WFH/WFO and the Workplace of the Future. Part 1: WFH Problems.

The office of the future is a place that not only achieves business goals, but enhances the lives of employees in ways that working from home cannot. In this three part article, I look at ways to optimize the workplace of the future.?

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Part 1: The unresolved problems with work from home??

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My business, Technology Elite, spent a lot of money on this new office fit-out last year.?

Here's a quick fly-through video of the office on our FB page

Starting this office build in 2021 I think a lot of people thought we were crazy. CEOs globally were scaling back on office space (and still are) and the future was “clearly” all about Work From Home (WFH).??

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However, in my opinion, permanent WFH was already?back-firing by 2021 and I decided most companies would move back towards an office of some kind, although it may be different from what we were accustomed to.??

?I believed then and now that the new standard will settle on office-centric hybrid in which the primary place of both work and company culture is the office, and where flexibility to work from home is based on evidence of contribution and effectiveness.?

?This may upset those currently working from home and who are motivated to continue doing so, but hear me out. The reason Technology Elite is building one of the most social and entertaining offices in the World is because the old idea of office needed an upgrade.?

I wanted to break free of the WFH/WFO dichotomy with its inherent assumptions about how little value a centralized workplace brings to employees.?

?The workplace needs to become more than just a place that people must go to in order to work.?Rather, it needs to be a place that draws people together because it’s where people want to be.?

This means making it a place that offers things staff cannot get anywhere else.

A place that adds value to their lives. This is what we are creating at Technology Elite. Although the office build was largely finished nearly a year ago, the entire exercise is a living ongoing experiment because the the building itself is only part of what creates community and value in people’s lives: the office is the set, not the movie.?

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A year into the experiment has convinced me further that we are onto something strong and sustainable, that it's in alignment with top talent, and that it’s worth the ongoing cost and effort.??

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Later I will explore the office of the future in more detail, but for this part of the article let's dive deeper into the evidence that WFH is flawed, and where things will move over the next one to two years.?

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The species-wide momentum for centralized working?

?The societal frameworks and personal attributes that empower centralized working have developed over centuries. Whether it’s blacksmithing a great horseshoe, providing great customer service in a store, or delivering knowledge-based work like IT services, there are entrenched human customs that support workers gathering in a central location to do their work and grow their skills. These are closely entwined with business iteration customs, where an organization makes constant improvements to products and services over years and decades.??

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I’m not saying this centralized approach is the only way (or even the optimal way) to work.?

What I’m saying is that as a species we have had a lot of practice at gathering together physically to conduct our work and improve our work.?Gathering together is infused into our species at a primal level (safety, community, survival) at magnitudes of thousands of years, and at a business level for hundreds of years.?

In contrast to this universal practice at centralized working, most companies have had less than two years of trying to achieve the same outcome with staff working from home.?

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Those two years, were unlikely to immediately replace centuries of solid development in ways of working together for a common goal.?

Interestingly, the handful of companies which have had a fully dispersed (WFH) workforce for a decade or more, seem to do things quite differently to those who were previously office-based and have needed to patch over processes to help them cope with staff being at home. That, in itself, says a lot.?Just look at the endless complaints online about the large increase in the number of meetings that remote workers are subject to in the typical office-based business turned WFH business.?

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Thanks to COVID, most companies now have a year or two of experience with partial or complete WFH staff. Nevertheless, surviving COVID through an emergency period of staff working from home doesn’t mean a business is actually good at it. Maintaining quality, and continuing to improve products and services with a fully dispersed workforce is not easy. The truth is, that we have all been part of a grand experiment in working from home, and to think that we could get it perfect on the "first attempt" is unrealistic.??

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So does WFH necessarily mean worse outcomes??

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No. I think it is theoretically possible for a company to be as good (or maybe better) with a dispersed workforce as they were with an office workforce, however, the default has been worse outcomes.?

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Some may disagree because their company is doing fine with WFH perhaps even better than it was before COVID and this may well be so in particular situations. But on the other hand, it may be that the repercussions have not yet been revealed. From the stories I hear, it seems to me inevitable that by default the quality and quantity of the majority of employee output will decline over time with a pure WFH model. This is also true of staff engagement with company values and ‘team vibe’.??

Working from home is certainly convenient, but for most employees, it is less engaging, less fun, worse for their personal skills, worse for their mental health, and worse for career development. And it's unclear how they fix these issues.?

