WFH – be careful what you wish for

The future of work is at home. Or at least that’s what the Technorati and many senior execs and workers appear to believe. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sent an email to staff in May, to notify them that they could continue working from home as long as they see fit. Finance directors are shredding property and travel budgets. And many employees report that they are more productive working from home (WFH), have a better work-life balance and certainly don’t miss the commute. A union leader told the UK Government to accept that the ‘world of work has changed,’ and called ministers ‘dinosaurs’ for attempting to get civil servants back to their desks. Get with the programme grandad!

Health concerns aside, the case for WFH seems to be simple, straightforward and utilitarian – and pushing at an open door. The case for the office is complex, nuanced and very human – and needs to be made.

Before I make that case for the office, some background. The concept of remote working first captured my imagination after reading Alvin Toffler enthuse about ‘telecommuting’ from ‘electronic cottages’ in his 1980 futurist classic, The Third Wave. I managed a highly profitable virtual design team from home for a few years in the 1990s, via dial-up modems and then ISDN lines. More recently, I have been an early adopter and keen advocate of cloud collaboration tools such as Asana, Zoom, Dropbox, and Google G Suite. My company has long operated a 1-2 days WFH policy for ‘head-down’ work, and we switched to remote working in a heartbeat at the start of the lockdown. We pay extortionate central London rents, and we’re heading into a severe recession – but I intend to hang on to office working.

The attractions of WFH are immediately tangible, but short-term for many. While going fully remote will make sense for some individuals and companies, leaders should weigh the longer-term and more intangible impacts before joining the rush.

Some jobs are better suited to WFH than others – for example, many call centre staff, software coders and accountants can work effectively from home. Others less so;  besides jobs which obviously require a physical presence, from retail workers to surgeons, there are many jobs with more nuanced benefits of face-to-face interaction – particularly those that require sophisticated teamwork and creativity.

Face-to-face collaboration is necessary for creativity and innovation. Bloom’s research has shown it is essential for developing new ideas and keeping staff motivated and focused. ‘I fear this collapse in office face time will lead to a slump in innovation … The new ideas we are losing today could show up as fewer new products in 2021 and beyond, lowering long-run growth.’

Steve Jobs was a famous opponent of remote work who believed that the best work came from accidentally bumping into other people:  ‘Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions … You run into someone; you ask what they’re doing, you say “Wow,” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.’ Encouraging chance encounters between knowledge workers in hallways and cafes has been a mainstay of office design for decades.

Offices also help to create and maintain what anthropologists call ‘weak ties’, the shallow and peripheral relationships with people inside and outside the organisation. These weak ties have been proved to increase innovation and service quality, but they are hard to establish and maintain remotely. Anyone vaguely familiar with workplace design knows all of this, yet it seems to be absent from the current WFH debate.

One of the main reasons for working longer hours, particularly for managers, is the need to communicate more intentionally and frequently when WFH. Remote working also encourages more formal, ‘asynchronous’ and written communication, all taking much longer than ‘grabbing’ someone for a quick chat in the office.

While it’s more laborious, intentional communication can be done adequately via video conference, instant message or email. The hidden damage is the communication that doesn’t happen. Lots of important communication happens unintentionally. Overheard conversations and chats in the kitchen add to our projects,  learning and life. Zoom blinkers and impoverishes communication – and risks reducing us to Zoombies.

Like communication, learning is often unintentional and happens as much by proximity and osmosis as by design. Younger members of the team learn a lot from being around more senior members. Sure, many seniors are better able to work remotely, but it’s often part of their role to develop juniors, and that happens more effectively face-to-face. Offices are spaces where we observe and learn what it means to be our kind of professional, through a bundle of rituals, behaviours and on-the-job coaching.

Hiring and onboarding new employees remotely is … suboptimal, to say the least. Doing first interviews over Zoom is OK, but I would never make a final hiring decision without spending face time with someone – ideally more than once. New recruits need to bond with teammates, be shown ‘how things are done around here’, and figure out how best they should fit into their new team. Most of which is best done face-to-face.

While remote workers may not be entirely ‘out of sight, out of mind’, it is harder for managers to observe their learning and progress. It is also harder for WFHers to earn the trust of their managers by demonstrating that they are able to work more autonomously at the required level. This is why recognition and promotions often take longer for remote workers.

One of the key reasons WFH worked better than many expected was that teammates knew each other, many trusted each other and, over time, had reached an understanding of how to get things done – and why. A general understanding of how things get done and what good looks like is the difference between a growing company and one with an uncertain future. In management speak, over the past six months, WFHers have been drawing on ‘cultural capital’  that has been banked over previous years.  Relationships, culture and trust will erode over time through lack of face-to-face interaction. The tacit sense of the meaning of work, how relationships matter and the rituals of getting it done need constant renewal and reinforcement. Leaders need to live and role model a culture, and that is far more effectively done in person.

Managers have a better sense of what’s going on with their people and projects when they share the same space. For example, it is much easier to spot if someone is struggling or going off on a tangent in the office. Leaders can also get a better sense of the spirit of the team, and whether an individual might need support. Leaders lose their peripheral vision in remote mode.

From an employee perspective, workers might like getting up a little later to WFH but many miss the sense of camaraderie. As author and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan puts it, ‘It makes what could be a grind quite fun. A lot of people are [now] saying “I’m getting my work done but it’s quite hard for it to feel meaningful”’.’ Studies show that remote workers tend to feel more left out and have less attachment to their companies. Culture is pivotal to success – it takes years to build and can wither within months of WFH. For all the talk of soulless offices, working together is what makes us human; empathy, collaboration and creativity are all best practised face-to-face.

Managers are encouraged to measure outputs not ‘presenteeism’ in the WFH era. While this chimes with the ‘work smart’ spirit of the times, the common result is more snooping on employees’ calls, keystrokes and coffee breaks – and in FaceBook’s case, their location. While Mark Zuckerberg is happy for his staff to work from wherever they like, he plans to grade salaries based on local pay levels –  and if they cheat the system, staff face ‘severe ramifications’, as theZuck monitors their internet addresses to check employees are not lying about their location.

Once managers become comfortable with more work taking place outside the office, costs pressures will drive them to move more work from their existing workforce, either by using lower-cost workers in Burnley or Bangalore, or by contracting tasks out to knowledge gig workers. Be careful what you wish for.