. But actually, and you'll see some of the same thinking here the social creates the digital and the digital creates the social they are intra acting not just into acting. And if we really want to understand and think about that we absolutely have to work across social sciences and engineering. And we need to craft new forms of knowledge and expertise at the boundaries of what are really quite siloed academic disciplines, different epistemologies, different methodologies, different questions that we ask. And so, where I am now is on a whole series of projects that are coming out of that, at the tail end of that. So, in particular, working as one of the directors of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute, BDFI, whose mission is to create exactly those forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, specifically to rethink the way that digital technologies are created. So, this isn't just about studying things that have been done in the past, it is about thinking, how do social questions integrate with the funding of the visualisation of the imaginary about what kinds of digital technologies are being created? Now? Is this all about Elon Musk's rocket to Mars? And Zuckerberg metaverse? Or how else might we think about the creation of digital technologies.
And for that, rather interestingly, we are creating some new physical spaces, physical workspaces at the University of Bristol, where I work now, as part of the larger research England investments. And one of the things that we're creating is something that currently is called the neutral labs. Watch this space, whether it stays being called that. But the neutral Labs is a huge, beautiful, empty space that will be occupied over time by to interdisciplinary teams of researchers working with our partners. So, we have 27 external partners, from small community groups to global industry. We have a giant cupboard at one end of the room that's full of the most extraordinary and wonderful things from dancing walls and pop up tents, to stages and 3d printers and glitter and lego and everything in between. And the people that occupy that space will just be able to create their own workspace from the things in that cupboard. And they will occupy these labs will probably have something like 10 groups of we can we can fit in maybe 45 50 people at once.
And they will occupy that space, they'll work in their teams, but they'll also bump into people they wouldn't normally bump into the word neutral is because it's not owned by any of the faculties or departments in the university is owned by effectively owned and managed by Bristol Digital Futures Institute, which is a university research institute that sits above all of the faculties. And we know we have a remit to work with everybody from philosophy to quantum physics and everything in between. So, it's kind of that coming right around full circle to lots of studying space and the specialties of work and knowledge and everyday practice. But how do we create those spaces in ways that promote new forms of engagement, new forms of collaboration, and hopefully, ultimately drive new socio technical approaches to technology creation.
Ian Ellison
After you mentioned in our sort of prep, Susan, I went and learned a little bit well, I learned the I read the page about neutral lab and sort of just to just sort of understand a little bit more. And there was a phrase that jumped off the page to be empowered to collaboratively design and populate a bespoke space with the sensible, the surprising, and the state of the art. And I think they're you're talking to essentially the contents of this magical wondrous immense by the sound of its cupboard, which includes glitter, 3d printers, and a bunch of other things in between and beyond. What I was getting from this narrative was almost more creative potential and ambition than anything that I think Chris and I have ever seen in the standard workplace field, the people who you'd be hoping to turn to for inspiration about these things. So, this sounds like the most ground-breaking boundary pushing, collaborative, focused, sort of spatial opportunity that I think I've ever heard of. So yeah, it's hard not to get excited about it.
Susan Halford
It's exciting. And it's part of it. I mean, what's even more exciting, is that it's part of a whole suite of facilities that, that we're creating. So, the Institute will be located in a building that's actually a repurposed industrial building. So, it was the home of the Bristol gaslight company. Those two old industrial sheds they're absolutely beautiful stone-built buildings. We've just done a historical project on how the Bristol Gas Light Company presented gas and gas light when it first came to Bristol. How it no actually it created a night-time economy, because for the first time there was kind of widespread and consistent light after dark. So, it’s kind of really changed the social nature of life in Bristol and I don't want to make any lazy parallels, but you know there are some parallels with how digital technologies are forming and reforming so and in that building. We will also have to a reality emulator, which is fundamentally a repurpose of all digital twin. So, it's an immersive experience where reap as repurposed digital twin, so we'll be able to create synchronised, data analytics visualisations sound, haptics and also smell allegedly, but we haven't quite gotten that far yet to create immersive experiences of dot, dot, dot so, it could be immersive experiences of one of our partners is Airbus, and they're interested in remote working on aircraft wings.