Despite these views, I’m not anti-WFH. What I’m about is driving the best outcomes for staff and for business. And that does not mean going back to exactly what we did before COVID.?It’s pretty obvious that if those pre-COVID times were so great, then WFH demand wouldn’t be so high, and this discussion wouldn’t even be necessary, right???

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Hidden or Ignored Risks like Security & IP

Permanent work from home throws up a lot of challenges for businesses. The business world, and the governments and industry legislations they are governed by, are still processing these problems. When COVID closed workplaces, many of these problems were ignored because it was the only way to keep operating. But the risks and problems did not go away and it’s only a matter of time before they become front page news.?

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For example, the protection of Intellectual Property and Data & IT Security.

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When governments forced WFH as a result of COVID, IT security and intellectual property concerns more or less got put on hold. The need to keep operating trumped all legislation and best practice that would previously have made it impossible to move millions of computers to personal / disparate networks and work from home.

For someone with more than 2 decades in the IT industry, this shocked me. Suddenly banks had staff working from home and no one knew what confidential customer data was being exposed to their family and friends. Software companies had developers building priceless intellectual property with few controls in place to prevent code theft. Organizations that handled millions of records of sensitive data had absolutely no idea if an employee’s home had been compromised, or had network equipment designed to steal data.?

VPNs and Remote Desktop solutions help with these things, but don’t stop someone looking over your shoulder, taking photos of screens or installing interception devices. It's not like an office gives you 100% protection either, but if you don’t have physical control of the environment then the protections are inferior- it's that simple. And the universal secret is that during COVID most companies did whatever they needed to do to survive, and IT security was far less important than keeping staff and keeping production.?

For many, the sky didn't fall and they adjusted their perception of risk accordingly. But I find it difficult to believe that nothing went wrong in these situations. Far more likely, is that all the things that went wrong haven’t yet been discovered. And while most businesses around the world put their security concerns on hold in 2020 with lockdowns, it’s now 2023 and CIOs are losing sleep over the exponential increase in attack vectors and the sophistication of attacks.?

Damage to Career Trajectory for WFH Staff?

At this point in human evolution, WFH probably causes substantial damage to an employee’s career. Search on the web and there’s endless articles about it.?

It boils down to WFH providing less opportunity for staff to be seen and heard, and build trust relationships with?those who make promotion decisions.??

I had an interesting chat with a team member last night, during an office-based informal pizza session for night-shift staff. There was no agenda to the event – hang out and eat pizza for half an hour, that’s it. I learned interesting things about the team member’s background and why he likes his new job. Those chats are priceless opportunities to build relationships that result in BOTH parties caring more about their mutual investment in each other.?

If that was scheduled as a 1 on 1 video call, I am 100% sure the conversation would not have gone in the direction it did, and built trust in the way that it did. Could you build a remote-system to replace the value of informal interactions like this? Absolutely! But that’s not where we are up to with the evolution of WFH – all we’ve done is keep doing the same thing in a different place, and for relationships, culture and career development, it clearly doesn’t work.?

In time this will become part of standard human knowledge about WFH:?

• that you need to speak up in meetings to get noticed,?
• that you need to proactively schedule 1 on 1s with your managers,?
• That you need to regularly draw attention to your outcomes/output,?
• that you need to find opportunities to tell the story about why and how you are really valuable to the boss and to the organization.?

But this requires both a substantial change to business process, as well as development or improvement of a newly critical employee skillset - “PR of the self” I guess you might call it.??

Right now, what’s usually happening is that those who are seen and heard the most are the ones getting the best career opportunities. And usually that means the more you are in the office, the faster your career builds. This isn’t fair, but it is reality.?

Culture as a Zero Sum Game?

It is wonderful that family culture has in many cases received an uplift due to increased presence at home from not going to an office. But this has come at a severe cost to company culture and reduced engagement with company values and goals. It’s rapidly become seen as a zero sum game where family or personal life is competing with work: for one to win, the other must lose.?

And that’s precisely why Technology Elite is investing so heavily in redefining the workplace.

The challenge as I see it is that business has to step-up and prove that a centralized work environment can deliver more value to staff without competing with family. This necessarily means getting away from the corrosive zero-sum cultural game by delivering NEW kinds of value.?

It is extremely difficult, probably impossible, to recreate a formerly strong workplace culture without physical presence. The default outcome is a decline of company culture.

