Why lying is rife in the workplace and how to stop it

Even experts can fall for a lie. Leslie John is the last person you’d expect to have been duped. The Harvard Business School professor teaches negotiation tactics for dealing with liars, so she was blindsided when she fell for the oldest trick in the book. She found herself in a six-month relationship with a man who, unknown to her, was married. “To be fair, it was a long-distance relationship,” she explains on the phone from Boston.

John had been “catfished” – fallen prey to a person who uses technology to construct a false identity.

Some liars are so convincing that even experts are snowed, despite all their training, their psychological profiling and their lie-detecting technologies. While many people believe they can identify dishonesty through body language, research shows that people’s success rate at picking lies is no better than chance (50 per cent to 60 per cent). Trained police detectives fare no better.

Recalling her “catfishing” experience a couple of years ago, John says awareness of lies doesn’t make you invulnerable to them.

“This is someone who completely duped me. He just flat-out lied,” she says. “When you are motivated to believe someone and see what you want to see in them, it is amazing what you can be blind to.” They were talking every few days on the phone. “It is exhausting holding a lie,” she says. “I don’t know how he functioned.”

When is it ok to lie?

People tell one or two lies every day, on average, and half of all people in negotiations will lie if they have the right opportunity and motive, according to studies. However, some untruths are seen as more forgivable than others, says Mara Olekalns, professor of management (negotiations) at the Melbourne Business School.

“Withholding information is considered reasonably acceptable. Engaging in what would be considered competitive behaviours, such as an exaggerated first offer or misrepresenting what you are willing to accept, is considered reasonably acceptable because it is seen as part of the negotiation game,” she explains.

“And then you move down to things that are a little less acceptable, like faking positive emotions, such as liking the other person, or faking negative emotions like anger to try to influence them.

“Then we move one further step down to deliberately misrepresenting information in order to influence outcomes. That is actually perceived as not very acceptable at all and is possibly illegal.”

Lying in business

The business world is awash with untruths. Around 36 per cent of managers admit to telling lies every day, according to research by the UK’s Chartered Management Institute (Managers and the Moral Maze). Olekalns advises her students to avoid this ethical minefield of game-playing by moving to a problem-solving orientation, which requires them to be more frank and open with their information.

But she warns that first they must test the other party’s willingness to play by those rules, otherwise they leave themselves open to exploitation. “Try to be as honest as you can until you have evidence you are being exploited,” she recommends.

People tell one or two lies every day, on average, and half of all people in negotiations will lie if they have the right opportunity and motive.

Enterprise bargaining is one area of negotiation where distrust of “the other side” is almost a badge of honour and it is a field of engagement Clive Thompson knows well.

Thompson is a director of CoSolve, a consultancy that uses a non-adversarial problem-solving process called “interest-based bargaining”. These union-versus-employer engagements are full of theatre, he explains, with each side performing to their own audience (workers or investors). Old suspicions and hatreds die hard.

“Once or twice I’ve had cases in the union space, mainly on the union side, where a very dyed-in-the-wool, class-analysis person has come along with the attitude that capital/the bosses are the Devil. There is never a moral reserve about lying to the Devil.”

Yet although there may be congenital liars among employers and ideological liars on the union side, both cases are very rare in Thompson’s experience.

What to do if you’ve been lied to

So should you “call out” a lie? Perhaps… but Harvard’s John says it is better to take note of it as a “data point” and use it as a cue to probe further.

Thompson advises going down the denouncement route only if you’re confident the liar will be removed by the other party’s team as a result. If the liar is not removed from the negotiation, it opens up a whole new area of unpleasantness and debate about whether or not actual lies were told. “It is a high-stakes card, only to be played when either you are desperate or there is no other option,” he says.

If you don’t confront the lie, then you have to proceed on the basis that the other party can’t be trusted, fact-check everything that the other party divulges, and keep your own confidential information close to your chest, he says.

