Remote Work Interviews

Owl Labs (OL): Tell us what led you to start the Behavioral Science Practice at Ogilvy?

Rory Sutherland (RS): If you work in advertising or marketing, you discover there are many cases where human behavior doesn't conform to the rational tenets of mainstream economics. Years before I knew behavioral economics and behavioral science existed as distinct areas of scientific inquiry, I felt there was a large missing area of study around human decision-making.

Our aim is to simply look at those areas where human behavior and human decision-making differs significantly from what a person might logically assume. In marketing terms, the distinctions can often be large enough to distinguish between success and failure.

It's difficult in a business environment to make a seemingly irrational decision. However, it's often necessary to do that to succeed. Just to give one example, there are instances where, to increase demand for a product, you may be better off putting the price up, not down. It sounds counterintuitive, but you can fail to sell something by making it too cheap, or by pricing it at the wrong place relative to other competitors.

Here in the UK, a marketer bought a British sparkling wine vineyard and ingeniously priced the resulting wine – which is extraordinarily good – to be more expensive than champagne. The vital thing about that is if you make a sparkling wine less expensive than champagne, it inevitably seems apologetic. It's almost an admission that what you have isn't as good; it also means you can't bring it to anybody as a gift because it makes you look like the cheapskate guy who didn't buy "proper" champagne. What might seem to be logical – undercutting champagne (because who doesn't want a drink that's as good as champagne but costs less?) actually may not work.

OL: What kind of work do you usually do when working with Ogilvy clients?

RS: Many marketing departments are too heavily focused on marketing communications at the expense of other areas of marketing: we believe the proportion of creativity and insight that goes into marketing communications is disproportionately high compared to the creative attention that's paid to everything else marketers do. We interrogate everything from product design to experience design to web design; just because they may be less expensive does not mean they deserve any less insight and imagination than conventional "bought" media communications.

Something that often happens, unfortunately, in businesses is that bought media communications get all the attention because they're so pricey. Parts of the marketing mix which tend to be less expensive receive far less imaginative attention. We think it's a terrible mistake because there's just as much scope to enjoy differentiation and competitive advantage through imaginative experimentation in those fields as in producing imaginative advertising. The ratio of attention has been out of whack for far too long.

OL: Owl Labs worked with the Behavioral Science Practice to create our 2019 State of Video Conferencing report. What were some of the most surprising findings when you read the results of the report?

RS: One interesting thing is the extraordinary success of Zoom. Especially when you consider Zoom is up against products from Apple, several products from Microsoft, and products from Facebook. Here, you have an outsider that came up against all the web giants and has beaten them all at their own game.

We're also starting to see the beginnings of an intelligent approach to remote working and different working practices. In the early days of video conferencing, there was a naive belief that it was a substitute for all meetings and that nobody would travel anymore, or that people would work remotely all of the time or for several days a week. We're beginning to see a much more nuanced approach. For example, you might have video conferences first thing in the morning then you might travel into work later on an empty road or a train; you might intelligently use it to shift the time of travel rather than replacing travel for instance.

We also see the extraordinary popularity of the Meeting Owl everywhere it's encountered. When a company imposes new technology on its staff, generally the staff is a bit 'meh' about it. To see that level of popularity is a testament to the significant emotional gains enjoyed when you use the Owl to video conference.

I always felt there was something about video conferencing that was logically right but anthropologically wrong. It seemed that the requirement for everybody to sit in rows facing a screen as if they were on a bus was fundamentally unnatural. For millions of years, humans or even higher primates have sat around in circles to discuss things. There's a reason we call them the knights of the round table, not the knights of conference-style seating.

The important point of this is most of the pure "information" as conventionally understood in a video conference takes place over voice, so the value of video is in two things: it conveys a lot of tacit and emotional information that voice and text alone don't convey, and it gives you something to look at to hold your attention. By zooming in on the speakers' faces, and by regularly changing the view, the Owl achieves both these ends fabulously.

One of the problems with telephone conference calls was that, in the absence of anything to look at, it was easy to become distracted. You'd start looking at your emails, you'd start online shopping, etc. Even DIY in the case of one (nameless) colleague.

OL: What are some of the human behavioral challenges that people on hybrid teams are facing? What do leaders need to be solving for?

RS: There's a coordination problem to be solved. My prediction is people will slightly partition their workweek. (See my article in Wired for more on this). They'll have a certain number of days of the week and core hours which will be devoted to face-to-face contact or to those things which are location-dependent. Then they'll have days of the week that are virtual – a mixture of email, voice conferencing, and old-fashioned phone calls.

