The Real Problem with WFH is Not a Lack of Presence, But a Lack of Leadership

Location or Leadership

New research suggests the problems with work from home (WFH) don’t emerge because employees are no longer co-located. Its weaknesses arise primarily when leaders fail to create new ways for employees to waggle.

Every once in a while, bees discover it’s time to move. So do humans. And the process both species use to choose a new home is surprisingly similar. Executives from a financial services company want to move their headquarters. They are on the hunt for a new city to call home. Like bees, they fan out over various candidate destinations then return to relate their conclusions. Bees do the same. When one finds a place he fancies, he performs a “waggle dance,” rotating while oscillating his abdomen in front of those he happens upon to convince them of the quality of site. Through this rump-to-face interaction he recruits his brethren to come and see. Humans arrive at a final decision in much the same way. Our gesticulations over coffee, chance meetings in elevators, and while sharing a taxi are a vital part of the process of deliberation. Waggling is how work gets done.

Pre-COVID, many organizations were trudging lethargically toward various mixes of workplace and home-based work. One of the primary reasons the transition was so slow was a mistaken equation of co-location and connection. We assumed that waggling together required being together. But our recent study suggests co-location may have always been a fig leaf for a lack of leadership.

The Study

In August 2020, we administered a survey to 2,300 executives, managers and front-line workers who had been abruptly thrust from the workplace three to five months earlier by COVID-19. We found that a surprisingly large minority of organizations report they are working together better since their forced separation. While a predictable majority (54% of executives and 43% of non-executive respondents) reported cultural strain and deterioration since dispersing, we were repeatedly fascinated by reports of teams that felt closer and more productive than before.

“Our group rarely got together socially except for at Christmas (and even that was still ‘work’). Since our team has been remote, we have had several ‘Zoom Happy Hours’ that have been a great success. We share what's going on in our lives at home and at work. People seem to relax and truly open up--perhaps it's because they are in their own environments. These gatherings seem to lift everyone's spirits. People often marvel at the fact that ‘remote’ can feel so ‘close.’”

A comparison of the leadership practices of what we called our Surprisingly Stronger (SS) organizations with the Predictably Weaker (PW) others calls into question the assumption that distance is destiny. For decades, the common belief in organizational studies has been that the further two people were apart physically and organizationally, the lower their estimation of one another was likely to be.[1] Our latest findings suggest otherwise.

At the end of the day, the necessary condition to a productive social system is leadership not location.

The Findings

The aim of our study was to examine the effect of WFH on social capital. Social capital, a concept popularized by the sociologist Robert Putnam in the early Nineties, is a measure of the healthy functioning of social systems. In our view, it is a report card on leadership. Leadership, after all, is not about creating results. It is about influencing others to create results. The work product of great leadership is social capital.

Our survey employed a seven-item social capital scale using common descriptors of healthy social functioning—for example, sacrificing for others, giving others the benefit of the doubt, and responding quickly to requests from others. Rather than asking directly whether WFH was good or bad, we asked about changes respondents had seen in these vital behaviors.

As we reported before, most said things had gotten worse since WFH began. The fact that the majority of organizations were predictably weaker was, well, predictable. But we were intrigued to discover that in a significant minority of organizations, the behaviors were flourishing under the same WFH conditions. We wondered if this was happening in spite of, or because of, WFH. As we dug into the data, we found evidence of both.

“My immediate team sat within 15 feet of each other until mid-March. Since WFH was imposed, my immediate team has a standing Monday morning 30-minute ‘coffee chat’ on Microsoft Teams. Business is rarely discussed. Weekend activities, upcoming weddings, home improvement projects, and the weather dominate conversation… I actually know more about what's going on in my teammates' personal and professional lives than I did when we were co-located... The pandemic has IMPROVED [our] culture. Care, compassion, empathy, honesty and respect have all grown stronger.”

Some leaders are finding ways to generate greater social capital because of WFH conditions. Here are some conclusions from our study:

1. All you have to do to destroy social capital is nothing.

We gave respondents a list of various actions their leaders might have taken to mitigate the effects of WFH. Some required very little effort, like sending out an informal survey or inviting input about WFH effects during company meetings. Some were a bit more taxing, like hosting virtual dance parties or significantly increasing personalized virtual contact with leaders.

We were encouraged to find that almost every intervention leaders used had a positive effect on social capital. Some had a greater effect than others, but most everything produced something. SS organizations were those where leaders worked actively to build social capital. When they did, employees were:

?      60% more likely to respond quickly to requests from each other.

?      Almost three times more likely to give one another the benefit of the doubt when problems occurred.

?      Almost three times more likely to sacrifice their own needs to serve a larger team goal.

