Who Wants Change?

I've never actually worked in an office for more than a couple of months when I was really young. I've always worked from home and loved the flexibility of it. No commute. No one watching me work. No distractions. No one telling me what to do. I could always get so much more done in a day than people inside companies.

All the research (McKinsey - see below) is demonstrating how it's much better for companies to let employees work from wherever they want, rather than force them back to the office. But even the uncertainty about a company's intentions causes employees to be anxious and stressed. The numbers show very clearly that giving people the freedom to work wherever they want is highly beneficial both professionally and financially.

The results of all these surveys are so clear, you would think that the whole corporate world would be moving in this direction of remote work. But that's not what's happening. Actually the exact opposite is happening.

The results of all these surveys are so clear, you would think that the whole corporate world would be moving in this direction of remote work. But that's not what's happening. Actually the exact opposite is happening. Managers are trying to get everyone back to the office. But the problem they didn't anticipate is that people are very different now. They may have been numb to their emotions before but since we all got a huge boost of EQ over the last two years, now we are aware of how we feel. And we feel very comfortable speaking about our emotions, as you'll see by the following examples.

Being Back in the Office is Draining

I'm super impressed by this high level executive at Nike who is always very real in her posts, not trying to smooth over tough situations - Samantha tells it like it is. So refreshing and says so much about the brand she represents. Here is her latest on being back in the office -

Samantha (Redmond) Unrau, Global Director of Social Media Engagement Ops @Nike: |"I made it two days back in the office. And on the third day I had to take PTO. I was exhausted - and my introverted soul was starting to wither. That was a lot of people, literally thousands of them. I generally enjoy people. They can be pretty cool. But being surrounded by them for that long was A LOT to absorb. Even when I wasn't actively engaging with someone, in a meeting, or at the cafe, I couldn't seem to find a moment of real stillness to recoup. The open floor plan was hard. I was distracted by, well, everything. People talking. People walking. There was a lot more stimuli than I have had to process in years. And then the immediate commute home and diving right into parenting young children left me with no chance to decompress until it was time to go to bed and do it all again the next day. I am convinced that when office work was a regular thing, I was just in a constant state of low-key overstimulation and had nothing to compare it to. To make office work successful this time around, we are going to need to reimagine strategies for not just flexibility, but energy conservation and recuperation for us people who love people, and also are drained by being around them 24/7."

Her colleague Stephen Carter from Nike posted a similar message: "I’ve been hit with a million different emotions in returning to our home turf. I love it. And also it’s tiring. Today, 3 of my in person meetings were moved to Zoom, which left me with a “why are we back here?” vibe. But then I realized how unique the Nike campus is. And so I grabbed a cup of coffee, snagged a piece of 50th anniversary birthday cake, and kept at it. Because we can’t all be psyched all the time. Sometimes we have to force it with cake and coffee." I commented that cake and coffee are a great way to "compensate" the ego for all the human connection going on that the ego resists.

My Commentary - Let People Do Whatever Works Best for Them

So even though all the fancy reports indicate very clearly that many people prefer to be remote, corporate is trying to lure them back with perks and also for in person meetings. Those meetings often turn into Zoom meetings to include people who are not in the office. So what's the point of coming to the office??

The Real Problem

What am I always talking about? The human ego. The ego hates change. Even if you tell it how much it's going to benefit from the change - at the end of the day people are not willing to change their ways. This is how we've always done things and that's what we'll continue to do.

So before we try to change anything, we need to fully understand what we're dealing with. These findings are no longer theoretical and contrived like they were in 2017. Now we have live and very comprehensive data about what's going on. So you would think we would take this information to heart and implement suitable changes. But no - everyone's still trying to sugar-coat commuting for hours to the office for Zoom meetings you could have done from anywhere.

To everyone dealing with these issues - we're really missing something very significant in these discussions - change is hard. It's not just about the money, the conditions or the perks.

We may know all this on some level but it's human nature to default to what we're used to. We're going to have to apply new thinking using a very powerful method that is the only thing in the world capable of overriding the egoistic system we have in place. But I can already tell you that it will be all uphill, because the ego will resist that too. We're going to have to consciously agree to the process together. That's what the new era is all about.

Some McKinsey Highlights -

Staying home.?In describing the hybrid model of the future, more than half of government and corporate workers report that they would like to work from home at least three days a week once the pandemic is over. Across geographies, US employees are the most interested in having access to remote work, with nearly a third saying they would like to work remotely full time.

Communication breakdown.?Valuable as a detailed vision for postpandemic work might be to employees, 40 percent of them say they’ve yet to hear about?any?vision from their organizations, and another 28 percent say that what they’ve heard remains vague.

[McKinsey research authors: Andrea Alexander?is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Houston office.?Aaron De Smet?is a senior partner in the New Jersey office.?Meredith Langstaff?is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office, where?Dan Ravid?is a fellow, research and knowledge.]