Because of the difficulty in identifying lies, a better strategy in a negotiation is to prevent any lies in the first place. Thompson, for example, asks that all announcements be made jointly by the negotiating parties. This stops them from misrepresenting each other’s position when reporting back to stakeholders.

An alternative is that an announcement will not be made until the other party has had it for 24 hours and has the opportunity to comment on it.

“In practice, that sharing of the draft typically does elicit comment. And that comment very regularly does move the first party to alter it,” says Thompson.

One of the occasions when it is often regarded as acceptable to stretch the truth is in a job interview, when people boost their successes (and sometimes appropriate other people’s wins) and exaggerate their current remuneration packages.

This crosses over to fraud when people claim qualifications they haven’t earned and concoct an impressive, but imaginary, work history. About 50 per cent of resumes include false information, according to research by both the Society of Human Resources Management and CareerBuilder.com.

Catching a liar

Liars will get caught. The Australian corporate world is, in reality, fairly small. It is more like a village, says Jannine Fraser, managing director of career management company The Career Insight Group.

“If you misrepresent the truth, people will always find out,” Fraser says.

Even gilding the lily on LinkedIn carries huge risks because former colleagues can read it and spread the truth. Fraser says when she hires for her own 200-person company, it is easy to do a police and reference check.

There is no excuse for employers to be caught out by the likes of Andrew Flanagan, who was sacked on his first day as general manager of strategy and business development at Myer in 2014 when it was discovered he had falsified his work history. Flanagan had falsely claimed to have previously held the job as general manager of strategy and business development for Inditex, which owns international fashion brand Zara.

The recruiter, in this case, had contacted two overseas referees supplied by Flanagan. According to one report, an email address for one of them was traced to the IP address at Flanagan’s home.

Flanagan had duped a list of big retailers into hiring him on false pretences (in Australia and overseas) before he was “outed” by Inditex, which had seen the announcement of Flanagan’s Myer appointment.

Fraser is still mystified how this could occur in such a well-networked industry: “In Australia, we use our networks. We don’t just rely on the candidate’s nominated referee. Nobody else does that,” she says.

As for habitual liars, Fraser says it can be a form of mental illness. “I think for some people it becomes a form of power and there is adrenaline attached to it. It becomes a matter of ‘What can I get away with?’.

“People kind of move into the zone of the hustle. We are all vulnerable to getting full of our own story.”

4 critical skills you’ll need in the future workplace

The workplace is changing, and with it the skills that workers need to thrive in a digital and diverse environment. Here are four skills that will be in highly sought after by employers in the future:

1. Emotional judgement

EJ, the new EQ, is now a top priority for many employers. “Emotional judgement is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathise with their position,” says Dr Marcus Bowles FIML, founder of the Institute for Working Futures. “It’s also about understanding the impact of the decisions you have to make.”

“EJ correlates strongly with the customer experience in service organisations. For technical experts, engineers and doctors, it’s about empathising with the outcome the client might want and being able to understand that the optimal solution may not be the best solution.”

2. Global citizenship

This encompasses cross-cultural work and diversity, says Bowles. “If you can’t empathise with different views of the world then it’s very hard for you to work in that context.”

Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?

3. Courage

“A lot of organisations don’t just want people who can innovate, they want people who can advocate for the customer,” says Bowles. Courage is a desirable quality that shows up among natural learning strings in organisations. “Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?”

4. Foresighting

Visionary leadership is about to take on a whole new meaning. “Can you see through the macro-trend to spot the business opportunity?” You’ll need to.

How creativity and innovation help make happy customers

Mark Wengritzky believes creativity is the greatest competitive advantage that humans have over machines, so he’s often puzzled why companies invest in innovative technology but don’t put the same money into innovative thinking.

“Too many companies think that being innovative is about building an app or getting the latest and greatest technology,” he says. “Technology is just an enabler. Creativity is the real source of innovation.”

As business development manager of Akqire, a Melbourne-based product development and innovation company, Wengritzky specialises in helping organisations come up with creative ways of reaching their customers and expanding their business. Rather than working as a traditional marketing company, Akqire helps companies cut through advertising noise to reach the heart of their customers.

