What an NFL Replay Rule and Working From Home Have in Common
What happens when organizations prioritize decisions based on how they’ll look over what they’ll achieve?
Last October, National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell addressed reporters at a news conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Speaking to the media isn’t new for Goodell, who often holds press briefings at the conclusion of his meetings with the NFL owners.
Roger Goodell is an NFL lifer. He began his career as an intern in the league office in 1982, and served in their public relations department shortly thereafter. Prior to his jaunt to the top of the organizational ladder, he led marketing, sales, and strategic planning. Goodell is often described as an “owners’ commissioner,” which is to say he frequently puts the needs of the 32 franchise owners above all else. And when the league has difficult questions pelted their way, Goodell — who is every bit as corporate as a Fortune 500 CEO — is comfortable holding the shield.
Back to the press conference. The hot button topic of the day: the league’s much maligned, heavily criticized pass interference review initiative, which was deployed for the first time at the start of the 2019 NFL season. Just a few days earlier, Detroit Lions wide receiver Marvin Jones was the victim of a clear pass interference foul late in a highly contested Monday Night Football game against the Green Bay Packers. There was no call on the field. It appeared to be the perfect moment to utilize the new replay rule, which is initiated by a challenge from the head coach — except that Lions coach Matt Patricia did not throw a challenge flag. Patricia would later imply that he knew his chances of winning the challenge were less than slim.
Goodell was asked about this, and about other calls, and about a new replay initiative that had only overturned seven of 44 challenges since the start of the season.
His response: “We didn’t set out to re-officiate these plays . . . I think [the new challenge rule] is settling out as expected.”
Keep that quote in mind.
We’ll come back to this.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the leader of your company. And one day, your head of human resources approaches you with a recommendation backed by a mountain of research.
Let me further qualify the word, mountain.
Over the course of the past decade, this particular initiative has been studied by academics, think tanks, consulting firms, and other leading organizations. It’s been proven to benefit employees and employers. In a 2019 study by the Journal of Business and Psychology, employees who utilized this initiative were more productive than employees who did not. In a 2015 research review by Psychological Science in the Public Interest, this initiative was found to boost job satisfaction, increase employee engagement, and decrease work-related stress.
In a study just published by Gallup, research indicates employers that deploy this initiative will boost employee retention rates and widen their pool of qualified applicants for open positions. Deloitte has suggested this initiative could save employers anywhere between 10–30% in expenses per employee. In 2017, a study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that one organization that took advantage of this initiative increased performance by 13%, generating an incremental profit of about $40 million.
I could go on and on. For the sake of brevity, let me reassure you that this initiative has dozens, if not hundreds, of qualified studies — from academia to the real world — vouching for its effectiveness. It’s been proven to boost employee morale; it increases workplace productivity; it decreases overhead expenses; it widens your candidate pool when new positions become available.
How could any leader, armed with this proverbial treasure trove of evidence, ever say ‘no’ to this?
So: what’s the initiative in question?
Allowing employees to work remotely.
The date was January 20, 2019. The site: Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. It was the NFC Championship Game. The winner would advance to the Super Bowl.
With the game tied and 1:49 left to play in regulation, the New Orleans Saints faced a third-and-ten from the Los Angeles Rams thirteen yard line. Quarterback Drew Brees threw a pass to Tommylee Lewis, when he was obliterated by Rams defender Nickell-Robey Coleman well before the ball arrived. It was blatant pass interference. The call would have given the Saints a fresh set of downs, and the ability to run the clock down and kick a game-winning field goal as time expired.
Of course, you know that no call was made. The Rams would eventually win the game in overtime.
Saints fans threatened boycotts (and even took legal action). To borrow a colloquialism, the internet broke with high profile media outlets and fans chastising the officiating, and lambasting the NFL for not having a process in place to correct such an egregious offense. It took ten days for commissioner Roger Goodell to address the media on this issue (an error in judgment from the NFL’s publicity team, as the criticism only grew louder in silence).
Once he finally did speak, Goodell reassured a nation of reporters that pass interference video reviews would be “looked at” in the offseason.
But here, I argue, is where everyone made their greatest miscalculation. Because if fans, players, and most importantly, coaches really knew what Goodell meant by that broad, evasive statement — made ten days after the offense was originally committed — then we wouldn’t have had the conversations we did all last football season.
We all thought the NFL was admitting that they had a rules problem. But they weren’t.
The NFL only believed that they had an optics problem.
OK, back to corporate America.
Recently, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that about 16% of the work force (that’s about 26 million people) now work remotely at least part of the time — not taking into account any temporary quarantines, of course. If that sounds like progress, I’ll temper your enthusiasm: many studies indicate that less than one quarter of U.S. companies currently offer a work-from-home option to employees (and one study suggests that figure is actually less than 10%).
Yes, every organization — every department — is different. And there very well may be varying degrees of telecommuting that work for a business, depending on the nature of the job. But workplace idiosyncrasies simply cannot explain away such a paltry take-rate. So: why aren’t more people working remotely?
My sense of it is that this isn’t a business problem. The research says — again and again — that everyone wins in telecommuting. Employees are happier and more productive; employers save money and hire better people. Honestly, is there any other initiative backed by so much data that doesn’t have widespread utilization across organizations? Companies aren’t exactly slow to embrace hot trends, after all. Open floor plans have been adopted by a majority of employers as of 2019, and this trend was not nearly as universally proven to be effective (in fact, its benefits and utility have since been debunked).
And it’s not as if companies are slow to adopt cost-saving measures (think: outsourcing, automation, organizational re-alignments). No, this cannot simply be a business problem.
It’s an optics problem.
How does it look to outsiders if the majority of your employees worked remotely? What if clients visit the office, and it’s half-full? How does it look to your staff if you, the leader, are working from home? What about departments that have to be in the office or on the front line — how would that look if their peers were telecommuting? If telecommuting was approved, and profits or performance slowed, wouldn’t it look as if remote workers were to blame?
Unfortunately, social science research tells us again and again: we tend to count how a decision will look as more important than what the outcome would actually achieve. It would be easy to skewer our political system for examples, but in truth, optics have long been considered in business, sports, and yes, our own day-to-day personal decisions. We don’t like to admit it, but we tend to make some pretty important life choices because of appearances.
Back, once more, to the NFL. By the conclusion of the 2019 regular season, only 24 of 101 replay reviews involving pass interference were reversed. We know that officials aren’t perfect; it seems that the league made it clear to them that this rule change wasn’t about rules at all.
Look, the NFL had a problem. An egregious interference no-call determined who made it to a Super Bowl, and it enraged a nation. So they solved it as a leader concerned with optics would: they built a trap door to keep a singular, ultra-outrageous circumstance from happening again. But players and coaches assumed it was a business change, and began utilizing it as we all assumed they should.
No no, said the NFL. This isn’t for run-of-the-mill missed calls in Week 6. This isn’t for the Detroit Lions.
When you see it as a decision made for the optics, doesn’t Goodell’s quote make a lot more sense? I’ll repeat it for you:
“We didn’t set out to re-officiate plays. I think it’s settling out as expected.”
Goodell can’t understand the criticism, because his owners never approached the issue as a rules problem. They had an issue that made the league look bad, and they built a trap door for next time. And what he says (“we didn’t set out to re-officiate plays”) speaks volumes about this disconnect. Because fans believed the NFL was making a business decision. A decision to do what was, in fact, the exact opposite of the league’s intent: to re-officiate plays.
But the league didn’t make a decision based on what it would achieve.
They made a decision based on how it would look.
