Consider how many years/decades/centuries/millennia we've had to "design" what working in person looks and feels like. Now take your average company that tried to do all that while "remote" or "hybrid" (in the last 4 years). Unless companies are willing to approach this as a new design problem ... as something they'll need to work at and iterate on ... not a panacea, and not a sacrifice ... then of course something will be missing from non in-person work. Hot take: companies that aren't willing to do this, should go back to in-person work and see what happens. You have no interest in figuring out how to thrive in the new reality, so just admit things will not work, and that you are not willing to make it work, and cut your losses. My guess is that in the near future we will see: 1. Remote or mostly hybrid companies who commit to making it work, and end up attracting really stellar employees because they do. They will be highly competitive, and will be rewriting the "script" we've evolve for centuries. 2. Companies who have no interest in making it work, but who did well before, and will continue to do reasonable well. They will lose high potential people to the #1s above, but it will not make a big dent. Gradually the innovation from #1 above will seep back into these companies, and over a long period of time they will eventually be forced back to remote/hybrid. 3. A lot of companies that aren't willing to make #1 work, but are also having a very hard attracting the people they need, will do remote. This is sort of the worst of both worlds. They will have trouble thriving at all.
Jakob Gehring
2mo
It is not about stellar workers. In-office practices continue to ignore societal issues. First, it is a male-first mindset, which poses problems to workers with families. As most women still take care of children, it reduces the time available for them to work. Second, going to the office means commuting, and if you want to reduce commuting time, you have to move close to the office, which is mainly connected to higher living costs. Let’s not just think about the 100k+ salary worker here. Third, some people cannot easily come to the office due to disabilities, or it poses a higher risk of being exposed to a bigger group every day. Fourth, you have different personalities, some of which thrive in the office, seeing people every day, and others don't. I hear that improved collaboration is a reason to bring people back to the office. Do we enhance collaboration while sitting in a big room full of people having Zokm calls? If you have distributed teams, the argument becomes even more disconnected. Companies call back their workers because they fail to adapt to new ways of building a thriving company culture in a remote or hybrid setup.
All this strikes me as an array of concerns applicable solely (or primarily, anyway) to enterprises whose value streams and ultimate value delivery exist in the realm of bits. No atoms need apply, is how I read this. Am I correct here — or if not, what am I missing? And if I’m not correct, how do those who honestly care about organizational alignment/cohesiveness preserve and promote it in the face of the risk of productivity-threatening factionalism (or at minimum the emergence of palpable resentment)? My first employer out of undergrad — one of the biggest construction management & engineering companies in Japan (somewhat of a peer to Bechtel) — required those of us who were Tokyo HQ-assigned staff to start work on the dot from 08:30 in no small part because everyone working at project sites began their day at 08:00 (in some cases at 07:30)…
Stephanie Leue
2mo
Interesting point, and I generally agree. However, there's one assumption I disagree with: that stellar employees prefer remote or hybrid work. Beyond the fact that I don't believe the concept of a 'stellar employee' is entirely accurate, I also think that even among high performers, preferences for work environments will vary. People may excel in different settings, so assuming a universal preference might overlook this diversity.
Stephen Mew
2mo
I have to agree. The "average" experience I have seen when "trad" in-the-office companies have moved to a hybrid or remote model has been simply to extend the same operating model they had before and all the calendar events that go with it to Zoom/Team etc et al. Effective developers (and some other roles to be sure) who have the natural communication skills to work this way, whom leverage real time tooling (comms, workflows or otherwise), seem to do well. Video conference/F2F modes and the like reduced with alternative means. Those NOT in an efficient remote ways of working framework without the supportive/mentoring/leading seniority available at hand to support the remote model suffer greatly without the guidance that is at hand side of desk. If they have the chops they do eventually move on elsewhere. The other extreme is of course when an org does have their remote working operating well and people are asked to return to office, a percentage of folks move on too as their life logistics tend to have been adjusted to it. Hard to Ctrl-Z.
Andrea Laforgia
1mo
Companies but, above all, the people in them, need to realise that in-person work and remote work are two different beasts. They are not mutually exclusive. I cringe whenever I read "You can work remotely just as you work from the office". No, you can't. It's a completely different working model. You can working effectively from home (I did it for years and I do it once a week), but it's not the same. I still like going to the office because the office is a different place, with different dynamics, natural interactions, occasional conversations, social banter, cross-fertilization. None of that happens when working from home. It's not surprising that those who consider remote and in-person equivalent are the same who go to the office to sit at their desks with headsets on, work on their tasks, and go home. They are right in saying that *for them* commuting to the office is waste. The truth is that some (most?) people love working on their own, isolated from the rest. Collaboration and communication requires skills and effort and people's inertia and natural reluctance to share and collaborate play against it.
Kim Lenox
2mo
I’m wondering, John, if there’s another option as well? If I’m reading correctly, your suggesting that top talent want remote/hybrid and in-office companies will lose this talent to other companies who allow remote/hybrid. Am I correct? From my experience, I have seen firsthand how some people thrive in remote/hybrid while others equally thrive in-office. While we have shown people can be productive working remote/hybrid, I’m certain there are people who miss (some aspects) of in-office work and thrive in those environments. One big challenge between pre and post pandemic work is post-pandemic teams are much, much more distributed, making in-office work a mix of in-person and distributed coworkers. Sitting in a conference room with some people on video conferencing and some in-person. If a company has a distributed team and wants to retain this talent, they need to allow for hybrid work. 5 days/week in-office for a distributed team means conference rooms will be difficult to secure. I’m hoping RTO for distributed teams doesn’t happen, and rather those companies shift to hybrid.
I agree, with a couple of additional points: 1. There are world class people who prefer working from an office. And it's not the walls or the commute they like, but the continuous collaboration and the interactions with other people. So I disagree that, by continuing to work in an office-based setting, companies won't be able to attract top talent. 2. Working from an office can be messed up as well. I counter the idea that, since we had a long time with it, it's now well functioning. I've seen all sorts of dysfunction over the years. 3. The industry seems to be less and less interested with great talent and quality. Most companies see remote work as a cost reduction approach. Save on rent, and hire cheaper in developing countries. This will be a disaster for those companies.
Cassandra Jones
2mo
I do wonder how companies who have mandatory office time will cope with AI...you know the thing that's not real and will never attend an office. Are they seriously going to mandate people be in the office to then login to work with an AI that is permanently AWOL? I do suspect this irony is going to be lost on those making the rules though.
Actually, many of us have been working in a remote manner for over 2 decades. It's not really hard at all. And doesn't take a long time to learn how. I've thought I should write up what we do / did, but I thought it somewhat obvious. But posts like yours and others make me realize it isn't really. I'll write up something soon. But here's a clue. Consider the value stream of your work. Remove delays in it. Attend to delays caused by not having people in the same room. And take advantage of the fact that although you are remote, you can often have instant access to the members on your team via zoom. This is an advantage you didn't have before.