Is it Monday yet?

“Six o’clock already, I was just in the middle of a dream.”  I have a pretty good memory for an 80’s pop lyric, and enjoyed hearing that one drifting across the room as I made myself a cuppa yesterday morning.  I've been blessed with a pretty good memory full-stop actually, and as I opened the curtains at around 7am to the wintery landscape that greeted me, I found myself remembering how it felt to commute on days like this, as I’d have been leaving for work right around that time.  It would have been the most manic of Monday’s. A petrol fuelled day of disaster, weary weekend heads playing dodgems on the skid-pan roads, a flurry of brake lights branching out on the motorway in front of me like some warped satanic Christmas tree.  Chris Rea shares his joy at driving home for that season with us each December, but he also chronicled the road to hell, a metaphor for the roads we’ve commuted along so many times in our careers.  As I stood there listening to my singing companion lament her own tawdry Monday experience on the radio, I got to thinking... What exactly will meet us at the end of those roads in a few weeks’ time?  

Yes, that’s right – in a few weeks’ time.  Because while we’re buried in yet another lockdown and the immediate situation remains bleak, with infections slowing and vaccines passing into arms at something of a canter now, we’re approaching a finishing line.  Not 'the' finishing line - I'm not sure there'll ever be one of those - but a significant milestone all the same.  In a matter of weeks, we will all have greater freedom to move, mix and engage again, and for many of us, the offices we once called home for much of our working week will start to re-open.  Are you looking forward to it?  I don’t mean the initial flurry of hellos and air-hugs for our on-screen companions of the last 12 months. Sure, that’ll be lovely.  But what about that first huddle?  Hmmm, ‘huddle’ – that sounds a little bit weird now, doesn’t it.  Or your first face to face meeting with real people in a real room - and that first cough you can’t mute, followed by an awkward silence.  Or perhaps the fight for the last car parking space before any of those other things can happen?  Well brace yourself, because it’s all about to make a return.  Well, unless we decide not to let it happen, that is.

Now I have to confess, I’m with Bob and the gang on this one - I really don’t like Monday’s.  My dislike for them developed at an early age.  I was born on a Monday, but my fairish face soon hardened to them.  The only thing I enjoyed at school was Games (aka sport), and that was on a Wednesday, but double Maths on a Monday morning… Ugh.  And I carried my dislike of the first day of the week into my working life.  There have been a few notable exceptions along the way - I’ll come to one shortly - but as a rule I really could do without them.  My last set of office Monday’s were particularly distasteful.  The race for a parking space, perching on the corner of someone else’s desk on an improvised chair (the fate of any hot-desker), huddles in a room so full you couldn’t see or hear the people presenting, over-subscribed meeting rooms and a sea of colleagues many of whom had driven a good 2 hours or more for the privilege of being part of the scrum.  If Carlsberg made Monday’s, they wouldn’t have made them like this.  What a strange way to start the week.  And there’s a good chance it’s returning to an employer near you soon :)

There are a heap of other challenges heading our way too.  Remember just how much that season ticket used to cost?  And how much you begrudged paying the money for such a poor service?  Or the cost of petrol, nursery fees, work clothing (I’m not sure I fit in mine now…) and all the other routine costs that will start eating into our bank balances again, the money perhaps being channelled elsewhere in more recent times.  Covid’s first birthday is not exclusively one of many unhappy returns. We risk losing some things as well.  That once out-of-reach exercise regime your office routine couldn’t accommodate, now firmly established to offset a life in meetings.  Your ability to flex work around the needs of your family.  Or indeed that you’ve actually seen your family during a working week – I confess I rarely did for large parts of my career. They’re all lockdown linings of the silver variety; upsides on a massive downside I expect we’ll be reluctant to let go of now we have them in our grasp.  But perhaps we don’t have to.  Perhaps we can have our cake and eat it.

I’m writing this with the aftermath of Superbowl LV playing in the background – Tampa walked it in case you’re interested.  Now I had the pleasure of working on sport as a job for part of my career, and my Monday’s in those days were good.  We had a weekend of sport just-gone-by to pour back over, and on most Monday evenings there was a cheeky final serving of Premier League action in store in the form of Monday Night Football.  In the US, ESPN made a virtue of their own brand of football on a Monday night, flipping the notion of Monday as a day of gloom and turning into a day of sweet destiny, framed by the child-like question on every football fan’s lips: “Is it Monday yet?”  ESPN loved and celebrated Monday’s, because they closed out with one of the best games of the week.  

They looked ahead with equal anticipation to the wonder of Tuesday.  Now in most of my roles, Tuesday was recovery day – the day you felt like you actually started to do something after the whirlwind of Monday.  I remember one of my colleagues confiding they only felt like they were on top of things and making a difference by the middle of the week, and I knew what they meant.  Monday – forget it.  Tuesday – recover.  Wednesday – aaaaaaaaannd breathe.  But for EPSN, Tuesday was a day to hover by the water cooler and re-live the drama of the night before.

