Is Remote Work Only Viable in Times of Status Quo?

As a leader of a mostly remote team, I read with interest about the decision by IBM's VP of Marketing to require remote workers to begin working from one of six office locations...or resign. This decision has famous precedence. Within the last four years Yahoo and Best Buy also ended policies that encouraged remote working arrangements.

In a time when collaboration tools are abundant, connectivity is high speed, the watchword is mobile, business is global, and traffic is soul-killing, why are these companies calling their employees back to the office? Is remote work a failed experiment? 

Many assume that a decision to abandon remote work is fueled by a concern for productivity. The thought then is that remote work is an extravagant perk, a luxury of companies far in the black who can tolerate a little fat for the benefit of their employees. Champions of remote work rush to site studies about productivity gains and reduced facility costs when employees are not tied to a main office. Far from fat, they say, remote work is a means to a leaner team. 

It is true that when making these announcements, IBM, Yahoo, and Best Buy were in the midst of a turnaround, trying to re-find their footing in a changing economy and changing technology. As for-profit companies, of course this was ultimately about the bottom line. However, the companies' decisions were not about accounting for every hour or distrust of employees and hardly about office space. The decision to bring everyone together was a need for new thinking. The desire to grab everyone by the shoulders and shake them a little and look into their eyes. The need to convey an urgency to stop business as usual.  

...a team being more powerful, more impactful, more creative, and frankly hopefully having more fun when they are shoulder to shoulder. -Michelle Peluso, IBM

People are more collaborative, more inventive when people come together. - Marissa Mayer - Yahoo

Bottom line, it’s ‘all hands on deck’ at Best Buy and that means having employees in the office as much as possible to collaborate and connect on ways to improve our business. - Mark Furman, Best Buy

The excerpts from the announcements and interviews about these decisions, show that the leadership in these companies felt that big change could not be accomplished without their employees interacting in-person each and every day. Collaboration and creativity were the key desired outcomes of face-to-face interaction and the key inputs to their big change. 

So the question becomes:  Is remote work only viable in times of status quo?

IBM, Yahoo, and Best Buy would apparently say yes. Under pressure of change, each sought the familiar comfort of having their teams in physical proximity. There is a security to being able to reach out and grab the people you need at a moments notice. 

Their decision is understandable, but it was a false choice. In order to achieve great change, these companies did not have to sacrifice the benefits of remote work. The collaboration and creativity sought by these companies can flourish among far-flung participants. The conditions just need to be set, and they are the same conditions that need to be set for employees working in the same physical space.   

Collaboration requires intention and trust.

It is disingenuous to say that simply being in proximity to each other will result in collaboration. We have all experienced cultures of cliques or silos or ignorance to each other's value. Breaking those barriers to collaboration requires intention. Intention is more powerful than distance. 

Intention also is not enough. Without trust in your fellow collaborators - trust in their competence, trust in their fair-dealing, trust in their commitment, trust in their intent - efforts to collaborate will be superficial and ultimately fall apart.

That prized water-cooler talk that companies divorcing themselves from remote working relationships yearn for is unattainable without intention and trust. Intention and trust can exist in remote relationships, just as it can be absent from face-to-face relationships. Companies that focus on these prerequisites to collaboration rather than the proximity of the workforce may find the grail that they seek. 

Creativity requires inspiration, open mode thinking, and constraints. 

It is ironic that constraints foster the greatest creative solutions. Limits to physical resources or resources like time and budget require out of box thinking that lead to inventive ideas. Perspective, however, is one thing that when constrained can stifle creativity. Constraining the source of participants in the creative process to only those in physical proximity limits perspectives which can limit the possible solutions. 

Open mode thinking* is the type of thinking that ponders all possible solutions and refrains from zooming into close mode thinking that is required to implement a solution. Creativity requires that time be spent in open mode thinking. Location is irrelevant. The key is discipline to not switch to the closed mode thinking of execution.

Inspiration in business comes from a well articulated vision. The most powerful gift that leadership can give is a clear rally point, a place to get to. Think of the vision of JFK for the United States to "take a clearly leading role in space achievement" by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. A bold vision at the time and crystal clear in ultimate end point. How few of our citizens were ever in proximity to JFK or an engineer at NASA, and yet that vision not only inspired those working on the goal, it inspired the nation.  

So IBM, Yahoo, and Best Buy's abrupt about face away from remote work, citing need for collaboration and creativity, seems to me to be less of a commentary on remote work and more about these companies' ability at the time to create a culture of intention and trust and communicate an inspiring vision to their employees wherever they may be. 

*(The idea of "open mode thinking" seems to be attributed to a speech made by John Cleese in 1991, but I can no-where find a transcript to link to.)

Photo Credit: Lexa Hoffner

#remoteworkers