David J.
Danto
Business travel
thoughts in my own, personal opinion
eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD
Remote Working Works – June 2022
Earlier this week we
heard from Elon Musk. No, it wasn’t about Twitter, or electric cars, or
tunnels in Las Vegas, or even flamethrowers.
This week Mr. Musk’s rant was abut remote working. He doesn’t like it. His
actual quotes were:
“Remote work is
no longer acceptable” “If you don't
show up, we will assume you have resigned” and remote workers “….should pretend to work somewhere else.”
So, let me take some time to
explain why Mr. Musk is wrong…again this time…by sharing a recent article I
wrote for LinkedIn.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Toto (and Mr. Musk) we're not in Kansas anymore...
Over
the last few weeks I’ve had the privilege of chatting with many end-users and
industry experts at a handful of in-person events again. Casting no
aspersions on the good people of Kansas, if our industry was ever in a ‘finding
ourselves in Oz’ moment, it’s now. Between the huge majority of knowledge
workers who have discovered remote working is more productive and better for
their lives, the stodgy large enterprises trying to lure employees back to
their outdated offices, and the many of us between those two polar opposites,
we’ve entered a period of enormous confusion. Other than a few
self-professed experts trying to steer the ships from their shoreline vantage
points, it is clear to everyone I’ve spoken with that no one has come-upon the
right answers yet. The future of work is a work in progress. All we
know for sure is that it won’t look like it did pre-pandemic.
What We Do Know For Sure
Let’s
be clear to preface this entire discussion with clear parameters. Coffee baristas,
jack-hammer operators, sales clerks and many, many others have no option of
working remotely. Their activities require an in-person experience. The
question here applies to the enterprise worker who commutes up to two hours to
get to a building so they can sit at a desk smaller than the one that they have
at home and collaborate electronically with people who aren’t in that same
building anyway. These folks are typically referred to as knowledge
workers, though I and many others hate this term due to its implied slight of
those not in the category. In-person workers have plenty of knowledge
without the luxury of remote as an option.
There
are also many outlying cases of people who enjoy being back in an
office. A few I have heard mentioned are employees new to the workforce
that are looking for in-person mentoring; people who have noisy or distracting
home environments and really want to get away from them; and people whose
living circumstances do not allow them to have a stand-alone space to work from. All
of these people can’t wait to get back to a traditional office to do their
work.
However, for the typical knowledge worker, being forced to
discover remote working during the pandemic has been an enlightening joy.
The Benefits
I’ve written about the benefits of remote working so many times
already that I won’t spend a great deal of time rehashing them
here. Unless you are an old-school control-freak manager, the model is a
win for everyone.
·
Time is not
wasted commuting to and from an office, which also helps the environment
·
Worker
productivity soars (according to studies
from before and during the pandemic) as the time not spent commuting usually
goes into additional productive efforts
·
Work life balance
is improved
·
Attention can be
paid to family as needed during crises large and small, with an easy return to
work instead of an extended travel time home beforehand
·
People can live
wherever they prefer, not just in one geographic area
·
Organizations can
hire the best and brightest employees regardless of where they live
·
Office footprints
can be reduced resulting in tremendous cost savings
·
Expenditures in
electricity, HVAC, bandwidth, etc. can all be reduced providing significant
savings to the organization
The benefits of in-person working at large enterprises however
have always been over exaggerated. To quote myself from an earlier blog:
“The common excuse that most of the remote working nay-sayers give
to justify their positions is that bringing people into the same space causes
some “magic” to happen from the impromptu collisions and
connections. Bumping into a colleague in a meeting or at the water-cooler
is supposed to be the genesis of this magic interaction.
I honestly have never understood people’s acceptance of this model
of organizations – as if we all worked in a 1950’s small business. Yes, if
you are employed at a local retail store then you may gain an advantage having
all your co-workers in the same place all the time. Realistically however,
I and many knowledge workers haven’t worked in an office where everyone was in
the same location, same city or even the same country for over two
decades. What good is in-person, impromptu “magic” when your colleagues
are rarely in the same building with you? Clearly, successful distributed
workforces need to be able to develop that so-called magic using collaboration
tools to truly be effective – and, when those tools are present on a computer
or mobile device, it’s just as clear that that knowledge worker can be anywhere
where they can access those tools and a solid internet connection.”
Welcome To Today’s “Oz”
So the question for most enterprises today is not whether or not
to adapt, but rather how to do so. Knowledge workers surveyed by multiple
organizations as part of multiple efforts usually show a rate of between
sixty-five and seventy-five percent who would be content never to regularly
commute to an office again. Conversely, many large enterprises are
reluctant to move away from the old-style working model. Both of these
forces resemble the tornados that threw Dorothy into Oz. Just as houses,
bicycles and everything were thrown-around by the storms in that story, so are
all those involved in the future of work today being thrown-around by the
significant opposing forces. Employees – when faced with draconian return
to work decrees – have created The Great
Resignation era – a movement that has seen the greatest power-shift
to the workforce I’ve seen in my lifetime. Knowledge workers tolerance for
poor work experiences is at such a low point that employer or even career
changes seem to be the lesser of two evils. Organizations are all being
challenged to respond to these market forces.
To peel the onion a bit, first we should deal with the
outliers. There have been a small number of enterprises that have publicly
announced that they are abandoning their offices completely and switching to a
one hundred percent remote environment. When one enterprise made such an
announcement they
reported over eight-hundred-thousand people flocked to their careers website
to look for work. While this model will work for some organizations, it’s
not clear if it will work for all.