?      Over twice as likely to take initiative to solve problems rather than waiting to be told.

The flip side of the coin is that in PW organizations (those where leaders had taken no steps to offset the potential alienation of WFH), social capital is diminishing rapidly.

The difference between the social capital winners and losers was not distance, but leadership.

2. The supervisor matters.

In SS organizations, many mentioned small gestures and consistent actions their immediate supervisor and managers had taken since WFH. And the returns on these small human investments were enormous. One respondent described how touched they were by a supervisor who on several occasions asked her how her kids were “handling the transition to remote learning…”

Apparently in this person’s organization, the example of increasing intimacy in spite of increased distance started at the top. They continue, “… In fact, in one meeting, our CEO went around the [virtual] room and asked all with small children how they (the entire family) were doing in the remote environment.”

Our study showed that managers in PW organizations are almost always those who have done little to leverage the social capital opportunities WFH offers. As a result, these leaders suffered extraordinary losses in social capital. Their direct reports were:

?      40% more likely to do the minimum required in their work.

?      4x more likely to respond slowly to requests from others.

?      4x more likely to assume the worst of others when problems happen.

?      3x more likely to put their own interests ahead of larger organizational goals.

3. It’s about waggling not just working

Finally, our study questions the long-held pessimism that virtual technologies can promote the frequent informal interaction needed to generate robust levels of social capital. We see hopeful evidence that virtual tech can be used not just for working, but for waggling. 

Successful generation of social capital requires two kinds of interaction: structured and unstructured.

Structured interaction creates social capital when it produces repeated positive experiences of collective striving. Social capital grows when, in the course of working together, we witness surprisingly virtuous behavior that accelerates feelings of trust. For example, during a stressful product launch your team demands you go home to see your daughter’s soccer final rather than stick around for an all-nighter to finish product specs. In addition, as you work intensely together over subsequent weeks, you gain respect not only for the character but for the competence of your colleagues. The next time this same group works together, you immediately fall back into familiar rhythms of trust.

We’ve known for decades that communication technologies are adequate for structured interaction. Need to get a geographically dispersed team to develop a budget? A 1980s-style conference call worked fine. Want to involve your team in critiquing a marketing plan? A 2015-era video conference is terrific. But what we never found a way to do with these technologies was promote unstructured interaction that reliably produces deep human bonds.

For example, back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, did you EVER hear someone at the end of a two-hour audio-only conference call say, “Hey, what do you say we all just hang out on this line for another hour and catch up?” Even with today’s rich video technology, how many seconds pass after the last word is said in most of your meetings and faces begin disappearing from your screen?

Unstructured interaction is free-form contact that promotes exploration, social learning, and social connection. Research shows this is a critical ingredient of high-performance organizations.[2] Much of the feelings of trust you developed during your stressful product launch came from unplanned moments where you showed colleagues a prized video of a goal your daughter shot in a previous game, or when you shared a special headache recipe with a coworker who you saw repeatedly rubbing her head.

Because few have historically used virtual communications to consistently promote this kind of interaction, we began to assume it couldn’t be done. That’s how it became a tacit law that, metaphorically speaking: The only way to create deep connection is to pass pizza over a cubicle wall.

The Office is a Way not the Way

We found that tremendous social capital can be generated if leaders match new social technologies with our virtual technologies. The limiting factor has never been distance, it has been an absence of innovation in social rituals that create similar effects to proximity.

What worked about the office was that it was a highly structured way of promoting unstructured interaction. It gave the illusion of agency to our spontaneous connection. But the truth is that those “chance” happenings have always been engineered through coercive norms. We were all required to arrive at 8am, lunch at noon, leave at 5pm, and office where we were told. And it worked. Like marbles in a bowl, our contact with each other was not elective. Modern companies like Google and Facebook are heralded as innovative for simply extrapolating benign coercion to a new level: offering gourmet meals, dentistry and dry cleaning all in an attempt to keep employees “in the box,” knowing the marginal increase in serendipitous interaction would yield dramatic returns.

Leaders in Surprisingly Strong organizations understand that WFH demands more than substituting conference calls for conference rooms. It isn’t just about using virtual technology to substitute for the structured interaction required to get work done. They are experimenting aggressively to create new norms and rituals for unstructured interaction.

For example, here is a social innovation one leader uses to promote unstructured virtual contact:

“Every morning at 9:30, my team meets [online] for something we call a ‘Check-in’ to make sure everyone is okay. We started working remotely after just one day's notice, so initially it was… very work-focused. Now that we have figured out how to work remotely all the time, our morning check-in has … become more a time to share personal stories, give tours of our homes, see each other's families, have our morning coffee together... If anyone is upset, we show compassion. If anyone needs help, we provide assistance. If anyone has a success, we all celebrate. [We] have really come together as people who care about each other…”

Similar to office-based rituals, everyone must arrive to the same virtual location at the same time. From there, the agenda is loose and social. But the result is deepening feelings of connection and trust.