It was all a little tongue in cheek, and I’m sure their fans preferred football on a Saturday if they had the choice.  But it’s an interesting thought, isn’t it.  So here’s my thought for you with a few weeks to go until things start to move again.  What if we re-imagined Monday to make it the best way of the week?  The one that supercharges the four that follow.  The Monday’s I described earlier at times bordered on insanity.  We endured them because that was the way it had always been.  Well, we used to dunk women in the river to see if they were a witch, but we managed to knock that twisted tradition on the head.  So perhaps we can do the same with the old Monday routine.  How about we take what we loved about being together in the same space, blend it with all the silver linings of a year in lockdown and create a new recipe so we really can have our cake and eat it.  And if we were going to take on that challenge, where would I start?  Well, I have a few ideas.

Taking a leaf from the story of those that led before you is never a bad place to start.  The story of the World Cup winning England squad of 2003 is a well told one now, but Clive Woodward and his team really were full to the brim with ingenious ideas, and among them was one I’ve used on several occasions in my time leading teams - their Black Book.  In it, they captured everything a player needed to know about being a part of the England elite set up, including how they interacted together.  Woodward would set the topic and the players formulated their rules around it, so it came from within.  Think timeliness & punctuality is important?  Write it in – and in their case, respecting personal time was such a big deal to them, it meant turning up for meetings 10 minutes early.  I’ve written a few black books with my colleagues over the last 15 years or so.  The exercise never fails to capture people’s imagination and while some of the ideas have been different, the issues and needs that underpinned them were invariably the same.  Co-authoring a black book for a return after Covid could form a cornerstone for the team or business you lead moving forward.

Following on from this, some simple principles or commitments we all sign up to could make all the difference.  My instinct is that people will feel an underlying pressure to be in the office again, even when they’ve been given permission to work remotely more often than was once the case.  Why?  Because other people are ‘in’ – which means you’re not.  And as we all know, managing split-site meetings can be painful at the best of times. “How do you connect a laptop to this screen?”; “I can’t get the sound to work?”; “Sorry mate, we can’t hear or see you.”  Perhaps framing a few commitments to each other will make it easier to collaborate together moving forward.  How about ‘All in or nobody in’ for meetings? - i.e. we all come in to attend or we all stay remote and Zoom in.  Or to appease grumpy start-of-the-week souls like me, perhaps ‘Monday always starts with a smile’ and we carve out that first hour for the things we’re most proud to share, or to tackle one of the more energising problems we want to crack as a team.  And dare I say it, perhaps on a Monday we all stay away from the office, or at least come in a little later to avoid the morning rush.

On a personal note, I feel the lessons from Covid challenge the very notion of what an office is and the purpose it serves in any forward thinking enterprise.  How many times have you travelled in to sit at a desk and work there for the majority of the day because you felt you ought or had to – I know I have.  But when I think about it logically, it’s all rather counter intuitive.  I’ve come to wonder if perhaps home is where we work, and work is where we play.  I don’t mean that exclusively or in a literal sense, but I certainly feel the balance could shift so the time we spend in the office is focused on the things where collaboration and connections make the difference.  An ideas session.  A food tasting (obviously).  Sharing our work together in a show & tell.  Taking time to recognise and reward each other for the things we’ve achieved together.  They all feel like brilliant reasons to be in the same place.  But commute in to sit at a desk all day tapping into a screen to reassure the boss that you’re committed and working?  No thanks.  That all sounds very Q1 2020.  

I also find myself reflecting that when it comes to leadership, there’s a challenge for all of us as we adjust back to a world off-screen.  Are you ready to actually look someone in the eye again and engage them, to be on stage in a world where you can’t turn your camera off or screen people out Black Mirror style?  Because when we’re in the room together, we can all see each other, all the time. I know I’ll find it an interesting challenge after so long working from home, beaming through a screen.  Despite my distaste for Monday’s, I am ultimately one of life’s optimists, prefer to see how much remains in the glass than what’s been consumed from it, and I’m most definitely on a post-Covid silver linings binge to replace my Netflix habit.  With a year of working this way under our belts and all our knowledge of the old world to reach into, we have all the material we need.  The genie is well and truly out of the bottle and doing a little tap dance on our home-improvised desks.  What was once sacrosanct where working routines are concerned is now up for debate, and I say let’s grasp the opportunity it presents.  The smart ones among us will have already prepared, some will have given it at least some thought, and perhaps a few of you have started to panic, just a little bit.  The next round of profound change is coming, it’s arriving sooner than perhaps you think, and the choice is binary - get ready for it or get run over by it.  For my fellow optimists in the room who don’t want tyre tracks across their neatly pressed work clothes when they do make a return, think of it this way.  When you hear your colleagues longing for the next Monday to come round, you’ll know all the effort was worthwhile.