Insights from the Great Work From Home Experiment of 2021

Ever since I started my professional career, I’ve butted heads with the status quo. I still feel sick to my stomach when I hear “that’s not how we do things around here”, or “if it isn’t broke, don't fix it” or similar anti-change, anti-improvement sentiment. Since I was in elementary school, I’ve had this ability to see how things could be, instead of how they are, getting into all sorts of trouble for suggesting improvements to my teachers. I even had to stay after school to write the definition of arrogance on the chalkboard 250x, but that didn’t stop me! (though it taught me to change my approach… a little) #ad/#sponsored

Over the years since, I’ve done my part to be a #Waymaker for the digital revolution, particularly when it comes to using technology for collaboration and productivity. From the dotcom era though the social media heyday and now into the emerging world of Web 3, and now Web 3.1, I continue to advocate for new (and better) ways to work. Which is why in the early days of the pandemic I shifted from thinking about reimagining the guild of old, to building a guild for remote workers. (failed that effort sadly).

As with many of you, I had once thought that Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 was going to finally be the breakthrough in organizational strategy and operations (and culture) to unleash our full potential to work together. But we kept running into the refrain “show me the money”, or rather the ROI. In talking to Fortune 100 execs while advancing social business at Deloitte, they wanted to see proof of this new way of working in action across an organization leading to better performance. They would ask, “who out there is doing all of this well?” I’d point to the bright spots across their industry, but few were really living the potential of the digital transformation created through social software.??

As that era ended and we moved on, we found it was more than a rejection of the language of social and a reluctance to change.?The sort of transformation we envisioned that empowered people to work together more productively in digital workspaces was not what they wanted. They couldn’t imagine the sort of world that we have now come to take for granted in 2021, where remote work is the default for so many. We still see that thinking today from several leading CEOs who want to observe the activity of their employees in the cubicle zoo instead of the results they produce while working from home or anywhere else around the world.

As we all saw and experienced, only the absolute need to change in the face of a global pandemic could get us unstuck from those old-world beliefs. Only the closure of our public spaces, schools and offices because of a fear of death (and lawsuits) from Covid-19 could create the environment necessary for this great Work From Home experiment. An experiment that has proven it is not only possible to work successfully from anywhere, but in many cases, better, even without pants.

The Great Work From Home Experiment was recently lauded as one of the Most Influential Projects of 2021 by the Project Management Institute, coming in 2nd only to the development of the MRNA vaccine itself.? PMI’s Most Influential Projects of 2021 highlights interesting efforts around the world and across industries that achieved significant milestones and impacted our society in the past year.

Of course, it isn’t just one experiment, but thousands upon thousands, in all corners of the world. ?Unlike many past unexpected and rapidly evolving societal transformations, we were fortunate to have the experience from the past decade plus of efforts around the future of work. We had the benefit of more refined technologies for empowering distributed teams, and the language necessary to communicate the new way to work. Nevertheless, there was much to be figured out and a lot of new ground to break. As you have likely read, most estimate that we advanced over 10 years in just a few months.

Before this new way of work would become the norm, leaders and project managers were called into emergency action to enhance operational security, to distribute technology tools, to train employees on new tools, and so much more. Coordinating so many aspects of transformation is a formidable task, especially under the extreme and uncertain conditions caused by the pandemic.?

Despite the challenges, we rose to the occasion, not only making the shift to working from home (or working from anywhere), but also addressing the consequences of the shift, and using it as a time for reflection on our expectations of work. PMI recognized several of these sorts of projects, such as Iceland’s experiment with shifting to a four-day work week.?

Many have long proffered that we would be more productive if we made this change.? After four years, Iceland released the report this year that proved it true. “Now some 86 percent of the country’s workforce is—or is able to start—working shorter hours.” This is the sort of thing that leading executives wanted when I was pitching Social Business, proof. With this evidence in hand, we now have the basis for taking it even further.

But this shift to remote work is not without consequences. Small businesses in downtown corridors are shuttering. Supply chains for corporate toilet paper came to a stop, and the shelves became empty as employees did more of “their business” at home. The burden of the cost of the physical space shifted from employers to employees. The carbon footprint of every organization changed too, leading Shopify to launch a project to incorporate its workers’ home energy use into its corporate emissions calculations.

Organizations embarked on workplace transformations in small and large ways. Many organizations canceled their plans to build new offices. Some entirely, some just changing their plans to support a more distributed workforce with satellite offices as REI did, another effort recognized in the Most Influential Projects list by PMI. The Top 10 Most Influential Projects in Workplace Transformation projects reflect just a slice of the thousands upon thousands undertaken this past year, providing a great basis upon which we can drive further improvements.

With the shift to distributed teams and remote working environments, we have found that there is even more work to be done, and an even greater need for strong project management, and even stronger transformational leadership. The skills and talents required to manage a project remotely are similar but also different and more expansive.?

But it still comes down to the fundamentals. People, working together on teams, and working alone doing “deep work”. As I’ve long stated, the ability of smart people to work well together is the most important element in creating value in today’s knowledge economy. While the way we work together is now more likely to be mediated by video conference instead of in shared physical spaces, we still need to build trust among team members.

The bonds that get built in conference rooms together late at night working a deadline, or simply discussing new ideas over lunch together, are now even more valuable, and harder to create. Yet they still need to be facilitated. The need for clarity of roles and alignment of purpose is now even more important. The need to be accountable to each other, and to the project charter, can’t be understated.?

In the end, the organizational leaders who foster co-ownership and a real sense of teamwork across distributed project teams will be those who benefit the most from this great work from home experiment. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that everyone will benefit from the efforts of these leaders.

As for me, I am still charging at windmills, striving to move us beyond remote work. To empower more organizations to learn from remote first companies, and the newly remote companies. To stay on the path of constant, never-ending improvement, to further our experiments in pursuit of continuous optimization.?

PMI’s Most Influential Projects of 2021 demonstrates how project managers and change makers have found resourceful ways to keep initiatives moving forward amid global disruptions, including the continuing pandemic. It’s a great resource demonstrating what is possible - the sort of resource I wish I had when I was trying to convince those Fortune 100 leaders to embrace the very technologies that enabled our rapid response and shift to remote work.

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