I started working in 1988 and nearly everything was location-specific. If someone rang you at the office, the phone rang on your desk. If you weren't in the office, you couldn't answer the phone. Photocopying took place in the photocopier room. Now, we should have face-to-face meetings on three days of the week and we should dedicate them to being fully, physically present. With my team, I try and encourage them not to email in the office at all. What's the point of coming into a building and traveling across London to do something you could do at home?

When you're sending an email, think of the opportunity cost. While you are staring intently at a screen you're not having a random conversation with a colleague which could be far more valuable. I remember when the most important conversations that took place were unplanned and serendipitous – they were just hallway meetings. When you're in the office, spend time doing what the office is good for.

When you're at home, rig up a good video setup with nice headphones, a quality microphone, and lighting. And devote blocks of time to video calls. One of the things that emerges from the research is that switching costs are high. If you switch from a physical meeting to email to another email on a different subject to a calendar to a video meeting to another email – every time you switch modes, you waste time. Have dedicated blocks of time for virtual contact and dedicated blocks of time for face-to-face contact.

An issue with video conferencing is that it's quite difficult to do with an open-plan office. Just as video conferencing technology became better, we created offices where it is difficult to use because there's a lack of privacy and silence.

I would love it if the Meeting Owl or Zoom took over unused phone boxes in London. Turn them into video conferencing kiosks! Sometimes, in London, I have a video conference but not a location to have it - and I increasingly notice people going home to do video conferences in a private space.

Of course, let's not forget video conferencing in the early days was very bad and you had an excuse to blame the technology when anything went wrong. As a result, people were put off of video conferencing because their early experiences were disappointing and the quality was so poor.

OL: It sounds like some of your recommendations for using video conferencing more effectively include having the environment that supports using it, but also taking the time to prepare for it the way you would a physical meeting.

RS: Yes, and ultimately, the one great tipping point we'll see, is when every physical meeting is a video meeting by default. So there's a Meeting Owl or something similar in every meeting room and every physical meeting room also has a virtual address so it's assumed that people can always attend remotely.

The other thing is what the Swedes call "flygskam" which means 'flight shame'. It becomes embarrassing to fly too often and to fly too gratuitously. Business people may make it a policy that they don't fly any more than X times per year. If that happens, environmentalism and video conferencing can work hand in hand here.

Most business people who have to fly a great deal would secretly like to fly less. That's not true of people who make one business trip a year – they'd like to make two because it's fun. It's a novelty and they probably build a holiday onto it. But those people who have to fly to Frankfurt 15 times a year would love to go only five times. The thing that forces them to attend in person is a form of costly signaling – if three of my competitors show up and talk to my client in person, and I only offer a video call, I become the lazy guy. The guy who is not quite so hungry, not quite so keen, not quite so eager.

If we can use flight shame and can achieve that social norm, we'll see another game-changer in business behavior. A large part of why I started the Behavioral Change Practice at Ogilvy was to solve these mysteries – including why people use video conferencing so little even now that it's become good.

Reluctance to use this technology is patently not about the price because video conferencing saves you a large amount of money. So, it's something cultural or it's something social – once you understand the other forces at work, you start to discover at least the potential for solving the problem. I also believe the fact that video conferencing was sold as being cheap was a mistake. If it had started out being really, really expensive, so only the CEO got to use it, it would've become a much higher status form of interaction.

OL: Interesting! I hadn't thought about it from a pricing angle but that's something we talk about too from the perspective of advocating for remote work. It can be a big cost-saver for businesses having to get a smaller office, or not having to pay for people's coffee and snacks for a team of 50 versus a team of 20.

RS: With remote working, the big benefit is it's much easier to work remotely when you've been with a company for a certain length of time because you're trusted to do so. One of the great benefits of remote working is that it keeps staff loyal. Personally, I don't travel to London on Fridays and would find it enormously hard to sacrifice that freedom – even for quite a large salary increase somewhere else.

The freedom to do what I'm doing now is extremely valuable – you almost can't put a price on it. In terms of the war for talent, this is an extraordinarily important weapon. The world is becoming increasingly global – I recently had a Zoom call with someone in Melbourne and now I'm talking to someone in Massachusetts. Had those meetings been in-person, it would've basically involved a whole week of my working life and would've been absolutely exhausting. There's a huge danger that we look at things and go, 'Well, this is easy therefore it's less productive.' In behavioral science, this is called the "Effort-Reward Heuristic".

This bias arises when people use effort as a proxy for value: there's a tendency in business to go, 'I'm finding this tiring, therefore, it's valuable', or ‘I'm finding this easy then it doesn't count as work'. Increasingly in the office environment, we don't know whether what we're doing is valuable, so we do what's tiring by default. Yet, looked at objectively, the freedom now to do business with people all over the place with a kind of casualness is like magic.

We also need to ask questions like, 'Why do video conferencing meetings always last an hour?'. Well, that was how long physical meetings used to last. Now, if you'd asked three people to travel across town to attend your meeting, the meeting had to be an hour-long because otherwise, it was discourteous. But, there's no reason why a video meeting can't be 15 minutes long or even three.