So, we could create a digital twin of an aircraft wing. And we could have engineers in the reality emulator in Bristol. But because we've got fantastic dark fiber connections, we could have people in Germany and other parts of Europe co working on the wing at the same time. We could also do things like create immersive experiences of future smart cities or future classrooms or future hospital wards, we could one of the things I'm really interested in is using it to think about how we could engage some of those community groups in a kind of visceral, immersive experience of potential Digital Futures, which is probably going to be much more powerful than me going and talking to them in a sociological way. And that digital future so that will be in the building. And then we're co located with another big investment, which is Creative Technologies for the film and television industry, which is also got some other really interesting kits and stuff that we'd be able to use. And that's part of a bigger investment by the University of Bristol in something called temple quarter. For the whole of that area of Bristol behind the temple Muse railway station, the university is going to relocate some other cybersecurity labs, some hyper smart internet labs all sorts of other things are going to be co located as well.
Chris Moriarty
When I looked at the, when Ian sent me the neutral labs thing, and I read through it, the first thing I said back to him as a kind of an impulsive response. And I don't know, Susan, how I ofay you are with the world of Harry Potter. But it felt to me like the room of requirements, which is this kind of magical space where things that you need just appear. And I guess in effect, I'm not moving from that position, having heard what you've talked about, because even with the 3d printer, I suppose that brings a whole different level of requirements. You know, people might need something, they can't make it up, but it's not in that cupboard, which sounds like it has got everything in where you just make it and that's it's just, I mean, you guys are really pushing commission boundaries here.
Susan Halford
And also, scanner so we've got some very high-end scanners. So, one of the challenges of doing interdisciplinary work in reality emulator is not everybody who wants to use it as a coder. So, we will have some technicians working with us on the reality emulator, but we can also we've got some pretty amazing scanners that will scan not whole streets, we couldn't afford those but whole rooms and create digital models, so we can then import those into the reality emulator. So, people who don't have the digital skills can do that. So, it is an amazing opportunity. And we have these 27 partners 28 nearly we're about to sign on another partner for this and yeah, industry communities there all very keen to work with us. So, watch this space.
-- Pinder Ponder –
Chris Moriarty
Right, James, you've had the opportunity now to listen to Susan, tell us the three things that you took from our chat.
James Pinder
The first one was around moving beyond the what and into the how and the why. So, I think she is the example of the difference between the org chart, and what actually goes on in an organisation and getting to know the organisation and the people and the type of research that you need to be able to do that moving beyond maybe more quantitative techniques and descriptive techniques and getting more into explanation and understanding.
The second one was around the right methods for the right questions. And also linked with that this notion of deeper questions. So, moving beyond maybe more mainstream business, school perspectives of organisations and management into more, she used the term critical approaches to management theory and research.
And then the third one was around the opportunities provided by moments of change. So, in this case, it was around hybrid working in lockdown, but also back to the original case study. And that was a moment of changing that organisation. And, you know, actually researching those and understanding those, but also linked to things that happened during lockdown. And when organisations adopted hybrid working, and maybe some of the knee jerk reactions that occurred then that weren't maybe evidence based, and the need to do more empirical research around those issues.
Chris Moriarty
Lovely. So, give us them. Let's expand on that first one, then, which I kind of guess we could summarise as a kind of what versus why type of investigation. So just to expand a little bit on what your thinking was, when you pick out something of interest?
James Pinder
Well, I think the stuff early standout line was you go into an organisation and what you can learn from, say, an org chart, and those sorts of documents that are artifacts aren't their cultural artifacts. Yeah, exactly artifacts in an organisation and what actually happens in an organisation. And I guess, in some ways, this may be something that people are familiar with the sort of cultural iceberg sort of model where, you know, what you see above the waterline versus what actually happens and what people think, and the values and the behaviors that actually go in, in an organisation. And you see that a lot in when you go into organisations, I guess, the organisational rhetoric versus the lived reality of what people actually do and say and how they behave.
Chris Moriarty
It's interesting, that kind of reminded me of the conversation that you and I had with Gary Myerson. And he was saying that a lot of workplace design, you kind of the client would almost start with the org chart. This is the information you're gonna need. And he was sort of advocating actually, you need to get below that. So, it's something that's cropped up again, isn't it?
Ian Ellison
Yeah, yeah. He was talking about getting past the formulaic planning of space based around structures of organisations and thinking differently based upon understanding knowledge, worker mobility, more sophisticatedly, but this is about kind of understanding the way organisations work more broadly.
Chris Moriarty
Were you said artifacts, James, so just for people listening, I mean, without thinking about Indiana Jones, and all his amazing work that should be celebrated. What do you mean like by artifacts in an organisational context
James Pinder
The visible, things visible may be invisible, but certainly the visible things that that organisation, so they could be physical things, you know, in the workspace, or it could be documents or textual information that represents that organisation.
Ian Ellison
So, what like posters on walls uniforms that people wear processes that might live on a SharePoint site or might live in a filing cabinet, but they're all evidence of what the organisation is. It does looks and feels and is about?
