Re-imagining work - no office, no problem?

I'm coming into a moment where I slow down to speed up, and will take slight break from the circular thoughts that have been playing in my head for over year. For the first, and maybe the only time in my history, I can tell myself that by lying on my socially distanced sun lounger reading my Kindle, I am not being a lazy slob, but am making a full-on social contribution. I am pro-actively contributing to the protection of the human race in an all round win-win.

Re-boot and re-shape

What is going to be on the minds of many people is the shape of work as we currently know it and the place it is going to be carried out. McKinsey in their study "Getting Real About Hybrid" believes we are in a period when all traditional workplace norms must be re-evaluated. Ergo it must be so. Most leaders they maintain are still not comfortable with the fact that clear solutions may not be immediately obvious. Even though business gurus over the generations tell us that uncertainty fuels success, letting go of certainty is going to be one of the biggest challenges for us all.

This possibly fleeting moment will give us a unique opportunity to reboot all systems and re-imagine everything we know about work, but especially a review of the values on which we base our organisations. Last time we talked about managers, the cheese in the corporate sandwich, spinning plates.

Now let's look at leaders. Will they seize the moment?

Touching down

I have always railed against the phrase "return to work" and think it should be deleted from our vocabulary. It is not accurate, and we need to stop saying it. Everyone has been working for the past 16 months, just in a different places. Not one single person has been on holiday.

However, the Dropbox leadership team have come up with an ingenious way of dealing with the whole issue of returning to the office. They are simply dropping the word “office” from the announcement. It's a no office, no problem kind of approach. I like it!

Photo by Dropbox

What if your old office could now be a “touch down spot” or “studio” and looks like a Scandinavian coffee shop? Dropbox announced the re-imagining of their workplace not as the “primary place for any employee to work, but as a place for teams and co-workers to come together.”

We are talking about a tech company in Silicon Valley. How will that translate to other geographies - Seville, Stockport or Salerno? My imagination is running riot. At Dropbox the this space will be used for many things "team meetings, group hangs, impromptu concerts, all-hands meetings and quarterly strategy sessions."

Now that sounds infinitely more appealing than co-spacing at the kitchen table in a home office coping with erratic broadband and marauding kids and pets. However, Dropbox don't want employees to come in 5 days a week because they don't have "affordance" for it. That's biz speak for no money, but I am only guessing. Will this be enough to deal with proximity bias to avoid favouring the employees managers see most frequently? We will see.

Replace work

So let's take that to the next level. Should our leaders now re-imagine the notion of "work" and replace the word "work" itself? Should we now say to our kids "off to touch down" on the days we go in to the.. well touch down spot. And how do we describe what we are doing once we are in this rather attractive hygge space? Can we now say "Don't interrupt me, I need to touch down?" Is that what we are now doing at our kitchen tables?

What everyone wants is to find meaning and purpose in what they do. "Work should use our creative powers and develop all sides of our potential. Each one of us has the potential to develop a wide variety of skills and capacities. We are most human: when we work because we want to, and because we like our work, when work is self-rewarding our life finds meaning in our work." This quote did not come from a leadership guru busting some moves on TikTok, but Karl Marx, 200 years ago.

What this idea does is shake-up the notion that people who are working remotely are being less focused. Despite the fact that even if it does conjure up male-code scenes from rugby matches (scrums, rucks etc.) which I'm not a fan of, "touch down spots" do sound way more fun.

Corporate cultures

The final part of the leadership re-imagining process is forging new corporate cultures. This is that invisible layer that everyone knows is there. It's the "this is how we do things here" line which gives organisations their own brand of certainty.

If you ask any group, leadership or otherwise to define their corporate culture you will usually struggle to get a precise meaning. Some organisations have stated values and leadership "pillars" in public documents, where you will find a range of generic adjectives and expectations. This could be customer centric, excellence, innovative, driven, "go the extra mile," inspiring, nurturing, team spirit, motivating, "do more with less," timely etc. But it's still not clear what that all means exactly, or how it is achieved.

And therein lies the problem.

Measuring success

Because some people do get it. The winners. Businesses reward certain types of behaviour that bring them success, which encourages everyone to view success in the same way. Others modify their behaviour accordingly, to align with those aspirations that make the grade. When all "successful” employees behave in the same way, we create a culture very often one involving personal sacrifice. When that behaviour is role modeled, we embed those cultural norms even further.

Male coded behaviours such as extraversion and the ideas of competition, winning and being the "best in class" are at the core. This is perfectionism by another name. Above all it has to be visibly so. Goldman Sachs of the 100-hour-week fame, has one its core values "we aspire to nothing less than excellence, consistently striving for exceptional performance and achieving outstanding results for our clients, our shareholders, and our company."

But in most organisations we are all expected to turn in top quality, error-free work, on time with confidence and charisma. We discourage disorganisation, errors, tardiness and introversion.

Punishment

If successful behaviours are rewarded, then those that fail to meet the standards are in reality "punished." Most businesses have "grading systems" (a reward system) in performance reviews, based on how right (perfect) we all get things. Quite often they are even scaled 1-5. It can be difficult to match up to these sometimes unstated standards which touch on intangibles such as "fit", "presence" and "charisma". Very few organisations have space for chaos except perhaps in a tech start-up.

Control

Perfectionism is about certainty and control and everything being well... perfect in a very public way. This usually includes the person themselves, what they do, their expectations and everyone they interact with. Doing that with a remote workforce which leaders cannot physically see, means letting go of control and trusting people.This is going to be challenging for many leaders and companies, which contributes to the reasoning behind getting employees back in the office.

It's less about relationship building and more about needing to be sure we know for sure what our people are doing. Lack of information creates uncertainty. We are already hearing tales about monitoring software and video cameras being left on all day.

Humility vs arrogance

So moving forward means resetting benchmarks for success and how it's rewarded. What will our new "good" best practices look like? We need different ideas and should probably be looking for humble leaders to make things work. Research carried out in computer software companies published in the?Journal of Management?suggests that?humility in leadership results in higher performing teams, better collaboration, and flexibility. Other research has found that humble, collaborative leaders are better listeners, more flexible, and inspire greater teamwork. This is another reason we need to stop the hemorrhaging of women from our workplaces. This is what most are good at.

The question is can old dogs learn new tricks? We are in the place that Marilyn Ferguson called "between the trapezes. " We have nothing to hold onto. It means that leaders have to evaluate everything about their organisations to lay the foundations for the future, as well as the near term. Including themselves.

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Footnote:?If your organisation wants to create gender balanced, diverse and inclusive workplaces in a post COVID hybrid world of work, reach out for more information: [email protected]