The Secret Weapons Of Marketing Psychology - Rory Sutherland - #904

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
So talking about lockdown, how effective do you think companies will be at dragging people back into the office?

**Rory Sutherland** (0:07)
It's interesting actually because in the UK, for whatever reason, there are exceptions. If you go to tech companies, there's tumbleweed, companies which are very strongly kind of tech engineering driven, still seem to be very empty. What I know best is the ad industry, and actually, they're generally a fairly gregarious bunch. I think it's returned to a pretty acceptable kind of equilibrium. By the way, personally, I don't want to see people in the office five days a week, because everybody who's engaged in some part of the knowledge economy, 20-40% of your working week is going to be stuff where you just need to truckle down, choose your own environment, and get on with it. You're much more likely to be more productive if you have some degree of discretion over where and when you work, for those tasks that you perform on your own. But there is this value of what you might call serendipity, coaching, for example, co-creation, collaboration, which I think still requires some degree of co-location. It helps to have people in the same place at the same time for all kinds of reasons. However, what's weird is that the level of absenteeism, I don't want to call it that, but you know what I mean, is much, much higher in the US and Canada than it is in the UK. Now, I'd always think-

**Chris Williamson** (1:31)
Was sick leave?

**Rory Sutherland** (1:33)
Some of it's probably geographical, in the simple sense that there are people who've moved. In other words, it's difficult in the UK to move so far away from the office that you can't come in for one or two days of the week. You have to choose an island somewhere, or go to Scotland, I guess. In the US, there does seem to have been a sort of widespread dispersion of people to a distance away from their place of work where it's a flight away, not a train ride away. But it's absolutely not what I would have predicted because if anything, the US had a very strong culture of presenteeism, of people effectively getting in early, staying late, being absolutely desperate to show their face.
The office occupancy rates are much, much lower in the US and Canada than they are in Europe or the UK.

**Chris Williamson** (2:27)
One of our mutual friends has a team that works remotely around the world, so they speak to each other on Slack, but they don't see each other in the office. As part of a team building exercise, I think every so often they bring people together. He thought this would be brilliant, everyone's going to get to know each other, they're going to become friends, it's going to bond the team together so much. The week after they had this in-person meetup separately, three people asked for a pay rise because they all got together and had a beer. We're like, so what do you want? Hang on a second. I was told such a, because you don't have that kind of non-critical conversation if you're just dealing with people on Slack. First off, there's a digital record of it. Maybe someone's able to check, I don't know. Can the admin check Slack? Maybe they can, I don't know. Secondly, it's like, we're just here to do the job. This isn't play around time outside of work. Do you really text the other marketing guy or whatever after work about stuff to do with it? Probably not. So there is from a totally Machiavellian totalitarian state organization point of view, there is an argument to be made.

**Rory Sutherland** (3:32)
Divided rule.

**Chris Williamson** (3:33)
Silo off, yeah, compartmentalize the staff and then they never know if one of them has managed to negotiate a pay rise and the rest of them haven't.

**Rory Sutherland** (3:40)
That reminds me of an agency back in the 1990s who sent their staff on assertiveness training and they all came back and half of them resigned.

**Chris Williamson** (3:49)
Oh, God. Be careful the skills that you give to the staff.

**Rory Sutherland** (3:54)
No, no, no, be careful what you wish for. Yeah. It is interesting, by the way, because one thing that's disappointed me is there seems to, I expected to see much, much greater levels of investment in really interesting remote working hardware. And by which I mean, really, really good tech at home. There is a project apparently in the works called Google Starline, which is a kind of 3D video conferencing, which there's a team at Google probably still working on. I hope so.