Why the future of work should be a strategic decision.

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell described how endemic change is often prompted by “the few”; outlier individuals who take a contrarian view, then others follow, initially in small numbers, before growing into a stampede.?? I wondered this week if we had seen that ‘tipping point’ in the future of work.? For the past four years, the likely mode and pattern of work has been all about flexibility, hybrid and remote working, freedom from the commute and the probable demise of the office.

But suddenly, an influential, well-connected voice offered a contrarian view, and it sounded like a foghorn in the hybrid-working mist.? Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon announced that staff must return to the office five days a week from the start of next year.? His memo sent to hundreds of thousands of employees around the world was clear in its rationale:

The advantages of being together in the office are significant, and the last 15 months? has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.? We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective.

?Amazon’s move is one of the starkest corporate reversals of remote working since Elon Musk’s acerbic memo, sent to Twitter employees in November 2022, mandating “hardcore” in-office attendance, or dismissal.

?There were already signs though of a subtle shift elsewhere.? Fiona Cicconi, Google’s chief people officer, said last year: “There’s just no substitute for coming together in person” and three-days a week office attendance was required.? Some professional services firms and banks have recently rowed back from the post-pandemic “you can work from home forever” approach, with PWC withdrawing its loose hybrid rules, introducing location data-monitoring, and ending the idea that attendance rules should be “open to interpretation”. The quote from their Managing Partner, Laura Hinton, reads like an early draft of Jassy’s memo:

Our business thrives on strong relationships — and those are almost always more easily built and sustained face-to-face. By being physically together, we can offer our clients a differentiated experience and create the positive learning and coaching environment that is key to our success.

?The backlash to Amazon’s approach came quickly in the mainstream media, on social media, and amongst work from home advocates.? With some bizarre synchronicity, on the same day that Amazon made its announcement, the UK Government announced a range of employment measures, aimed at addressing low-productivity and growth by encouraging flexibility and making it a legal entitlement.??

While Jassy wanted employees to feel “joined at the hip with your teammates”, Jonathan Reynolds, the UK Business Secretary, claimed that flexible working boosts productivity and that employers should avoid creating a “culture of presenteeism”.? He said efforts to encourage workers back into the office were “bizarre” and suggested that Amazon’s approach was wrong and was “ignoring the evidence” of the boost to productivity created by working from home.

Which approach is right?

Deciding which approach is right has become a kind of productivity culture-war battle.? Do companies go back to the pattern of the past, or continue to allow employees to dial it in from the suburbs??

Understandably, given our experience since 2020, everyone now wants to define their own work pattern and indeed, many of us are lucky to do so.? Some are fiercely protective of the flexibility afforded by firms in the past few years.? Sho Dewan, CEO & Founder @workhap reacted to Amazon’s move:

And I’ll tell you upfront… it doesn’t look great. Because once other companies see another do it, it’s gonna inspire them to follow suit.

Nick Bloom at Stanford, a Linked-in Top Voice and WFH expert said he suspected Amazon’s approach would not change a great deal (a “storm in a teacup”) in work-form home rates in the US, though Amazon risked many of its talented staff quitting.?

The future of work is unlikely thought to be determined by legislators, academics, and business commentators, as the best solutions will come through the real-world experience and dialogue between the two stakeholders who matter most.?? Octavius Black, Chairman of Mind Gym, put it perfectly: “employees and employers need to find a way that works.”?

The last five years has seen an extraordinary liberalisation of work.? The pandemic took a wrecking ball to the old office-based work model, but no real strategic thinking was applied to what that might mean, or the unintended consequences for organisations and individuals.?

Today, being apart from one another (at work) has never been more popular.? For individuals the flexibility, and well-being upside and time saved from the hassle of a commute is hard to argue with, but then even in that there are unintended consequences to working remotely – something that has been described elsewhere as an emerging? “epidemic of loneliness” amongst remote workers, particularly young men, “scrolling alone” at home.

?Strategy is about discernible choices

The key to any successful strategy is to make discernible choices from amongst many options and then to focus your people and resources on pursuing a chosen route.? Professor Costas Markides goes further and argues that you also need also to be explicit about those choices and the options you have decided not to pursue. Markides describes this discernment as hugely difficult:

There are no simple solutions, formulas or shortcuts for developing your strategy. It’s about making judgement calls as you go along and treating strategic decision-making as an art.

This discernment was once described to me as the three C’s – clarity, consistency and focus.? But making these choices (clarity) is enormously hard. Consistency takes nerve, when the temptation will be to pivot, change course and diversify from the core proposition.? Focus is hardest of all as the swings and arrows of markets, competitors, new entrants and external disruption abound.? But if you succeed in aligning the entire organisation around these clear strategic priorities, then a strong, distinct market and competitive advantage can follow.? The creation of cohesion and unanimity around clear goals amongst employees is what gives some firms an organisational advantage.

Careful discernment and strategic thinking should be applied to determining a working pattern and mode of work that best realises that strategy.? Work from home advocates too often use meaningless missives such as “people should work wherever they feel more productive”, but that is not a strategic choice on the part of the firm.? As a blanket policy it is an exercise is obviating responsibility – passing decision making from the firm to the individual.

Like a Rubrik’s Cube, even amongst a firm with a few hundred employees, there are many millions of potential patterns and configurations of work, each individually devised.? We expect people managers to be master practitioners at three-dimensional chess - moving people, projects and timelines asynchronously across different realities.

The work from home advocates argue that this chaos is liberating and lifts morale, and the focus should be wholly on individual “outputs”.? But the organisational outcomes are almost imperceptible or are denuded by the added complexity of trying to aggregate them.

The future of work is strategic

Since so much cost, investment, resources, management time and energy are required to create a productive working environment, surely all CEOs should take a fundamentally strategic approach to deciding their ideal model and optimal design??? It seems that Jassy and his team at Amazon have taken the time and done just that.? In fact, the return-to-work decision was shared alongside a whole series of other initiatives aimed at reducing bureaucracy and creating efficiency, to serve faster decision-making, through deeper collaboration and creating shared commitment. Elsewhere I have called this "creating glue". Other CEO’s and their leadership teams may well determine they need a very different working model, better adapted to achieve similar goals. But they should be clear on the choices made, and the options rejected.

A firm’s working approach has a better chance of success when it is formed as a strategic decision, and not just some random coincidence of individual needs and preferences.? The “genie” of hybrid and remote working is not going to go away, and few firms are likely to be as strict as Amazon, at least until they see how their bold move plays out. But for the future of work to work better, all firms should heed their example and decide upon a more strategic approach.

?JPD

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