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Innovation – Productivity – Creativity

Why Do So Many People Want Us Back In The Office?

   Posted on [11]September 12, 2020September 12, 2020Author [12]Paul
   TaylorCategories [13]Future of Work, [14]ProductivityTags [15]Future of
   Work, [16]Kirsty Allsopp, [17]Matt Mullenweg, [18]Minimum Office,
   [19]Productivity, [20]Remote Work, [21]Stowe Boyd, [22]Tom Cheesewright

   After the sudden and miraculous shift to remote work in March – the
   office fightback has well and truly begun.

   Four months ago I wrote that – surprisingly- there was no fightback
   from technophobe hold-outs barricading themselves into their offices.
   They simply packed up their laptop and went home with the rest of us.
   [23]How [24]premature[25] I was.

     2019: millenials are wasting all their money on buying sandwiches
     2020: THE ECONOMY WILL COLLAPSE IF YOU DON'T BUY MORE SANDWICHES
     — Sam Grinsell (@samgrinsell) [26]August 28, 2020

   If you thought that 2020 couldn’t get any crazier – it seems some
   people really are suggesting that businesses should alter their
   workplace strategies in order to save…sandwich shops.

   OK, I’m exaggerating for effect. But there really has been a hand brake
   applied to the move to remote/hybrid working , or my favoured term,[27]
   minimum office in recent weeks.

   An [28]article in the Daily Telegraph suggested that employees who
   continue to work at home will be more vulnerable to redundancy, with
   bosses finding it far easier get rid of people they don’t physically
   see.

   [29]Kirsty Allsopp led the anti-remote work charge on Twitter,
   suggesting that if your job can be done from home, it can be done from
   anywhere in the world. Who would have thought that a couple of months
   of working in shorts and a T-Shirt has made us more susceptible to
   being replaced by less expensive folk in India, Myanmar and China?

   A debate that is framed around saving sandwich shops and an already
   dying high street isn’t helpful or progressive. Cynically I might
   suggest the real subtext here is about propping up commercial property
   investment portfolios. Realistically though, we won’t see anything like
   a return to the same number of offices, and although few will shed
   tears for commercial real estate investors many small businesses will
   suffer a big hit and go out of business unless they can pivot very
   rapidly.

   Clearly there are two groups emerging, those who are desperate for the
   pandemic to be viewed as a temporary event before everything returns to
   ‘normal’ and those embracing the true long term disruption that is
   occurring.

   Thank heavens then for more balanced thinkers like Tom Cheesewright who
   has an uncanny ability to pan back and take the long view. [30]Writing
   on his website about the current over-confidence in the possibilities
   for remote working he says:

   “There is something different about being there, in person, with all of
   your senses engaged. It’s what I called a few years ago, ‘[31]the
   unbeatable bandwidth of being there‘. What gets transmitted and
   received through the screen and headset, mediated by a million miles of
   fibre optic cable, is not the full experience of meeting. Nor does it
   allow for all the things that happen around those meetings. [32]I’ve
   talked at length about the need for peer support, the subtler parts of
   staff training, and the mutual inspiration that happens when you’re
   sharing a physical space.”

   I’m a remote working, or at least a minimum office, enthusiast. I’ve
   written on this site for years about the worst aspects of office life
   and [33]the most popular post on here applauds its impending doom. Six
   years on though I’d admit it’s a deeply flawed argument. The idea that
   constant interruptions and back to back meetings were a symptom of
   being in a corporate building has been well and truly busted
   by…Microsoft Teams.

   In truth the problem with work is not the tools or the physical
   location, but [34]the obsession with leadership , an undue focus on
   work about work, an overbearing hierarchy and the lack of true
   digitisation of the enterprise. Deeper, more complex problems.

   It’s ironic that it has taken a pandemic to reveal what was good about
   the office. “The things that happen between meetings” that Tom writes
   about reveal our innate desire for human contact – the need to get our
   senses fully engaged. Wasteful? Quite often. But we dismiss this at our
   peril. It may seem logical that workplace chatter stifles productivity,
   but studies show the opposite to be true.

   A narrow focus on efficiency in the workplace and a flawed view of what
   makes people productive is similarly regressive and likely to drag
   people back to the old normal. As Stowe Boyd writes the backlash
   against minimum office is in full flow , as detailed in [35]Companies
   Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All, as executives want
   to get people back in the office:

   “An increasing number of executives now say that remote work, while
   necessary for safety much of this year, is not their preferred
   long-term solution once the coronavirus crisis passes.

   “There’s sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of executives
   saying, ‘This is not going to be sustainable,’” said Laszlo Bock, chief
   executive of human-resources startup Humu and the former HR chief at
   Google. No CEO should be surprised that the early productivity gains
   companies witnessed as remote work took hold have peaked and leveled
   off, he adds, because workers left offices in March armed with laptops
   and a sense of doom.”

   Perhaps it’s simply we haven’t yet matched our colleagues roles, and
   their specific work preferences, within our existing organisational
   design never mind considered a future state. Working from home (managed
   and supported appropriately) can be more productive than going into the
   office.

   [36]A HBR study published in August contrasted surveys of knowledge
   workers from 2013 and 2020, found that remote working was in fact
   helping address long-held frustrations about the rhythm of office work.
    1. Lockdown helps us focus on the work that really matters. We are
       spending 12% less time drawn into large meetings and 9% more time
       interacting with customers and external partners.
    2. Lockdown helps us take responsibility for our own schedules. We do
       50% more activities through personal choice — because we see them
       as important — and half as many because someone else asked us to.
    3. During lockdown, we view our work as more worthwhile.  We rate the
       things we do as valuable to our employer and to ourselves. The
       number of tasks rated as tiresome drops from 27% to 12%, and the
       number we could readily offload to others drops from 41% to 27%.

   The key phrase here is: managed and supported appropriately. Certainly
   managers need to reinvent themselves as mentors to this style of
   working and then – forgive me – get the hell out of the way.

   The office as the default way of working is dead. But the office itself
   isn’t dead. With working from home, what we gain in work-life balance
   we might lose in innovation and creativity. There are people who could
   directly challenge that sentence but I suspect they will come from
   highly mature companies who have fully mastered the remote working
   learning curve. Many of us are still at the stage of doing what we did
   in the office , just remotely. The timorous amongst us may use the lack
   of productivity net gains as a reason to regress rather than push
   through the ‘pain barrier’ [37]as Matt Mullenweg describes it.

   We can do so much better, for ourselves, our customers and society if
   stop being so frightened of the future.

   We are going to have fewer offices and spend more time at home.

   Our time would be a lot better spent improving the experience and
   outcomes of both rather than arguing about preserving a status quo
   whose time has truly run out.

   The office versus remote work?

   The best thing you can do in any period of change is to bet on neither
   black or white. The future will be made up instead of shades of grey
   where few things are certain and the best you can do to prepare is to
   be endlessly adaptable.
     __________________________________________________________________

   Photo by [38]Benjamin Child on [39]Unsplash

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Paul Taylor

   I’m a facilitator, innovator and designer. I work with organisations to
   identify problems and solve them in ways that combine creativity with
   practical implementation. I established Bromford Lab as a new way for
   the organisation to embrace challenge and adopt a ‘fast fail’ approach
   to open innovation. Nearly everything the Lab works on is openly
   accessible at www.bromfordlab.com. I'm a regular contributor to forums
   , think-tanks , and research reports and a speaker or advisor at
   conferences and events. [46]View all posts by Paul Taylor

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