Companies who were “fully remote” by design well-before COVID have had more practice (and likely more success) at this.?

However, an overwhelming number of businesses struggle to define what their culture even is, so let’s say for the sake of argument that:

"culture" is whatever creates an emotional attachment. ?

In the case of a business, that means culture creates, defines and evolves an emotional attachment to the business, its people, and its vision or goals.

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If a business cannot create an emotional attachment with staff it only interacts with over video email and chats, it is logical those staff members will not care as much about the business. This leads to reduced commitment, reduced alignment, reduced willingness to go beyond the call of duty to fix a problem, and reduced retention of staff.

How do you create an emotional attachment over video? I’m sure you can think of a couple of ideas right; we all had to in recent years. In a decade there will be consulting firms that specialize in this, and no doubt 'remote workforce culture' will be eventually be a core part of an MBA. But right now and for the years ahead, we are all shooting in the dark.?

Employee Onboarding and Ramp Up Has Changed

Starting a new job can be stressful at the best of times. From an employee’s perspective, joining a new company while they are entirely remote from their office is both difficult and disorienting.?

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Technology Elite has always had a compulsory consulting process with our new clients, and part of that process is to help clients understand what it’s going to be like for their new employees starting, and how they can reduce the disorientation and get them up to speed. I give advisory on this to very experienced business managers around the World under the guise of explaining"cultural differences with managing Filipinos". And a lot of the advisory of is cultural, but a good part of it is just trying to help our office-based clients understand how hard it is for remote workers to start a job with their company.?

How do you get someone you’ve never met to truly care about the things you care about? How do you fill in the enormous gap that exists when there is no body language input, no overheard conversations, limited ways to use your senses to understand the environment... no “vibe” ??

The unfortunate outcome is that although this gap is 100% the responsibility of management to fill,?often?employees are blamed for many things that result from this gap, including inadequate ramp up speed and inappropriate decision-making.?

A manager may respond by saying that being able to adapt quickly is a valuable and desirable skill they want all employees to have so it’s OK that many don’t make the cut. I totally agree that adaptability is a valuable talent and success-driver. But perhaps many managers don’t realize that those highly adaptable folks are

firstly in the minority, and

secondly are in massive demand – both of which are due to the global changes over the past 3 years. So I ask the opposite question – sure I want adaptable staff, but when the world is their oyster, why would they want me??

For most businesses, scalability in business comes down to producing consistent quality without perfect people.?So if high adaptablility is a new operational requirement, then scalability just got even harder than it was before.

Productive WFH Environments??

Productivity at home is utterly unpredictable from a recruitment perspective. It’s already very difficult to predict in office-based roles. And it’s an order of magnitude more difficult again in a developing nation.?

Yes, you can ask WFH questions like what room the computer is in, what’s the internet speed and how many people live in the house. But?are you going to inspect their answers by counting pillows or dirty dishes? Moreover, how will you know when the situation changes??

If you survey people who aren’t worried about losing their WFH job or desperate to protect the WFH concept, you will find that many people cannot be highly productive when there are distractions (like family matters, bed, food, TV, neighbors, unexpected noises). I would count myself amongst them – I'm simply not as productive at home most of the time.?

Of course, there are valid arguments that there are too many disturbances and distractions in the office as well, but trading one for the other is not a solution. There are endless articles about how working from home improves productivity, but I would assume they are written by people who have (or claim to have) a constantly quiet productive workspace at home which the vast majority of people simply do not have.?In the modern world of constant distractions, focus is a superpower.

In places like the Philippines, the WFH conditions can also rapidly change through no fault of the employee. If someone in the extended family loses their job or their home is damaged in a typhoon, your team member could transition overnight from having 4?people in their home to having 10 people in their home, indefinitely. You can complain all you want about the productivity drop, but if you compete with family you will lose every time.?

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Output-based Management and Productivity?

For all the reasons discussed (most of which are not their fault), working from home frequently results in the employee becoming less significant to an employer, particularly where they are compared to office-based staff. For example, the office norm is time-based billing or tracking, which is unsuitable for WFH because of the lack of control over the environment hour to hour, and ultimately inferior to output based billing.?

Most organizations have some version of tracking time against tasks and so it seems that before WFH can become the new workplace default, we need to drop the concept of being paid for eight hours of solid productive work. This is an industrial-era factory worker concept, which may be fine for physical labor but isn’t optimal for drafting contracts or programming software.?