“If you want to be at the forefront of change, creativity is something that needs to be celebrated.”

“A lot of companies are spending so much money on marketing without actually looking at what their customers want,” he says. “We help companies create innovative products and services by looking at who their customers are and what their pain points might be.”

Brightday, an online platform that aims to make it easier for people to make choices about their superannuation, is one example of Akqire’s work. Akqire’s research showed that people were looking for greater control over their investment decisions, so it worked with Eureka Report to design a new model for advisory services. The Brightday platform provides investors with research and knowledge to assist them in managing their own superannuation.

Sometimes a company’s culture is its own impediment to innovative thinking, says Wengritzky. “Companies know they need to innovate and they may have innovation teams and gather customer insights, but their culture often gets in the way. It may be that people just want to follow their boss’s ideas to keep them happy without ever saying what their own ideas might be. It just means that the breadth of ideas become restricted.”

Mark Wengritzky

Mark Wengritzky believes more companies should invest in creativity (Photo: Eamon Gallagher)

He adds that businesses may need to think beyond their traditional service offering if they want to remain relevant to their customers. He points to the challenges insurance companies face in engaging with millennials. “Instead of following a traditional approach to marketing or engagement, why not look at what is changing within the demographic, what they want now and what service they might need that’s not necessarily insurance in its traditional form,” he suggests.

It’s this kind of creative thinking that can lead to innovative solutions. “If you want to be at the forefront of change, creativity is something that needs to be celebrated.”

When I grow up I want to be an ethical hacker

The work landscape of the fourth industrial revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, looks very different to the one we grew up with in the 20th century. Industry 4.0 is characterised by universal connectivity, technological breakthroughs and fast-paced disruption that are facilitating a widespread shift to automation at the cost of traditional jobs.

We hear a lot about the jobs that we have lost, but what about the new jobs created thanks to advances in technology? Once children wanted to be firefighters and astronauts when they grew up. Now they want to be ethical hackers and drone pilots. Here is a selection from the growing list of jobs that didn’t exist five years ago.

11 jobs that didn’t exist five years ago

  1. Ethical Hackers help institutions identify the vulnerabilities in web applications and networks.
  2. Chief Growth Officers are also on the rise, along with growth hackers, typically social media or viral marketers or product managers, who focus on building the customer base by running rapid experiments.
  3. Chief Listening Officer oversees all customer communications, from social media to face-to-face.
  4. Chief Innovation Officer encompasses both product development and strategic direction responsibilities.
  5. User Interface/Experience Designers focus on making technology instinctive to use.
  6. Cloud services architects oversee a company’s cloud computing strategy.
  7. Cognitive computing architects make machines “think” like humans.
  8. Drone pilots, once the preserve of the military, they’re working in utilities, mining and insurance with roles in deliveries and wedding photography ramping up.
  9. Autonomous vehicle operators remotely operate driverless cars, collecting data for engineers.
  10. Digital prophet: a trend predictor. AOL has one.
  11. Jolly Good Fellow is the personal and spiritual development adviser at Google. Where else?

The problem with the open-plan office and how to fix it

The open-plan office: collaborative and egalitarian or noisy and unproductive? Whatever your view, it’s a layout many Australian workers are familiar with.

The open-plan office developed in the 1950s in post-war Germany and then swept across the corporate world. Its two perceived benefits are cost and increased collaboration.

There is no doubt that, on paper, open-plan offices offer the cheaper option, as you can accommodate more people in a smaller area to cut down on your office space. In the United States, the average office space per worker fell from 20.9 square metres in 2010 to 16.3 square metres in 2012. In Manhattan, where real estate is at a premium, each worker occupies just 11.1 square metres.

The open-plan office’s other selling point is that it fosters a flow of ideas between employees that would be impossible if they spent their working days isolated in private offices. However recent research casts doubt on this claim.

