Dear CEO, Why are you suddenly down on flexible & fluid workplaces (aka remote or?WFH)?

There have been a host of organizations who have made the decision to move back to office, after 4 years or so of SUCCESSFULLY working from home and supporting all the worker preferences of a true flexible and fluid distributed workplace. How do I know they are successful? Almost NONE of them lost money during the pandemic itself. They only started losing stock value in the last 8 months after the pandemic ended. DURING the pandemic almost all of these organizations thrived.

So what the heck suddenly happened? Why are y’all blaming remote working on your market misfortunes now?

I have some theories and they are all related to poor, short-sighted investing in real estate. But that is just an assumption. Ya see, what’s changed now, is that y’all let go of a high percentage of your staff and well, that has left you with a lot of empty seats you feel bad about paying for. Ya see if you explicitly targeted all of your remote employees you might find yourself with backlash due the fact that many of them are women (caregivers), people with neurodiversity, disabled, and other groups we are sympathetic to.

Let’s assume my assumption is wrong. That the remote experiment failed in these organizations. I’d really love to see the “proof” though. Why did the experiment fail? What analysis was done to understand the outcomes? I ask this because I genuinely feel that most organizations, even the ones committed to remote work, don’t do all they can to make remote working as successful as it can be.

First let’s do some term definition. I know, sorry:

• Remote: The type of workplace where people work away from each other. It is a catchall phrase that is an umbrella for everything else.
• Distributed: A team is distributed even if everyone is an office. They just might be in different offices. Often this workplace type is ignored (see real estate assumption above). However, the reality is that this workplace type is incredibly common within an organization with multiple offices. It is almost impossible to ensure that everyone who needs to work on the same things are in the same office location on a near daily basis.
• Back to office, often paired with hybrid is the new policy that requires that all employees live within a commutable distance (arbitrarily decided) from a corporate office. The hybrid part is how many days a week you can work from home? Usually 2–3. The idea here is that if we standardize when people are in the office, and set days that people can work from home, we are striking a compromise. Why this isn’t really true, I’ll talk about later. But if you are going to work hybrid, you have to support all the needs you’d have to for a remote working culture (ok, almost all).
• Flexible / Fluid workplace type is one that focuses on the needs of the individual in the organization and acknowledges that where someone needs to work on any given day may change. Also, that some individuals have real needs that require them to work out of the office as much as possible. This could be because of a mental illness like social anxiety. This could be because of some level of neurodiversity or a specific disability. It could also be because of long commuting doesn’t work for people with caregiving obligations. There are a ton of reasons.?
• The other side of Flexible / Fluid is that sometimes we have commitments and obligations that don’t happen on the arbitrarily assigned day you are permitted to work from home. “My doctor’s office is closed on those days.” “The cable guy wasn’t free then.” “My kid’s parent/teacher conference is on the day it is on.” “My wife’s sonogram is on that day”.

Life happens.

It means, you have to support remote working 100% regardless of your back to office policies?.

Now, let’s talk about inclusivity. In this month of all months, PRIDE ??? ??, inclusivity should be on the top of everyone’s list of things they should be supporting. At the heart of why it is so important to support Flexible/fluid workplace types is because of inclusivity. We have to be supportive of all the types of people or we are just playing lip service to inclusivity. You can’t support PRIDE with all the rainbows in the universe and then say you aren’t supporting women (primary caregivers), disabled people, the socially anxious, and neurodiverse.

When we make a commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice, it is not for some people and not for others. It requires full commitment, because when we only do some people and not others we find ourselves not supporting the full intersectionality of the people we claim to be supporting.

All the people listed above are within every group we claim to be supporting already. They are horizontal if you will across those vertical identities. Yes, there is not such thing as verticals because even the identities of race, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc. are intersectional to each other.

Ok, so we have to do this “remote thing”. More accurately, we should be doing it. We really don’t have a choice in this day and age. It is almost stupid to think you can get away with forcing people back into the office for long.

