The Findings Are In, Fun At The Office Isn’t Feasible?

What a ridiculous title. Equally as ridiculous, in my opinion, as something like “Results are finally in, work from home doesn’t work”. I meant my title as a joke. The work from home title is a real thing I've been seeing in a lot of articles lately. It’s as if we've finally struck proof from a productivity percentage or some other generalized statistic that working from home definitely does not work. I’m not going to make the argument that working from home is right or wrong, but I do think we are having entirely the wrong conversation. We should be talking less about location and more about management. Saying work from home doesn’t work purely due to a statistic misses the point just as much as saying fun in the office isn’t feasible. Ben Horowitz put it best in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things when he said “Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers - it’s for amateurs”.

It might seem pedantic, but my statement about fun isn’t exactly a stretch given just 23% of employees report being engaged at work and this is an all time record high! If I tried to argue that we should stop caring about providing enjoyable, engaging environments for employees simply because companies are managing to operate with largely disengaged workforces (77%), you would rightly laugh in my face. The numbers don’t tell the whole story in the work from home conversation and it’s time to move on. Whether people are more productive at home or in the office isn't the right question anymore. I work with companies that are fully remote and others that are fully in office. Where their people do their work doesn’t seem to predict overall productivity. The quality of their management, however, does.?

Where we work isn't the pivot point of productivity, management is.

Each and every project is different. Same goes for the people working on them. Generalizing across "work" as a concept is what to me, doesn't work. What works for one company may or may not work for another. Even inside a single company you may have teams that thrive remotely and others that need to be face to face. Sometimes even within a single project or team the ebb and flow of the work results in certain phases when we need to be in person and other times when we don't. Discussing work from home as a general concept across all companies at all times has run its course.

Here are some stats from Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report to help kick off what I think is a more interesting conversation:

• 51% of employees are looking for new jobs while employed
• 59% are quiet quitting at their current jobs
• 18% are loud quitting (taking action that can directly harm their organizations)

A lot of people have either quit on caring about their jobs or are going to quit them entirely soon

We all know the saying, people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their boss. Let’s stop asking whether or not people should work from home and start asking how we can support our managers either way. Many people are struggling to keep engaged because their managers are struggling just as much or more. When your manager isn’t at their best it’s going to be hard for them to help you be at yours. We’re not exactly doing them any favors either. A company decision to mandate everyone back into the office, with no room for exception, turns a manager into a minion. They have no real room to do the job they’re there to do - empower and enable their teams. People, projects and priorities are always different. We can’t manage them all in the same way across the board. Isn’t that why we have managers in the first place?

People don’t quit their jobs, they quit their boss

When we mandate people back into the office, it’s managers that have to deal with the emotional and cognitive overload of making that happen. We should stop asking whether it’s best for everyone to work in the office and start asking what more we can do to empower our managers in the first place. What would need to be true for managers to make their own decisions for their own teams? Do we not trust them to do what’s right for the business overall? If that’s the case, why did we hire them? Location is just the most recent in a long line of decentralizations at the office. Information used to be centralized. Now we have content management systems to share it company wide. Organizational charts used to be centralized, but are increasingly becoming more decentralized. We trusted managers with those changes, why not work location too??

What would need to be true for managers to make more of the decisions impacting their own people?

If you’re an executive perhaps you can ask how you can better enable your managers. What decisions are you making for them that you could give back to them instead. Yes, you’ll give up some control, but in return you’ll get back more engaged managers (and probably stronger decisions too). More engaged managers lead to more engaged employees. When it feels like you have a decision too big for one of your managers to take, try asking what would need to be true for them to be able to make it. Often decisions that feel too important can be delegated with the right guardrails in place.

Execs can ask "what would need to be true to delegate this decision" to empower their managers with more decision making

Managers, you can help yourselves too. Take on more decisions. Ask what would need to be true for you to make an important decision your boss is talking to you about. For important decisions you can't make, find ways of having more influence in them by asking how you can get involved or sharing context you have and asking how it will be considered in the final decision. If you don't feel like you have enough control or influence over the decisions you need to take care of your team, talk to you boss and come up with a plan together. Often they're so busy with their own priorities they may not have realized you're feeling marginalized.

Managers can take on more decisions or find better ways to influence when they can't

If you work for a manager you can also help. If things aren’t working for you, tell your boss. It can feel scary to share something like that with your manager, but if they're a good manager they should want to hear it from you. Remember, it's important that your boss listens to what you have to say, but that doesn’t always mean you're going to get what you want in that moment. The goal is for them to hear the context from you so they can better advocate for you day to day. Ultimately when they have that kind of context from you it will help you and your team in the long run. If you’ve tried all this and your manager still isn’t showing up for you in a positive way, perhaps it is time to make a change.?

You can help your manager by providing honest feedback and remembering that you may not always get your way

Let’s get out of this generalized debate about where we should be working. Generalization is like taking an average and no inspirational company aspires to be average. If we want to get into the weeds, where the real impact occurs, we need to start talking more about our managers and how to help them manage their teams, in whatever ways they think make the most sense.

p.s. if you like this sort of thing, you can check out the book I'm writing and join my (roughly) monthly newsletter here, where I share specific tactics for working smarter, not harder and enjoying work more along the way too.