I don’t trust you and you need to be controlled: the tale about work from the office

Since the pandemic work reality left us for good, slowly but surely the system also is healing itself from the disease called remote work. During this remote work era, employers as well as employees saw the semi-equal benefits from it: companies didn't close due to the pandemic, results stayed efficient while employees didn’t lose their jobs and were able to safely work, stay at home, school their children. Well, the equally beneficial dream was short lived - and the famous case of Amazon’s 5 days at the office return policy marks this strict reverse shift. The semi-adjusted employer and more balance-seeking employee, once on the more equal pattern during the pandemic era, now are on the path of growing further from each other.

Our physical, mental health suffered during and after the pandemic period. In relation to that, many of us started to pay more attention to our work-life balance, setting more boundaries, investing more in our wellbeing, prioritising workouts?and?quality time. During this time employees saw clearly that they were equally efficient (even more efficient some could say) while working remotely as they would have been while working from the office. For employees, remote work seemed (and still is) a natural progression of work conditions, empowered by technology which allows them to work and be reachable no matter the location. Seems almost like a no brainer.

On the other hand, employers had no choice as to adapt to remote work - it was basically forced on them when the pandemic hit. For many companies it presented itself as quite a challenge - both to their "Modus operandi" approach, to trusting that employees will do the necessary work efficiently. After a while they saw it clearly - it worked, employees were efficient, companies didn’t collapse during this fully remote period, work continued as it should. But afterwards, the old ways slowly needed to come back: with emplyee's growing needs for mental wellbeing, prioritising balance, setting boundaries, there is a sense of losing control, authority and management. I will not elaborate on Gen Z topic, the negative views on how they work and must be managed as this generation is also very concerned about its mental wellbeing, finding balance.

The saying “seeing is believing” is just how it works: we need to physically see it and only then believe it, even though we also know that we can believe it even if we don’t see it. It is always way easier to come to conclusions, evaluate situations and make decisions when we see what is happening in front of us. When we assume that we have all the information available, we can analyse it here and now, we are in control of all the data - we can move forward with the best outcome or decision (even if it might be an illusion). On the contrary, when some pieces are missing, we don't fully see the picture, we experience something like an unfinished gestalt - then our anxiety may grow, we might experience the sense of losing control, trust, predictability of behaviour, we may start to overthink. Results might suddenly look not so good, maybe we are missing something - the sense of taking control might start to grow.

It is true - remote work can create a similar feeling of unfinished gestalt. From an employer's perspective, there are a lot of things we can’t see, fully understand, be sure about. We don’t see the actual person, his/hers actual work being done, we don’t see facial expressions from email or slack messages (only some emojis do the trick). This signals the challenges that remote work presents - even though the work being done is not visually present, we have to trust that employees will do it and do it well. Employers can’t easily visibly see how John or Emily feels today - they have to plan a virtual interaction and build an honest, trusting connection via video calls. This new approach, demanded by remote work, is way more difficult and challenging - we need to do the planned, intentional trust building work as leaders digitally, not just simply approaching employees at the office for a quick chat. Trust, loyalty, and a safe psychological space is built over time by honest, consistent connection - here you have to do it virtually and even then, it is not a 100% guaranteed how a person will behave. Such leadership aspects are challenging and yet extremely important for remote work culture, as this work model demands different working practices, approaches towards digital communication, trusting your employees by allowing them to be flexible. Organisations tried to adapt to it during the pandemic period with some examples with multiple failures of digital miscommunications. And now, when we don’t have such pandemic restrictions any more - it is way more efficient and convenient to reverse engineer everyone to the offices.

So the system is still healing itself - time trackers made a comeback at work (from industrial times?), AI monitoring devices are installed to ensure that not only we are at our desks, but we are efficient, taking not unusually long breaks. As I am currently reading Skinner’s behavioural theory and how it works in society, I see a lot of common practices being applied today in such settings. One very well known negative punishment example comes to mind, when its goal is to weaken the unwanted behavior by taking away something the individual values or enjoys.

And let’s call it as it is - work from the office hugely benefits the employer and less so the employee, especially now, when employees are more concerned with their wellbeing, having the flexibility to manage their own time. Working from the office has its benefits - there is no doubt about that, but the ability to choose when we come to the office is usually way more important nowadays. Many employees have already adjusted to a more remote-office work balanced approach and prefer to have the option, the flexibility to choose when to come, not when it is demanded of them to be there.

Even though the system and organisations resist it, remote work is the future's direction. We are all enabled by today's (and tomorrow's) technology to be connected no matter where we are and it is reverse engineering to try to say that we still need to be at our desks to do the work. More so, globalisation will not slow down with many of us choosing to live not in the city, or the same country where our company is based. We even can be forced to move elsewhere due to wars or extreme climate change conditions or simply by choosing to become digital nomads. Remote work will be crucial in supporting any companies of the future which will adjust how to truly work remotely - not by direct influence of management authority and surveillance, but by consistently building the trustworthy connection, psychological safety and true leadership no matter where you, your employees or your company is located.

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