Come Into The Office -- To Do What You Could Do At Home

You absolutely knew, in your soul, that companies would find a way to absolutely destroy the COVID moment and its possible lessons for workplaces, and that’s all now beginning to ratchet up into completely meaningless bullshit and misguided decision-making.

The first wave of travesty was “Everyone shall be WFH forever, if they can!” leading to “Well, we’re sorry you moved to Bozeman. Actually, we’re going to take back some of that salary too.” The second wave of travesty was all the stops and starts about returns and policies, though some of that travesty lies at the feet of local governments and their communication inefficiencies. The next wave of travesty is what the process of return looks like — and this process is well underway in some places, as I’ve seen stats that only 13% of Americans are still five days remote.

I recently rolled off — a fancy way of saying “I got piped!” — from a gig called Neuroleadership Institute, where the founder, God bless his soul, used to regularly show up 11 minutes late to a 50-minute call, harried as founders are, and launch into “what he’d be telling executives this week.” (The place did consulting and training, essentially.) He had a concept called “one virtual, all virtual,” which he admitted sounded awful , and it’s exactly as it sounds. Even if 5–10 people are in the office, if anyone is remote/virtual, those 5–10 people have to sit on their laptops in different conference rooms and join the meeting virtually instead of sitting together somewhere. I thought this idea was awful, but you can’t push back on a founder, or you get the pipe. I didn’t push back in this case, and I still got the pipe. Life is fickle.

Realistically, why would a company spend money on an office, which is often 2%+ of revenue, if people report to the office to sit on video calls by themselves? That can be done from your laundry room. Now, there is an element here of “I want to get out of the house.” I work from home, and some days I do go to a WeWork for this exact reason. Admittedly, there is nuance. But the problem becomes this: if the “culture” of an organization is “We want you here, but when you’re here, all you will do is stuff you could do in your living room,” well, that’s not going to end well.

How it will end: employees will leave for places with more flexible and logical policies. Instead of reading the tea leaves accurately, executives at the places where people left will double down on control — control is more beloved to an executive than their first-born — and say, “Everyone needs to be in five days/week. This isn’t working.” They will claim innovation is suffering, and anyone with a brain will say, “Um, the only product you have that sells was developed in 1993. I don’t think this is an issue of COVID and remote work, Gary.” But because they make the biggest bucks — Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, or HIPPO — their “process” needs to be worshiped and revered and sacrosanct, and more people will leave, so long as the openings market stays hot (it should for another 8–10 months).

A lot of the core issue about how work is designed comes down to two factors: firstly, executives don’t do the actual work. They don’t know about the nuts and bolts of the sausage, and it’s been 20+ years since they’ve needed to, and that probably happened at a different company anyway. Because they’re so distanced from how the work gets done, they have no business setting policy on questions of that nature. But, because we worship hierarchy and are all secretly kindergartners who need direction, we can’t think of a better way to manage any of this. (In reality, an employee should work however they want to work, including at 3am, naked, in a public park. And if the work isn’t getting done, you fire them. Or a sheriff’s deputy arrests them. Whatever comes first. The how doesn’t matter. The what — output — does.)

The second issue is that being an executive is often an elaborate game of follow the leader. You look up and sideways at rivals and similar companies to see what they’re doing, and certain ideas get “hot” in certain periods of time. Right now, hybrid is hot, and one of the elements being discussed with hybrid is bringing people in only to sit alone on a laptop doing a call that includes someone who is five feet away but who you cannot sit in the same frame with. If you even thought about this for 20 seconds, you’d realize how stupid it is, but goddamn, it was mentioned in The Wall Street Journal that some people are doing it, so I guess this is the thing we try now? Let’s roll. No time to think about the logistics or the idea behind it, though — got a standup on Q1 2022 revenue plays in 10. Has Marcia sent me the briefing deck yet?

It’s a stupid idea to spend money on a physical office and then have people come to that office to do things they could do at home, before you mention commutes, childcare, dinner time, how family should matter more than work, etc. We need to design work around how people like to work and where they need to be to most successfully live their lives while retaining that the what matters the most. Again, it doesn’t and shouldn’t matter where you are in knowledge work (a term that drips with privilege) so long as you get the work done. That should be the only goal.

Unfortunately, because people are complex and therapists want to buy nice homes, it’s never the only goal.