How strict lockdown rules are shaping the way we work

As the pandemic hit the UK last year, government experts, scientists and officials concluded “the British public will not accept a lockdown”, fatally delaying measures to curb coronavirus, according to Dominic Cummings.

Behavioural scientists have hit back at the former prime ministerial adviser’s implication they were partly to blame. In fact, it was Cummings who notoriously left lockdown in London to travel to Durham with his family. Britons otherwise proved pretty good at following the rules. University College London’s rolling Covid-19 Social Study suggests 91 per cent of people are still complying with most of the official guidelines. That figure has not slipped below 80 per cent since the survey started in March 2020.

The pandemic has, though, provided an education in how people respond to rules and guidance, and how their decisions — to mask or not to mask, whether to holiday in the UK or ignore official guidance and travel to an “amber list” country — are affected by what others do. What might business leaders learn about how to keep their organisations on course?

At a roundtable I chaired recently on rules and culture, for the charity Blueprint for Better Business and the Institute of Business Ethics, one former senior government official offered three ways in which rules can be useful: as signals of intent; as guardrails, to make the organisation a safer place; and as “tools of last resort”, to hold individuals to account (and, another participant added, for individuals to hold organisations to account). When this leader’s team ran into unfamiliar ethical territory, though, they relied on values, not rules, to decide what to do.

Carol Franceschini, senior behavioural scientist at the Financial Services Culture Board, which aims to raise standards in UK finance, points out that “when it’s all about rules, it’s almost a game: it’s just like we’re telling highly educated, intelligent people that all that stands between them and a great outcome is the rule”.

The temptation to push to, and eventually across, the boundaries can become overwhelming. Failure then to punish a breach reinforces the bad behaviour and encourages repetition. It may even evolve into a new social norm. Think of the bantering interest-rate-rigging bankers in the Libor scandal, or, for that matter, of anyone who took Cummings’ flexing of lockdown last year as a licence to bend the rules themselves.

Businesses have covered plenty of unfamiliar territory since the beginning of 2020, and most will insist publicly that having strong values helped them through.

What staff have lacked, though, is the opportunity to test their understanding of rules and values in face-to-face exchanges with colleagues, or by watching how everyone behaves. I’ve heard more than one tale of errors made by remote-working colleagues, in a few cases leading to dismissal, that their bosses believe would not have occurred if the staff members had been able to bounce their ethical dilemmas off colleagues in casual encounters.

There is some evidence, though, that the constraints of the pandemic have reinforced trust and interdependence between colleagues.

The FSCB’s latest survey of 73,000 banking sector staff, conducted in September 2020, was bathed in what Franceschini calls a “Covid glow”. Workers’ views of the effectiveness of feedback and of leaders’ willingness to take responsibility improved. One possible reason, she says, is that “people searched for purpose and connection” more during the pandemic.

Academic Maartje Schouten says that in times of uncertainty, clear guidance and rules may reduce individuals’ “cognitive load”, letting them focus on other things. A paper she and colleagues from Iowa State University presented to last year’s Academy of Management meeting suggested restrictive Covid-19 rules pushed people towards work as a coping strategy. Workers in US states with tighter policies became more engaged, trusted their leaders more, and co-operated more with colleagues.

There is one obvious caveat, says Schouten — a golden rule, if you like: guidance “only has an effect when we recognise the authority it comes from”.

In the US and the UK, clear authority was sorely lacking at the height of the crisis. Cummings last week conjured the memorable image of an indecisive Boris Johnson as a wonky shopping trolley, “smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.

Business leaders, take note. Unless applied fairly, consistently, and with clear consequences for transgressors, rules are hard to transmit and enforce. Or as Cummings put it, “if the prime minister changes his mind 10 times a day, and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy, day after day after day, you’re going to have communications disasters”.

andrew.hill@ft.com

Twitter: @andrewtghill