What happened to WFH? Companies, even (or especially!) Big Tech, are asking (or demanding!) that staff report to the office full-time! What happened? Why is everyone back to commuting?
Control freakery by insecure managers could be part of it; but that feels too easy a target. Some evidence that home-workers put in fewer hours and are less productive is emerging but surely that can only be measured for very repetitive jobs. What is going on?
What makes this question perplexing is the decades-long trend towards people spending their whole day in online meetings, even when in the office! Surely they would be more productive if they didn’t have to commute.
The answer is human relationships of course. We are waking up to a fact that should have been obvious, but obviously wasn’t; that a formal organization chart doesn’t remotely describe what an organisaton is or what it does. A company operates more like a gossipy society than a reporting hierarchy. It’s a society in which ideas are exchanged, bonds are created, skills are observed and learned, fears are shared, fantastic visions are indulged, and loyalties are developed. This never happens in formal meetings (online or otherwise).
This, however, raises a bigger question. Having made the startling discovery from our WFH experiences, that the true value of a common workplace is its chaotic interconnections, not the cost-efficiency of its workstations, what are we doing to improve the office environment? Shouldn’t we use our new knowledge to encourage the messiness that is real life and relationships? If not, don’t we risk a situation where we only go into work for those tedious, formal meetings? And how can we bring some of those messy connections into necessarily remote relationships that can only be on-line?
A SWISSUES open, online Meeting will address these and other questions on WFH at 17:00 CET on Thursday 21st November. Sixty minutes; no formal presentations; no recording or minutes; everyone may say what they want.
Register at: https://www.linkedin.com/events/workingfromhome-wfh7256763415468163072/
See you there
Bill Young