Business fails again. Even with the answers under its nose.

(WARNING: Stroppiness ahead)

I don’t know if you ever watch Pointless? For those who do not know, Pointless is a gameshow which asks a question, such as “We gave 100 people, 100 seconds to identify as many types of ‘radio-active Antarctic gerbils’ as they can.”

After this they put up six different pictures from the many distinctive species of radio-active Antarctic gerbil that exist, and your job, as the contestant, is to identify the most obscure, correct answer.

The ideal answer to choose, is one that nobody in the sample group thought of. If you give such a ‘pointless’ answer, then you score zero, Alexander Armstrong’s ears turn bright green before they rotate through 90 degrees, and you are in line to win a glass model of a North Korean office block, that you can display proudly in your loft. ?It really is that exciting. As I work for myself, the boss lets me watch.

Failing grammar, failed practice

Sometimes there are questions, like the one above, where you know all the answers and must choose which you think is the most obscure. Obviously, you avoid the answer that you think everybody will know. Only to catch your jaw when that turns out to the best answer of the pass.

Cue yesterday morning. A friend of mine sent me a ‘Panel Event Invite’ on “How do we measure employee experience?” (and for future reference, there is no such thing as an ‘invite’).

Abbreviations and abhorrence

You may know the abbreviation FFS, and it isn’t “For Fiona’s Sake.”

FFS! We have known how to exquisitely measure employee experience, how to model it, and how to assess the causal links between organizational actions, employee experience and impacted mental well-being and performance for twenty years. We can even attach financial implications to these measurements.

Yet a panel including an MD of Workplace, An Associate Business Professor, a Workplace Futures Lead and an ‘Innovative transformation and Well-Being Consultant” are just coming around to thinking about how things might be done? It is nothing short of pathetic.

And I don’t just mean this panel. The lack of knowledge in our industry is atrocious. Most people who call themselves workplace experts are nothing of the sort. They are self-appointed quacks paddling about in the shallows of hubris, thinking that their years of experience of nothing much at all, is the same as expertize. They look with myopic backward eyes -- comfortable in the half light of business standards -- at problems that have been solved by science years ago.

The arrogance of individual companies and sectors wanting to display themselves as the purveyors of information prevents business as a whole from functioning properly. This indolent stupidity relies on hearsay, self-congratulatory claptrap, and insular publications from within the kith, with all the intellectual challenge of an angry flannel.

This should shame us. The knowledge is there! What are we playing at?

We have the answers!

Science, applied business science, already knows how to:

·?????? Measure

·?????? Model

·?????? Assess

·?????? Understand causality

·?????? Explore culture

·?????? Understand stress

·?????? Understand leadership

·?????? Build financial gains and consequences

·?????? Measure productivity

?

It also knows

·?????? What a good bad/good/great workplace is (and looks like)

·?????? How to maximize hybrid working

·?????? How to attract and retain the best people

?

The tools are cut, the work has been done. All anybody needs to do is ask. Then what is pointless becomes valuable.

?

Credits

Pointless image: By https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09yrtdr/pointless-series-19-episode-2#, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57022807