Instead of improving communication in the workplace, one Australian study found that the open-plan office, and its latest variant, hot-desking, had a negative impact on colleagues’ relationships.

Instead of improving communication in the workplace, one Australian study found that the open-plan office, and its latest variant, hot-desking, had a negative impact on colleagues’ relationships. The researchers found that offices occupied by one, two or three people offered “the best situations for workers”.

Another study that surveyed workers who moved from private to open-plan offices had a similar conclusion. “The benefits that are often associated with open-plan offices did not appear: cooperation became less pleasant and direct and information flow did not change,” wrote the authors.

A 2013 study found that any benefit from increased interaction between staff was wiped out by losses due to noise and lack of privacy. Employees who work in open-plan offices also tend to report higher levels of stress, take more sick days, and are less productive.

But if we accept that for cost reasons the open-plan office is here to stay, what improvements can be made to address its shortcomings?

 

modern office

The use of ‘segmented space’ is a growing trend in contemporary office design. (Photo: iStock)

One answer is the ‘segmented office’, a design philosophy “based on the idea that different spaces are needed to support different tasks and different personalities,” explains Libby Sander, a lecturer at Bond University, in a piece published at The Conversation.

A segmented office might have small rooms where people can work uninterrupted, larger rooms for meetings, communal tables for informal catch-ups, standing desks for brainstorm sessions, and phone-free quiet zones. Workers move around the office to suit their different activities.

The segmented office is not the perfect solution, however. Sanders reports that employees often feel frustrated having to carry a laptop, cords and other work materials around the office, and annoyed when they can’t locate a staff member. A shortage of rooms and private spaces was another common gripe.

 

CASE STUDY

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY CADET BUILDING Deakin University CADET building

Deakin University’s new $55 million Centre for Advanced Design in Engineering Training (CADET) building is an office-free zone.

Designed by Gray Puksand and built by Cockram Construction, its workspaces comprise a series of ‘blended environments’ designed along activity-based working principles to use space more efficiently and effectively.

“It’s understanding what activities go on and then designing spaces to suit those particular activities,” explains Kean Selway, chief operating officer at Deakin University (an AIM Affiliate Member). “[But] it’s not just a case of pulling the walls down and everything works. We have to be very careful about how we zone certain activities.”

 

 

 

 

There are, for example, quiet zones that cater for people who need to concentrate. “You can go into that area with the expectation that you can sit in silence and you won’t be distracted or interrupted by people. You don’t need to build offices and walls and locked doors to create that quiet environment,” says Selway.

“At the other end of the spectrum, there are highly collaborative spaces where the table heights are raised to almost a bench height, and the seats are raised as well. It’s a far more active, almost stand-up environment where people can move around easily and collaborate and talk around tables.”

Privacy – or the lack of it – is another issue. Deakin University has replaced its landlines with mobile phones, so people can walk and talk. “We have a range of rooms that people can step in and out of to have a private conversation,” says Selway. “It’s a very dynamic use of space.”

Meeting rooms that lie empty for most of the day have been replaced by “collaboration spaces”. But there are still a few meeting rooms available, where “you can close the door and have a formal, private meeting with typically between four and 14 people,” he says. And with Deakin University spread across four separate campuses, they’re equipped with video-conferencing and presentation equipment, “As a university, we use video-conferencing equipment as a natural extension of everything we do,” explains Selway.

“Everyone has ended up with much more functional, more beautiful, more usable, more enjoyable spaces because there’s been this shift in practice from ‘I own’ to ‘we share’.”

Small power point-free meeting rooms – “so people can’t charge up their laptops and their phone and spend hours in there alone”– complement the more formal meeting spaces.

The CADET building also aims to cater for people’s different working styles. “A person may want privacy for part of the day, or part of the week, but not all of the week,” says Selway. Those who want desks have them, he adds. “Some people have a highly reliable, predictable work pattern and workflow, so… staying in the same place all the time actually works highly effectively because that’s what they do day in, day out.”

