Back to the Office - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about several assumptions I hear concerning distributed workforces and the importance of addressing them. Part 2 will illustrate how the lock-down response to the pandemic has generated a lot of magical thinking about office space and the knowledge worker. Just riffin' on a couple...
The word "collaboration" gets sprinkled around as if doing so will make everyone effortlessly work together and create super happy teams that look like they walked through a pharmaceutical commercial on their way into work. A team’s ability be creative and innovate does depend on quality collaboration. But collaboration describes an end state. Being collaborative depends on other things like the length of team's experience together, the depth of their shared knowledge, skills at self-organization, the span of their individual and shared "adjacent possible" horizons, etc. It takes work to make this happen. Often hard work with difficult decisions that impact people's lives.
In a case study involving toy designers, it was determined that workspace designs that facilitated aspects of collaboration like impromptu interactions promoted innovation. Easy to imagine this would work for toy designers. The end product is a physical object and from what I'm able to determine a toy designer does, the job requires more expansive creativity than it does focused knowledge work.
To be sure, coding can require creativity and also benefits from collaboration when this is needed. But when it's time to implement the idea - the innovation phase - distractions can significantly impede progress. I recall many, many instances while working in-office where I got more work done during off hours or during holiday seasons because the distractions were minimized. I was not alone nor in the minority in this respect among fellow software developers and engineers.
Embedded in the magical thinking around collaboration are the constraints literally built into the modern workplace. The "open office" design as a facilitator of innovation, for example, works some places some of the time. As a general strategy, it fails more often than not. Squeezing people together for "intentionally designed impromptu interactions" and "facilitated spontaneity" - some managers actually say stuff like this out loud - tends to demotivate more than inspire. And post-pandemic, who can deny the increased risk of spreading a contagious virus in an open office setting?
The fundamental problem here is the buildings themselves. They don't support a collaborative work environment that deviates from collocated expectations. (I've read where the design of current office buildings are decidedly antithetical to sustainability and reduced carbon footprints, if that's of interest.) The open office experiment was an attempt to build a solution within the same framework that causes and sustains the problem.
There's magical thinking about metrics that results in an over emphasis on the gains from collocated work. Many of the arguements I see presented are framed in a way to make the reader think there are zero gains from working on distributed teams. Of course, this isn't the case. If the gains from working collocated were unequivocally better than working distributed, we'd all be back in the office in a heartbeat. That's not happening. Not only are knowledge workers hesitating, they're actively resisting. At the very least this should be telling manage they're missing something about the distributed environment that's important to workers. (Feel free to insert your favorite conspiracy theory here about the Big Office Space cartel and how they're controlling the research.)
The last interesting bit concerns the media's influence on getting people back into the office. Speculation is the media is inhibiting this process by manipulating various biases in people's minds. It's easy to point to the media and say they are causing people to think a certain way. I think it's much more likely the media is amplifying what people already believe about working from home. That is, the media is confirming what people are already thinking.
With trust in the media somewhere around 10%, I don't give them as much credit for controlling information that directly impacts the lives of large populations, such as knowledge workers. Squashing the Hunter laptop story, sure. They have the machinery and support to do that. (As David Burge observes, the media's job is to cover important stories. With a pillow until they stop moving.) How many people really care about baby Biden's electronics? However, articles on how glorious it will be to go back to an office - where I know I'll have to listen to a co-worker drone on about their evil spouse - don't resonate at all. Individual agents act rationally in their world. If the media's content didn't resonate with what was already of interest in the zeitgeist, the content wouldn't be so popular. It is, after all, called the "confirmation bias" for a reason. The media is confirming what people have already determined for themselves.
What's forming people's opinions on the matter is probably more influenced by family, friends, and peers. And concerning matters that directly impact someone's sense of well-being, there are likely to be no unbiased sources of information. What sources are there? The media? Confidence in the media is at historic lows. Research? "Science" has significant replication issues and is just beginning to experience a type of rot that could take generations and the collapse of too many buildings to correct. We may or may not have trust in our collocated cohorts, but we trust our friends, family and our own direct experiences more.
There are perhaps thousands of confounding variables in play when working to determining if the shift to a distributed workforce has been an overall positive or negative experience. As yet, there is no way to reliable assess the impact of collocation vs hybrid vs fully distributed teams except perhaps over time. A collocated company that shifts to hybrid or distributed, and doesn't change the business it's in, might be able to show with financial data whether or not the shift was a good idea - IF there are no black swan events to confound the data, like a global pandemic or superpower war.
But then again, perhaps we're just ill equipped, at the moment, to figure out how to gauge company productivity and health while using distributed practices. Evaluating how well a company is doing based strictly on financial/inventory data is the factory model. In the age of information and knowledge, other factors may be more important. Things like resilience, agility, adaptability, and durable value may be equally important. But how do we measure these? The past several years have certainly shown that companies with flexible work environments had a greater chance of adapting to the lock-downs than those reliant (either operationally or philosophically) on a collocated work force.
Back to the Office - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Part 1
Back to the Office - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Part 3
Back to the Office - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Part 4 (Conclusion)
Back to the Office - Delayed Effects from the Lock-downs
Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash