Back to the Office - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Part 4 (Conclusion)
(In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about several assumptions I hear concerning distributed workforces and the importance of addressing them. In Part 2, I touched on some of the magical thinking about working in distributed environments. In Part 3, I covered several of the benefits to working in a distributed or hybrid environment followed by a few examples of how the removal of many of the in-office negatives have enhanced the appeal of working from home. I'll wrap up this series with some thoughts about what knowledge workers have discovered is really important, ways we can work to satisfy those needs, and the cultural elephant in the collocated workspace.)
We are social critters, something research has demonstrated over and over. Identifying with a group - a tribe - is fundamental to human nature. So it's no surprise that collocation is more efficient at establishing trust and knowledge sharing. However, there is a tendency to romanticize about the office experience. Collocation is equally efficient at destroying trust and inhibiting knowledge sharing.
The arrival of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the factory and, eventually, the office. For the factory worker and the office worker, the company supplied the opportunity to find a tribe. For better or worse, we got the team tribe, the company tribe, and sometimes the company town we were assigned to. From there it was up to the individual to figure out the rules, customs, and culture. If they wanted in, they had to change and conform. Hard wired cognitive patterns for establishing status, authority, and power will always route around any legacy HR initiative or corporate policy designed to "correct" basic human nature. Played out to where we are in the 21st century, in a sufficiently large organization, the "intelligently designed" mitigation strategies have initiated a race to the bottom, leaving a decidedly unpleasant and unproductive workplace in many cases.
Judging from what I read from various news sources, listening to my colleges, and my own experiences, my sense is that many employees are acutely aware of the downsides to working in an office as well as the upsides they will lose by not working from home (or a coffee shop, a shared office space like WeWork, etc.) The annoyances, the legacy HR Kabuki Theater, navigating pronoun and gender preferences, turf wars, office and identity politics, the stressful commute, and the cumulative expenses from things like automobile maintenance, gasoline, clothes, makeup, etc. have been thrown into sharp relief during the lock-downs.
I also believe office workers actually DO miss the social and face-to-face interactions found in collocated work environments, but not on the factory model's terms. In fact, maybe not at the factory at all. They would rather continue to (re)build long neglected social ties with family, neighbors, and their immediate community. They want some other way and "back to the way it was" has very definite opportunity and financial costs to them. Particularly now that we're suffering the knock-on effects of the extended lock-downs, such as the steep rise in the cost of living, ongoing supply chain issues, job security concerns and more.
I read recently an interesting theory on why knowledge workers are reluctant to return to the office. "Reluctant" might not be a strong enough word. The theory hinged on the idea that employees had been captured by a particular emotional bias: The Endowment Effect. This looks to be a forced fit. My understanding of the endowment effect is that it relates to ownership of tangible or observable things like physical objects or money. Allowing someone a private office or giving them a raise or bonus are examples. Ousting someone from an office can make that someone very angry (I've had to make just this management decision and the employee did indeed become physically angry!) and bonuses become expected each year, company financial health notwithstanding. Such "perks" are well within the purview of the business to grant or withhold.
Issues around personal freedom and time, however, are a different matter. During the pandemic, companies didn't generously bestow upon employees the freedom to work from home or what time of day they worked. The shift was mandated by the lock-downs. And yet, many companies are acting as if they do have full control over personal freedom and time, as if an employee's personal freedom and time were a privilege granted or revoked at the company's discretion.
The lock-downs allowed many employees to rediscover this freedom when away from the factory model of employment. That is, the lock-downs restored a sense of agency, control, and freedom. This rediscovery was reinforced by the awareness that many employees, knowledge workers in particular, could indeed be highly productive at their jobs while working in a distributed environment. If anything, the endowment effect has been a bias of corporations since the advent of the factory model of management. Many companies seem to be fearful of losing this perceive right to control.
I've heard some managers say they are "allowing" knowledge workers to work from home. Furthermore, they seem to believe that since knowledge workers no longer have to spend time commuting they should be using that time for the benefit of the company. It doesn't seem to matter that pre-pandemic, during an employee's commute to work, they were most likely not productive in a way that was benefiting the company. If company's expect that time to now be thought of as company time, then I and many, many others are due some serious back wadges.
A common retort to my position on this is that employees will eventually abuse this arrangement. Yes, some have and will. Barnacles will be barnacles. My response to this is what I've stated before: Current management practices are not equipped - yet - with the mindset and techniques to deal with workplace changes that deviate from the factory model. It isn't that such new practices, mindsets, and techniques don't exist. They do in the software world. The principle issue, in my view, is that they are not being adapted in a cogent way from the software world to other types of knowledge work. A one-to-one mapping may be worse than nothing at all.
The Elephant