Where people don’t require the same “reliability of environment”, that space can be freed up to improve productivity and engagement. “It’s embracing the complexity and sophistication of the way in which different groups work,” says Deakin’s COO.

 But perhaps the biggest shift has been in moving attitudes from ‘I own’ to ‘we share’.

“Traditionally in a university environment, certain people would have certain offices with four walls, lots of bookshelves, and an exclusive right to that space. The one thing we understood was that the more walls that we build and the more doors that we lock, and the more exclusive use we enabled when people don’t actually need it, we are spending…  hundreds of millions of dollars on new development of floor space that we don’t need,” says Selway.

“[We have tried] to remove this right of ownership of spaces, by an individual or a team or a faculty, and say ‘we’ll design beautiful, usable, flexible spaces… but share them when you don’t need them’.”

This approach means Deakin University has been able to invest in the quality of the spaces rather than increasing the volume. That’s saved the university $400 million that would have otherwise been spent on new buildings. Instead, $200 million has gone into renewing existing campus buildings. “Everyone has ended up with much more functional, more beautiful, more usable, more enjoyable spaces because there’s been this shift in practice from ‘I own’ to ‘we share’,” Selway says.

While it’s difficult to measure the effect of blended environments on productivity, Selway points out that increased usage represents a better return on investment in physical space. He adds that people have told him they’re having more conversations in a more natural way, which encourages the development of new ideas and innovations. “If you look at the innovation companies around the world and you look at the way they’re designing their office spaces, they’re designed for people to come together and collaborate, not to retreat and isolate.”

And how do the staff feel about working in the new building?

Reaction is split, says Selway. “There’s a group of staff that are up for anything, and they find any change a really interesting, positive environment with new opportunities. There’s the group that is reasonably positive, thinking ‘I wonder how this is going to work for me personally. I’ll give it a go and see.’ And then there’s the group who will always be reticent to changing what they’ve grown to know over time. You always have a small group that says ‘that doesn’t really work for me, I don’t like it, it’s not the way I’m used to.’ You just have to accept [that].”

Can Geelong be the innovation capital of Australia?

Innovation is more than a buzzword into one of Australia’s largest provincial cities, Geelong.

The Victorian city joins South Australia’s Adelaide in establishing an innovation hub in which tech startups are encouraged to set up shop amid a culture that encourages digital disruption in what is already a multi-billion dollar industry for the two states.

Replacing manufacturing with start-ups

Working with private enterprise is the startup initiative LaunchVic , nurtured by a state government $60 million investment. As in Adelaide’s Tonsley, Geelong’s digital innovation drive is helping fill an employment and industry void following the departure from the area of a major car manufacturing business.

It is bringing together leading-edge institutions and companies to connect with startups, business incubators and accelerators in a high-value industry, research, education and residential precinct, says LaunchVic CEO Kate Cornick.

Cornick says Geelong’s transition to an innovation district is integral to the state’s economic development. The shift involves creating an operating environment for manufacturers to innovate and grow through connections to research, education and collaboration.

“The Victorian economy is sound but needs renewal,” she says. “Over the last 30 years, Australia’s manufacturing employment has declined steadily with Victoria being the hardest hit losing around 30,000 jobs.

“Cities, regions and countries are aggressively seeking to unlock new sources of high-value jobs and have identified investment in startups and entrepreneurs as critical for a broad-based, future-proofed economy. Some of Victoria’s high-value jobs will be created by simply doing things smarter, for example by using technology to drive productivity and create value.”

Geelong manufacturing decline

Traditional manufacturing is in decline in Geelong (Photo: Bloomberg)

Cornick says LaunchVic will provide capital “and the right environment for entrepreneurs to develop, incubate and grow early-stage innovation businesses”.

“Startups create a pipeline of new companies and jobs. For example, firms like SEEK have grown to become multi-billion dollar companies, providing high-paying jobs and consuming many professional services.