When we asked respondents what kinds of tactics leaders had used to offset WFH challenges, there was a marked difference in those used by leaders in Surprisingly Strong organizations. Where PW leaders may have changed work hours or offered flex time policies, leaders in SS organizations were far more likely to use:

1. Fun, off-the-wall virtual events (virtual dance parties, online eating contests, etc.).
2. More frequent team meetings.
3. Scheduled non-work-related team meetings for team members to connect.

Notice what these all have in common. These are investments that enable not just structured, but unstructured interaction. And their social capital effects were strikingly different, showing a two to four-times greater impact on social capital than offering a more generous flex time policy.

This study provides early evidence that leaders need not choose between developing a high-performance culture and allowing home-based work. It may be possible to have both, provided leaders take responsibility to embed new rituals that provide an ample mix of structured and unstructured interaction.

How to Structure for Unstructured Interaction

Effective rituals have three common design characteristics:

1.    A reason to gather – Social capital is most likely to result if participation feels more inviting than coercive. The “water cooler” became a symbol of informal interaction because people came to drink, not to be hosed down.

2.    A reason to linger – Meaningful connection requires sustained interaction. Little happens in 30 seconds. Thirty minutes provides possibility. The ritual must keep people together long enough to enable vulnerability and disclosure.

3.    Opportunity to mingle – The ritual must offer a mix of structured and unstructured time in order to both keep people together and allow for progressive connection.

While there are many interventions that check all three boxes, virtual synchronous training, when properly designed, is the perfect blend of all three requirements. Most classroom-based training is delivered in ways that maximize efficiency rather than social capital. Employees generally attend classes sitting next to complete strangers from other teams or divisions. While sensible for scheduling convenience, leaders who allow training to be offered in this way squander a perfect opportunity for team development.

Imagine a WFH team gathering one hour every week for eight weeks to learn presentation skills. Each one-hour session includes a blend of 30 minutes of instructor-led activities, and 30 minutes with a variety of teammates in a virtual breakout room engaged in skill practice. Lightly structured breakout activities afford time both for skill development and unguided tangents. Training of this kind offers a reason to gather, a reason to linger, and opportunity to mingle.

And the research further validates training as a context for building connection. The study found organizations that offer the same or more training since WFH get a culture bump. Specifically:

-      33% of employees in these organizations say their culture has improved since WFH.

-      22% of employees say they feel more connected to their organization.

-      52% of employees say their commitment to the organization has increased.

Conclusion

For a couple of centuries, office spaces have become the preferred tool of leaders for generating social capital. But the fact that co-location facilitates cooperation has seduced us into believing co-location equals cooperation. Proximity is but one way of creating intimacy[3]. It makes sense to use it when available, but the breathtaking rate of innovation in virtual communication tech has exposed our addiction to location. We can now see the vast differences in social capital from one organization to the next are likely the result of variations in leadership competence, not physical concentration. It is becoming increasingly clear that the office has progressed from a leadership tool to a leadership crutch.

With many species, biology is destiny. Bees are limited to genetic programming. Co-location in a hive will forever be required for waggling to work. But humans are not so limited. Our capacity for social connection and social learning may be limited not by distance, but by leadership. Leaders who innovate new structures that promote unstructured interaction can be liberated from geographic constraints in a way that creates a high-performance organization with highly distributed work accessing world-class labor wherever its hive is found.

The work ahead is for leaders to develop new social rituals that provide a reason to gather, a reason to linger and opportunity to mingle.

[1] See, for example, Robert Kraut and Carmen Egido, and Jolene Galegher, Patterns of Contact and Communication in Scientific Research Collaboration (New York: ACM Press, 1988).

[2] Alex Pentland, director of the MIT Interaction Lab, argues that the functioning of a social system is a product of two kinds of interaction: engagement (work-focused interaction within a group) and exploration (unstructured interaction outside the group). See especially chapter 5 of Social Physics: How Social Networks can Make Us Smarter, by Alex Pentland.

[3] For example, Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has shown that virtual eye contact even from a teacher avatar produces similar increases in student performance to eye contact from a teacher in a physical classroom. Bailenson, J. N., Yee, N., Blascovich, J., Beall, A. C., Lundblad, N. & Jin, M., “The Use of Immersive Virtual Reality in the Learning Sciences: Digital Transformations of Teachers, Students, and Social Context,” Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17 (2008), 102–141.