I think the real issue here besides bad real estate investing, is that these orgs, even “the best of them” don’t have any experience with 100% flexible / fluid or 100% officeless organizations that are successful in every way that they want to?be.

How do those companies do it? They stay principled. They have no choice, because they don’t let themselves have a choice. THAT is how they do it. Different organizations have figured out different ways to be successful, but here are some of the things I’ve figured out in observing these companies and working for a few of them myself.

1. Respect: The organization respects all workers regardless of what type of workplace type they are utilizing. What this can look like is a hiring manager coming up with an excuse why “THIS new hire has to be where I am, or in my office.” As soon as you allow that, you are telling everyone else that remote working is 2nd class.
2. Parity: Every worker regardless of where they primarily work, gets all of the same benefits, or matching benefits. E.g. if everyone in the office gets transportation or parking benefits, out of office workers get internet and/or co-working space access of equal or similar value.
3. Ask. Don’t tell*: Don’t presume to know what people want, ask them. Maybe give them options where it is feasible.?
4. *See what I did there.
5. Equal access: This might just be an expansion of “Parity”, or maybe be seen as equity even. But a great example is that if you have a meeting where some people are “in the room” and others are not, you have to make sure that everyone has equal access to participate. To elaborate further: You’re in an all-hands-meeting and you reach the Q&A portion. In the old world, there is a huge advantage of being in the room. But imagine instead that everyone had to put their questions forward using electronic media. Those questions are then curated by an admin or similar role, so that people out of the room are given equal access to the speakers as those in the room.
6. Come together: Yup, the only way that flexible / fluid really works is if periodically you gather EVERYONE together in the same location. Annually, quarterly, bi-monthly.
7. Accountably & Coaching: Of course, we have to hold people accountable to their performance, but we also have to make sure that supervisors are properly trained in how to be excellent coaches, so that people are given the fair chance to improve outcomes.

Return-to-office is the equivalent of collective punishment. It is lazy management built around control instead of accountability and coaching.

There are a few more of these principles I can go into and all of them could use more or more elaborate examples but isn’t the consultant’s job to keep you wanting more??… So call me and I’d be happy to explore with you and your organization what you can be doing to make a flexible / fluid working environment be successful.

So, you still don’t believe me that flexible / fluid can work, so you’ll do these silly “hybrid” ideas.?…YES, I do believe they are silly, especially the ones that try to state that everyone does the same thing on the same days.?… What should you really do to make that work? Here is my fun list I came up with the other day on LinkedIn.

• Raise everyone’s pay so they can afford to live within 30min of the office without using a car or making any transfers between different types of public transportation. You do this regardless of pay band the person is in. Having the service staff live further way than executives is just plain mean. Oh! no more suburban offices. If there isn’t rapid public transportation available, you can’t say “back-to-office”
• Pay for people to relocate (if they choose) to that smaller radial zone. Otherwise, moving back tot he office is again a punishment. Some people may decide that better school districts and wider open spaces are more important than a shorter (aka reasonable) commute. But that is their decision to make, not yours.
• No more video conferencing ever. Don’t make me come to the office, just to be in a Zoom call getting Zoom fatigue just like I would if I was at home, because you wanted to meet for coffee in the hallways.
• The previous one also means teams need to be co-located, for real. You have to build teams where everyone working together works together. No more where the design team is in the US and the engineering team is Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Dubai, or Buenos Aires. That includes contractors. That especially includes contractors.
• If someone goes to a conference, to do customer visits, or field research they are under no obligation to read a single email, or attend a single meeting during that time. Their job is to do THAT work, not to do multiple jobs. Again, no VCs anyway, remember?

Obviously, there is a lot more to all this and the above list is completely unreasonable to do, but then again so is back to office policies. Oh, and if you want help with your flexible / fluid workspace types, I’d be happy to help.