“Startups also play a critical role in disrupting how things have previously been done and, as a result, they renew as well as displace traditional industries. By introducing new products, services and processes, startups contribute to a more competitive, innovative and globally connected economy forging new ways of doing,” she says. “Entrepreneurs tap the underutilised knowledge that resides in our universities and research institutes turning ideas into economic value and creating wealth in the process.

“LaunchVic’s objective is to launch a startup culture in Geelong that will establish the city as a global centre for innovation and entrepreneurship.”

“By introducing new products, services and processes, startups contribute to a more competitive, innovative and globally connected economy forging new ways of doing.”

The Runway project, led by CEO Peter Dostis, secured $1.25 million and acts as a catalyst for innovation in the region, creating new businesses and jobs through the provision of mentoring, networks, training and access to venture capital.

Entrepreneurship is not new to Geelong, Dostis says, with universities and local chambers of commerce having encouraged innovation as car manufacturing slowly declined.

“How to create an innovation environment starts in schools by teaching students about start-up principles and entrepreneurship, and Geelong’s universities have been doing that for years as traditional manufacturing has been lost to the region,” he says.

“Runway is more than an incubator or accelerator. It’s about how we create an entire ecosystem to support start-ups – how we attract them here, how we keep them here after exiting the program and establishing their businesses. We want them to remain in Geelong. We teach people how to transform an idea into a business, and that includes how to run a business.”

LaunchVic has also provided $450,000 to Dimension Data and Deakin University, an AIM Affiliate Member  to establish a cyber security incubator at Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus. The incubator will accelerate the development of unique cyber security solutions and help address the skills shortage within the industry in Australia.

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

The Geelong Region Innovation and Investment Fund (GRIIF) is a joint venture between the Australian and Victorian governments, Ford Australia, which shut down its manufacturing operations in Geelong in 2016, and aluminium manufacturer Alcoa, which left in 2014.

The GRIIF allocates grants to boost employment and support innovation in the region. In November 2015, the fund handed out $11.2 million to seven local businesses.

Victorian Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade Philip Dalidakis says an Innovation Expert Panel will also help strengthen the state’s position as an innovation and tech hub. The panel comprises entrepreneurs, experienced in turning bright ideas into commercial reality.

“As a state, we can be the number one destination for technology and startups in the entire Asia Pacific region,” Dalidakis says. “In the past year alone, we have seen global tech leaders like Slack, Square, Stripe, Zendesk, Pocketmatch and GoPro all choose Melbourne as their regional headquarters. They’ve joined our local success stories – Nitro PDF, SEEK, Catapult, Red Bubble, CultureAmp and Appster.

“We have also done a lot of work to position Victoria as a cyber security powerhouse, so that we can capture a large slice of the global industry now worth an estimated US$71 billion and growing at a rate of 10 per cent per annum.”

Geelong aerial view

An aerial view of Geelong and Corio harbour (Photo: Getty Images)

As for Geelong following Tonsley’s successes, the minister says Victoria is already a major contributor to the nation’s $79 billion digital technology business, making tech bigger than traditional industry sectors such as agriculture and retail.

“Victoria’s digital technology industry currently generates annual revenues of around $34 billion and exports worth about $3 billion,” he says. “Currently, the state’s digital technology workforce comprises around 160,000 ICT professionals. By 2020, the forecast value of the Australian digital economy is $139 billion, and Victoria’s could be worth $50.8 billion.

“Digital tech employment is predicted to grow 70 per cent faster than Australia’s overall employment growth over the next decade. And, research shows that for each new technology job, five additional jobs are created in other sectors.”

Professional services firm PwC, Cornick says, estimates the Australian tech startup sector alone has the potential to contribute $109 billion or 4 per cent of GDP to the Australian economy and 540,000 jobs by 2033.

“Successful cities build on their unique strengths,” she says of Geelong’s future. “It’s about an active approach and supporting those entrepreneurs with ideas to be able to convert those ideas into businesses – so it is important to surround entrepreneurs who invest their own capital and sweat into building businesses with organisations and networks to help them succeed such as accelerators, universities and investors.”