James Pinder
Yeah, and I guess the point is, most of the time we take those things for granted. Which is often why somebody coming in from the outside will see sometimes see those things more obviously or because in an organisation they become literally wallpaper down and you don't see those take them for granted.
Chris Moriarty
To continue my recently introduced Indiana Jones analogy. Is there a danger that was something like an artifact if you take it on face value that you risk? Making a mistake or misinterpreting it. So, like, let's take the kind of Indiana Jones things, let's say someone pulled out some excavation site some tool, that that looks like it's an eating device and we develop this big story around it because we're looking at it, it looks like an eating device. And then we find out that it was an instrument for cleaning out toilets. And because we just didn't understand the people we didn't talk to the people at the time is there is that kind of what we're saying about the danger, we're looking at some of these artifacts, and not getting underneath it at surface level
Ian Ellison
I think there's kind of two sides to that, I think you can use them to start very powerful observations and confidence. If somebody says, in an organisation that you're working with, well, our values are x, y, and z. You know, we value trust, we value honesty, we value open
Chris Moriarty
Pipes, the random word value generator, there you go
Ian Ellison
And then you go to the kitchenette on any floor in said organisation's property portfolio, and you open the fridge and it says, do not steal my milk, do not steal my lunch post its over everything. And there's a bunch of posters around that kitchenette, saying washing pots, tidy up dinner today. They're all artifacts which demonstrate a surface level, right? You take them for what they are, but they show evidence of things more deeply going on.
But while we were talking about the sort of other side to what I was gonna say is, you know, they are surface level and they prompt further investigation. So, they are a starting point there, what data that helps you get richer things when you dig more deeply.
Chris Moriarty
So, guess is this, you know, Susan mentioned it, and she was talking about patterns versus understanding, I guess that's what you're getting at here, which is, we can look at a set of things and we can draw our own conclusions, we can infer what we think the relationship is between these things, we can infer meaning to them. But actually, unless we talk to people, unless we go under the surface, we don't really know what's going on.
I mean, even then I guess you talk to people. And you've got to there's a whole host of other things to consider like bias. And that could shape how people explain it to you. But it's surely put you in a better position than just looking at a set of numbers or a set of things artifacts, and drawing up a story that might be wider them up?
Ian Ellison
Well, context is the words you look at, to what degree does a surface level dataset show you context
James Pinder
I remember quite a few years ago doing some work with social network analysis in an organisation. And what that looked at is those informal networks of who are this key notes in an organisation and this particular department within an organisation, the people that people assumed were, the key individuals weren't actually the key individuals, when it came to actually how work got done, how things got done, and who the key people were, naturally, I remember this one particular person who's quite is probably seen as being more peripheral, or quite, you know, a low key individual actually was quite critical to have this department worked, even though that wouldn't have come through on the org chart.
Ian Ellison
So, when you overlay spatial considerations onto that, and I'm pretty sure that certainly Kirsten Sailor has done stuff like this, where it's not just about the social network analysis. I think Hallam has doubled with a bit of this as well haven't there, James. So, you’re thinking about social network analysis. But you're also thinking about spatial layout and space syntax, that space syntax is definitely something, Chris, that we'll get to when I'm sure Kirstin's available to come on the podcast.
And you can start to see really rich kind of double insights from the two analyses overlapping each other. And then when you take it in the direction of what Susan Halford was saying around, not just hybrid as spatial choices, but the fact that those spatial choices affect the, I think the words he used was relationality, they have this other this mutual impact, they change things, more than perhaps we're talking about right now. You can see that it really gets complex quite
Chris Moriarty
So that's quite a nice segue, I think into the second point, you highlighted James, which is about the right methods to answer the exam question, I guess in a in a kind of a simplified way. And we've just talked there about lots of different datasets, you know, might be spaced data, it might be organisational information, it might be interviews. So, I guess that's something that people struggle a lot with is, how do I how do I select the right method? What is the right method? How do we how do we get into that? So, what is it that you thought was interesting about what Susan said, and what would you be saying, if someone was asking you right, how do I go about establishing the right method? What do I need to think about?
James Pinder
Yeah, I mean, the thing that stood out for me was the not being overly dogmatic when it comes to methods and it's very easy to set yourself in a particular camp, and it should come back to what question you're trying to, what's the best way of doing that? And that might mean using a method that you don't normally use or that you've not used in the past. or that you're not familiar with even.
And, yeah, we've talked about this previously, when we talked about sort of multi-disciplinary teams and the benefits of working with people from other areas. And I know again, that cropped up in this episode as well. So, I think it's been more open minded isn't about what's, what's the right tool to use in a particular situation.