Most humans doing knowledge-based work such as reading, analyzing and producing, cannot be productive for eight hours per day every day. When the standards of factory work were originally adapted for office workers, most office roles were narrow and repetitive. These days most office roles are much more complex, with many more forms and sources of communication. Studies show anywhere between four to six hours is a productive window for work.?

I was speaking recently to the CEO of a small company who was hired to improve efficiency. He did line by line reviews of work output of every single person in the company – a company that had changed permanently to WFH during the pandemic. In some cases he said he had to learn completely different skillsets to even understand what he was reading. (An impressive effort I think).?

What he found was that most of the employees who were perceived as essential to the organization were actually doing very little output. They had built their reputation over many years (presumably they had done impressive things at some point), but were now in a very comfortable position where everyone believed they were important. They were no longer working productively and shifting to WFH exacerbated that situation.?

The managers were afraid to fire them because they figured they were essential (“key man risk”), and they weren’t confident of hiring good remote replacements, or properly supervising the performance of new employees until they could trust them with the quality and quantity of their output.?

If a company can switch from time-based supervision/management to output-based management, then they perhaps have a shot at a productive dispersed workforce. This is harder than it seems, and isn’t the same thing as “flexible hours”. Spending any part of a 24 hour window logging eight hours per day into the ticketing / billing / job system, instead of spending eight straight hours doing it, is merely time-based supervision with a flexible shift and is not output-based management.?

Output-based management means logging a certain amount of output or value into the work system, regardless of how long it takes. The output contains the value for the business, therefore the output is what the salaried person is paid to do. This means a senior will do the same job faster than a junior, which is partly why the senior is paid more. In this ultimate WFH situation, the smartest employees could easily have two or three ‘full time’ equivalent jobs because they are three times as productive as the average person.?

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Multiple WFH Jobs: Gaming the System?

Which brings me to my next point. Rapidly increasing evidence indicates that a percentage of WFH employees are gaming the system and working two or three jobs at the same time.?

This is happening all around the world right now. There are websites, forums and chat groups dedicated to discussing how to scam one or more employers by pretending to work full time for multiple jobs at once.?

A small number of the people doing this are the ones mentioned above, who manage super-human levels of productivity. For those people, the eight hour ‘factory’ workday has been stifling their capabilities for a long time, and they really are delivering the value that each of their jobs now pays them for.?

However, I think it’s fair to say that very few people are churning out 12+ hours of productive work per day. And of course staff know whether their?employee’s ability to track output is far worse when staff are not in the office.?

In industries like IT, where demand for staff is high, staff who are accused of working for multiple employers at the same time, and having terrible output, may be fired from one job yet go do the same or similar with another employer. This is not a radical statement – its already proven.

Equifax hit the headlines in October 2022 for firing 2.4% of their staff for deliberately working two jobs in the same time window, and claiming two full time salaries. ?

Presumably they only caught the 2.4% who weren’t savvy enough to hide it properly. It’s not unreasonable to assume there are many others doing the same thing more cleverly.??

Unemployment is at record lows, suggesting that many untrustworthy people are being hired since logically not everyone is trustworthy. I don’t pretend to know the percentage of unethical people in the workforce who are happy to claim a salary without caring about their output. Nor do I pretend to know the number of angry?employees who have an axe to grind with their employer, but we’ve heard a lot about “quiet quitting”?which is where employees have given up entirely on the relationship with their employer but are still employed there. So it’s fair to say that such staff (regardless of fault) no longer care about the value they offer to their employer.?

What is the percentage of the office workforce is already doing this?

Five percent? Ten percent? Whatever it is, current low unemployment levels in some industries mean that you’re already employing some of these people – onshore and offshore.?

How is that going to work out when you have them working from home, no longer influenced by the more positive behavior of your top performers? And you're no longer able to notice that they are angry with their manager or your company for some reason??

Employees that are working from?home with two or three jobs at once, likely assume that they’ll be caught and fired from time to time, but as long as they protect their resume in some logical ways, they can keep the game going just by choosing employers who aren’t good at measuring WFH productivity.??

So where to next?

So this might all sound a little depressing, but I'm just painting the picture for what I feel is an inadequate status quo with the WFH debate.

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In Part 2 of this article we will look at the cost-benefit arguments of WFH and WFO, and in Part 3 I'll present what I think we are headed and how to re-frame the debate entirely.?