Fore! Why golf-loving, office-obsessed employers need to look out

What will it take for Australian leaders to really understand that changing their antiquated employment practices makes business sense?

A major barrier to progress is, of course, golf. Even the Chinese government are aware of the dangers of golf to the economy. In 2017, they closed down one fifth of the nation’s golf courses. Mae Tse-Tung had it right when he banned golf in 1949.

Golf is a metaphor for all that is wrong with significant pockets of management practice in Australia.

The problem with golf is not only the ineffably boring people that play it and who insist on drawing attention to themselves by dressing like club circuit comedians with the similarly tedious anecdotes and jokes to match. Rather, golf is a metaphor for all that is wrong with significant pockets of management practice in Australia.

Golf has mastered the challenge of embracing new technology on the fairways and greens, while at the same time resolutely clinging to out of date, frequently borderline or worse sexist, racist and generally benighted attitudes to people management.

Women are still not admitted as members to some of the self-styled elite golf clubs around the world including in Australia. There are still problematic issues surrounding the treatment of black players, caddies and some clubs who allegedly exclude those of particular ethnic or religious origins.

Golf clubs reflect the embrace of advances in graphite shafts, aerodynamics, and putter balance, but golf clubs drag their new-tech comfy golf-shoe-clad feet when it comes to social change.

It is time that employers who expect their staff and customers to embrace change, embrace it themselves with hybrid working.

While technology is transforming work, a significant group of benighted employers seem hell-bent on maintaining traditional arrangements for how we work.

Elon Musk is not the only employer at the helm of leading edge technology supported by practically Victorian attitudes against working from home. It was, he asserted this year, “morally wrong”. Tesla employees need to do 40 hours in the office.

Perhaps the latest research published in no less than the journal Nature might force leaders to get with the program (that is no longer written in BASIC, but in JavaScript, Python, SQL and C sharp).

Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang, recently published their six-month randomised control trial looking at 1612 employees in a multinational technology company Trip.com. They compared staff who worked from home on Wednesdays and Fridays while working the other days in the office, with those that worked full-time in the office.

They found that hybrid working led to improved job satisfaction and quit rate reductions of one third. Furthermore, the researchers found working from home had no impact on performance reviews, and no difference in promotion rates over a two-year period.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that managers held negative views about working from home, however their attitudes improved over the course of the study. In other words initially sceptical managers were won over by the working from home results.

Approximately 100 million employees in Europe and North America now have a hybrid work pattern. The researchers state that hybrid working schedules are now the “standard” for university educated employees.

What is important about this study is that it looks at higher skilled work compared to earlier studies that tended to focus on more repetitive data entry or call processing roles. It also looks at hybrid workers, rather than those who work entirely from home. The researchers claim this is more representative, as 70 per cent of those who work from home are on a hybrid scheme.

At the end of this study, management at Trip.com extended hybrid working to all of its staff. They calculated that each quit cost the company $A30,000 in recruitment and retraining, meaning the one third reduction in turnover represented a massive saving.

It is time that employers who expect their staff and customers to embrace change, embrace it themselves with hybrid working. It is time for leaders to get out of the bunker, get the albatross off their backs, to soar like eagles, and to abandon their rough people policies.

Dr Jim Bright FAPS owns Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy, and is director of evidence & impact at BECOME Education. Email to [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @DrJimBright

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