Then, on the other side of the spectrum, we have the firms that
have publicly commented that all their people are coming back to the office,
period. They are completely averse to any extended remote working. We
have to realize in these cases that it is the strong preference of their
management to maintain the status-quo they are familiar with. They’ve
likely invested time and money in a work model that involves buildings and/or a
campus, and that model worked for them before, so they see no reason to assume
it won’t continue to be effective. In-fact, some of these firms are openly
discussing punitive measures for remote employees – including paying them less
for the privilege of remote working, which is so counterintuitive it is
ridiculous. (Why would a company choose to tell an employee that they are
worth less when that life decision actually saves the company money via less
in-office resources needed?) In my opinion, these organizations’ leaders
are more concerned about control and power than success. Change is just
harder for some people than it is for others.
That leaves everyone else somewhere in the middle. It’s
mostly organizations that are genuinely trying to figure out how to transform
to ones that get the benefits of having teams together in an office, but also
support the greater good of remote working.
Coercion Is Not Working
One thing I definitely heard from multiple end-users is that bringing
employees back to an office will not be achieved by tricks. No matter how
many free-donut days or spa-style massages are offered on site it will not draw
significant numbers of employees back to an office that they no longer perceive
they need to be in. In addition, if told they ‘must come back if they don’t want to lose their job’
approximately forty percent are just quitting – either immediately or making
the decision to look for alternate work and leaving as soon as they
can. [Let’s check back in six months to see how many employees Mr.
Musk has lost and/or if he has changed his policies.]
Enterprises need to recognize that the old-style office – a place
where knowledge workers do desk work and occasionally meet together – is as
dead as the dinosaurs. Successful organizations will have to accept that
changes are inevitable, and that they don’t want to be one of the last to
change if they want to attract and retain the best employees.
What Should Organizations Do Now
My friend Tim
Banting, an analyst with Omdia, opined that the
state of work has now moved from The Great
Resignation to The Great
Experimentation. He couldn’t be more correct. The dozens
of users I’ve spoken with have all stated their firms are trying things out to
see what works, realizing that it is likely a moving target. Some things
clearly are working, some things clearly are not
When we come to the inevitable realization that ‘the home is the new office, and the office
is the new offsite’ the path becomes clearer. It is plainly
ridiculous for employees to commute to an office to sit at a tiny, open-plan
desk to do individual work and connect with global colleagues using
technology. There is zero advantage to doing that away from a home
office. The organization’s office then has to be a place that offers
advantages that working from home cannot provide. It has to
transform from a place where individual work is done to a place where group and
collaborative work is done. It should be a place where employees can
schedule spaces and then schedule time to converge with their colleagues when
that would be helpful to a project or process. Once we all stop pretending
that day-to-day interactions have to happen in the same building we can evolve
those buildings into spaces that can really provide benefits for group
collaboration.
Again here, we can identify the things not to do quicker than discovering the sure to be complex future, but
here are a few obvious guidelines to use as we all discover Oz together.
Formulas fail every time. As soon as you tell people how many
days they must be in-office versus working from home you’ve completely lost
sight of the advantages of working remotely. Your organization needs to
hire smart people that can self-determine the best place to work from on any
given day. If they don’t perform, then they weren’t right for the
job. If they do then you have no reason to remove their work location
autonomy.
Toss-out your old office designs. ‘Densified’ desks, open
plan layouts, xx number of audio conference rooms and videoconference rooms per
employee, etc. are all wrong now. Create an office space that is
specifically intended to foster group collaboration. Set aside desks for
the support people that need to be there every day, but make-sure the remaining
desks are reservable as touch-down spaces and focus
rooms for people who are not there every day. Make the majority of rooms
specifically for group collaboration, with lots of space to support
brainstorming, whiteboarding and scrap-boarding on
the walls, and videoconferencing. Understand that EVERY meeting going
forward will likely have at least one remote participant, so the era of the
audio conference room is over. Every room needs to be equipped with
modern, AI driven videoconferencing that uses cameras without distracting
in-room motors and complicated in-room touch-panel controls. They need to
work essentially by themselves.
Hire and train good people managers. It is totally wrong to
believe managers cannot effectively do their job when their employees are
remote. Global teams and twenty four hour / seven day a week teams have
been effectively managed for years. Don’t simply promote good performers
into management roles. Either hire managers with a track record of success
doing so and/or provide management training to give people the tools they need
to effectively manage remote teams. The ‘mean / strict’ manager is no
longer an organizational advantage. It is now in-fact a force to drive
away your best employees.
Remain open and flexible. Organizations and employees are still
very much in the ‘figuring all of this out’
phase. Be the person that asks both why and why not. Try new things,
fully assuming your employees and colleagues have the best possible intentions
as everyone tries to create a new balance between health, safety, life and
work.
In conclusion, anyone telling you that they know exactly what the
future will be like when we’re this early down the yellow brick road is
probably just guessing wrong. The storms and their results are still being
worked-out by most organizations and employees, and there’s lots of trial and
error going on. The only definite thing is that if you don’t start down
the path to change now, you and your enterprise will surely not make it to the
Emerald City at the end.
This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal
opinions.
All image and links provided above as reference under
prevailing fair use statutes.
Copyright 2022 David Danto
++++++++
As always, feel free to write and comment, question or
disagree. Hearing from the traveling
community is always a highlight for me.
Thanks!