The other thing we shouldn't forget is that this technology is a solution to the plague of emails. On a video call, we can talk and agree on things between a group of five people in real-time in any place in the world in the space of 15 minutes. Over email, that would involve 45 minutes to an hour of typing spread over five days.

The fact that email is asynchronous is a huge problem, and being able to video conference around the world is a kind of magic. We're failing to spot that because we're not conscious of what it replaces.

OL: I agree. You make a good point about how asynchronous tools of email and Slack were meant to be timesavers but we're starting to reach a tipping point where they're becoming time wasters in their own way.

RS: Every time you switch from one email to another email you're losing focus or you're losing time. One of the great things we have to do to get productivity back up again is to repartition the week so that there are whole mornings dedicated to one activity and whole mornings dedicated to another activity. What you need is swathes of uninterrupted time dedicated to a single task.

Managers are slightly different as they can switch from one thing to another; they tend to view productivity as the number of set group decisions they're involved in during a day. If you want to actually make something, what you need is a whole day or the very least an afternoon dedicated to that single task. (Paul Graham wrote a great piece on this called "Maker's Schedule versus Manager's Schedule")

OL: Absolutely. You made a great point about chunking your time or your schedule. Having days for meetings in the office and having days where we're fully at home. Our State of Remote Work Report found that all of your assumptions were correct.

We asked respondents if they'd be willing to take a pay cut to work remotely and 24% of people said they'd take a pay cut of up to 10% to work remotely, and 20% said they'd take a pay cut of more than 10%. Those aren't small amounts of money. It speaks to your point that it's about building a schedule and building a personal life too.

RS: There's also a macroeconomic question. Very, very large cities are extraordinarily creative because of the number of connections within them. Areas of high-density population are extraordinarily productive and generate astounding wealth. But, they immediately start to run into problems where the land value becomes so high and the space becomes so cramped or transport becomes so difficult that they essentially run up against a kind of barrier.

London invested early in an underground railway, allowing London to grow to a scale for about 100 years that wasn't matched anywhere else until London reached the natural limits of expansion. If you change the rules so the definition of London expands by another 50 miles, including people who may live and work remotely in Oxford or Cambridge or Brighton but travel into London when needed, this is a way of actually breaking that physical constraint that tends to exert downward pressure on cities. I always jokingly say the only way to have a great life is to have a megacity salary but to live in a small town. If you could combine those two, you've got it made.

OL: What do you think the future of work looks like 10 years from now? Will there be more remote workers, more people in the suburbs, what does that look like?

RS: It's an interesting question. When I say we're reaching the limits of infrastructure, I'll be honest with you; 25-year-olds don't mind. They love huge cities and none of my younger colleagues want to go and move to suburbia. But, we also have an aging population who possess skills and experience that are still valuable to the economy. For them, big-city commuting is exhausting.

First of all, retiring outright is bad for you. Going from working 50 hours a week to zero is a bad idea. Most people aged 60 wouldn't want to be getting up at 7:00 AM and braving the London underground and so one of the big changes to patterns of work would be people who say, 'Once I no longer have the commute, I'm perfectly happy to go on working for longer'.

For example, after you retire from the Finnish railways, they keep you on a retainer for a few years to answer questions remotely. Someone can ring up a retired worker to ask questions on the job. Whereas what used to happen when someone retired is that their entire mental store of knowledge and experience walked out of the door, never to return.

I can see about four or five different ways of change. The problem is that changing group behavior from one mode to another is a slow process. Changing one person's mind can happen in an instant. Changing five people's minds is a much, much more gradual process. Hence the adoption of this technology to its full effect will annoyingly take a decade longer than it should.

OL: It's hard to be the people doing the evolving, right? It's easy to benefit from the results and it's easy to have an idea to do it, but when you have to do the actual process, it can be a slog. We're working on a guide for people that outlines the instances where you should use Slack, email, video conferencing, etc. People don't know unless they spell it out and that's a big help in hopefully making that decade a little shorter – it's about making the implicit explicit.

RS: These new forms of communication all arrived too quickly for any form of etiquette to take shape around their use.

Incidentally, one thing that might help is if video conferencing is built into email so you can automatically record video in reply to an email. There are tons of things on email which are appalling – it's poorly designed and we can undoubtedly rethink that. One thing that Outlook does that drives me crazy is, if you send a subject-line-only email, it prompts you: Are you sure you want to do that?

On the contrary, you should be encouraging people to send emails that contained entirely within the subject line because they can be dealt with much more quickly! I don't need to open anything, I read it. I go, 'Yep that's fine' and then I delete it and I've saved about five clicks and 120 seconds.