Ian Ellison
There's a funny thing there isn't there, because you also don't know what you don't know. And that plays to your argument about so that's why you assemble multidisciplinary teams to help you open opportunities and open up. That's the thing that Susan was getting super excited about at the end with neutral labs room of opportunity that Bristol is finalising and about to open dead soon.
Chris Moriarty
I think that's been one of the real kind of learnings for me, you're talking to these amazing brains, there's kind of this respect for expertise in sort of very particular areas of research. And really what matters most is getting the right application in not, you know, not who gets the credit, not who has the resources, or whatever it might be. It's like, oh, this person is really good at this. Let's get them in. So, we can learn a little bit about how they do this, because I need the answers. But I don't really know how to get it the best way or I might know the best way, but I don't know how to deliver it and make sure it's because it was like Harriet was talking to us about key things to think about when you're asking people to take photos, right. And it was a series of kind of ethical standpoints. And I was like, Oh, wow, that, you know, a lot of people wouldn't have even thought about that.
So, get them in, it just reminds me like there was that kind of fascia wasn't there in the 90s, just to get another film reference in but there was that fashion in the 90s with kind of like sci fi films, where you'd get a bunch of scientists together from all these different disciplines who didn't know why they were there. But it's the person that's overseeing it wanted a geologist and wanted a kind of anthropologist and wanted to biology and they didn't know why they were there. But they even the evil sinister scientific overlords at these corporations understood, I need an a decent, I need decent multidisciplinary team. Yeah, they got it, so we should be able to get it. But I was thinking it's like things like Jurassic Park, right? Jurassic Park. You know, you had Jeff Goldblum, no new Jeff Goldblum. It was a quantum physicist is a quantum physicist that I knew about chaos theory. Anyway, we've got side-tracked. Anything else you want to add on methodology? James?
James Pinder
Yeah, I guess your second part of the question was about how you choose. And I guess that's understanding the strengths and weaknesses of different techniques and what you're going to get from those techniques in a particular context. And part of that is the experience of having used there may be but also being able to find out well, is this going to generate the insights and the data that I need to be able to answer that question?
Chris Moriarty
This is a time for Einstein, which is if I had an hour to save the world, I'd spend 50 minutes working out the problem. So that's the kind of thing isn't it? Like, where do you where do you put your time, resources and everything. Your third observation was about moments of change, which is kind of like the sort of environments that these research programs take place in, I guess, and the impact that they have on the project?
James Pinder
Yeah, I guess there's a couple of angles to this. I think the one that stood out was the opportunities that moments of change can provide from a research perspective and from an understanding perspective, and we've kind of know that from the last couple years, they'll be in terms of significant change, and then the potential, and that potential isn't always realised to guess to try and understand and study the impact of that and learn from that. So, I guess that's one angle. Yeah, I think the other thing you touched upon there, Chris, maybe we come back to this is the impact that you can have on that change by studying it and researching it. So, I guess that's the other thing that I just heard them from the question that you asked
Chris Moriarty
I've read about ethnographic study. I know this is going off on a slight tangent here, but ethnographic study whereby you know, the challenges with it is when does the observation impact what you're observing
Ian Ellison
Ethnography in kind of very simple definition terms is a study of the lived experience. So, the ethnography is the process of studying a group of people. And you've got your classic kind of, you know, researcher turns up on island and lives with the tribe on the island who've never, ever been seen a person other than themselves before and all of that stuff. And to what degree does that change the tribe is the question you're asking, ethnography is a technique and ethnography is also the outcome, the product is the writing.
So, if the if that researcher then writes a book about the tribe, well, that's an ethnography of the tribe. The bit that you're wrestling with is the degree to which it influences that now take it to the opposite extreme. There's a type of research you could do called action research, where at a moment of change, your piece of research is deliberately designed to aim to I guess positively influenced that change. And we've got a friend at Sheffield Hallam, James Paul White, and he's very sort of pro action research as a method for academics to work really proactively with organisations at times when it can be really beneficial.
Chris Moriarty
The lovely notes finish on right, James, it's time for you to go. You got any plans for the rest of the day?
-- Outro –
Chris Moriarty
Well, that's everything folks. Hope you enjoyed our chat with Susan. Remember, you can give us feedback at hello@workplacegeeks.org Because we now know is looking at them and you can find us on LinkedIn and use the #workplacegeeks to share your thoughts. Next time we'll be bringing you our live episode with Dan pilling of tsk group. So, keep an eye out for that. Until then speak to you soon.
