The Future of Work is...?

I started running virtual workshops back in 2015. At the time, I wanted to validate that full 2-day (or longer) workshops were not the best use of people's time for change-related workshops.

My hypothesis(es?) was:

• By running virtual cohorts spread out over time, attendees will get a chance to try the techniques they're learning and get help and support from their peers and me.
• By offering learning in smaller chunks, spread out over time, attendees are more likely to retain what they learned as they get to try the ideas in a real situation.

The first cohorts were your typical bootstrapped-special using a combination of Dropbox videos and Zoom calls, along with a private Slack forum for real-time support throughout the course. We'd meet bi-weekly for 90-minutes and between the online content and face-time via Zoom, it would be the equivalent of a 2-day course.

Then COVID hit, and my organization was already two years into a substantially reworked virtual learning experience. To date, we've run a couple of hundred online workshops globally since March.

That leads me to virtual exhaustion. I finished my last cohort in early October and don't plan to run workshops anymore. Partially because my business is at the size where I can't do it justice anymore, but mostly because the global community of facilitators is way better at it than I am!

I stopped running workshops because they became exhausting to do virtually. I recently had a chat with some folks looking to make their organization more agile, and I suggested starting with an open space with everybody. 

I could facilitate that in-person while blind-folded, but since we'd have to do it virtually, the effort on my part has increased 10-fold.

That leads me, finally, to the point. I joined Justin's Lean Change workshop last night and threw the class off the rails during our lean coffee session by hypothesizing:

• People say, "remote is the new normal...it's changed forever, and no one is going back," and my hypothesis is: "When we have a vaccine and cases stop increasing, there will be a mass flood BACK to the office."

I am sick of remote everything, as are many people. I write and produce music on the side and what my band could accomplish in 30-minutes in my studio takes four weeks through Zoom and What's App.

I love what Lisette Sutherland says, the future of work isn't remote; it's choice. I think many companies will get this completely wrong because:

• they see the cost savings of not having an office, and they'll stop, or heavily restrict travel, or close their offices entirely, thus taking that choice away
• they'll start finding or building tools that monitor remote employees

I predict a few things:

• Next year, more employees will want to return to an office than will want to continue to work at home when it's ok and safe to do so
• 27 million apps endly in ".ly" will emerge over the next few months now that Microsoft has released their "employee productivity" addon to Office 365
• Breather.com and other office rental businesses will absolutely EXPLODE with demand next year because companies that "get it" will give employees a choice. It's stupid-easy to use Breather and get face-time when you need it without the hassle and expense of an office. So if you have the means, buy an old building!
• Plenty of people who felt stuck in a shitty organization will realize they can work with anyone from anywhere and hopefully will find their calling.

Humans are fascinating creatures. Watching the slow evolution of how society swings to extremes are like watching 6-year olds play hockey. The puck goes into the corner, the chaotic swarm follows it. The puck squirts out, and the cycle continues. Eventually, the smart players stop following the hoards and end up breaking all the scoring records.

Pre-COVID many (NOT ALL) organizations swung the pendulum towards the extreme of being in the office 100% of the time. COVID shoved the pendulum 100% the other way.

Next year, society will shove the pendulum back to the other extreme to close-to-100-percent in-office working, mostly because people miss being with people because the novelty of working at home wore off months ago.

Finally, in a few years, the pendulum will settle somewhere in the middle, and people will have the choice to work with who they want, from wherever they want.

What is your organization going to do? Give people choice, or jump on the popular thought of wrongly thinking 100% remote is the new norm?