Yet Another Opinion about Back to Office

With vaccination rates up and spring in full swing, the topic every day on LinkedIn news seems to revolve around whether people are going back to the office. As someone who has worked in office, flex, and remote companies, as well as the fun opportunity to design a lot of office space, my opinion is just another drop in the bucket. Stay awhile and listen to my belief that 1. increased productivity is here to stay, 2. managers that increase remote friction will find it hard to compete with those who reduce it, and 3. smooth access to a national/global skill market builds the perspective diversity needed to solve hard problems.

Of course, not everyone can enjoy the benefits of remote work. It's an enormous privilege to be able to work and deliver value through a digital medium. On top of that, there is the additional privilege of safe and reconfigurable space.

Choosing how and where to work is more productive

If you watched the WeWork Hulu documentary or Madmen, then you have a sense of what kind of person is able to have their work context constructed around their productive nature. In an office, it is always the few, never everyone. No matter the amount of money spent on workplace strategy or customized furniture, the office is never a place that can never fully cater to the whims of individual productivity. Go through any office planning exercise and it's full of "work styles" and "zones", each a way to constrain our individuality into bubble diagrams.

The home office, no matter how basic, is always more customizable for the individual. Your desk, chair, or monitor only has to fit your productivity rather than some office aesthetic or vendor. We've long known that average does not mean one size fits all, then why are we shocked that unitized workstations aren't universally loved.

Just like wearing shoes that fit, a tool that fits you eases you into a productive flow. In knowledge work, the tool happens to be the entire work context. Having control over context is just the start to discovering our productive potential. Remote work happens to naturally give more context control to the individual. Many companies are already bracing for workers refusing to return to a less productive context. The companies who can recruit and enable the newfound more productive talent will gain a significant advantage over those who are scrambling to cover their churn.

Time to hire managers that can manage remote teams

I speculate that the companies that have had an easier time staying in sync through the pandemic had managers who are well adapted to aligning their team no matter where they are. Managing teams is not easy, managing them without actively seeing what they are doing is harder. However, the latter is exactly how modern high-performing managers operate. Managers are pushed to be leaders and process becomes the cultural norm.

When a coach gets ejected from a game, the players don't forget how to play. In the Two-factor theory, motivation and hygiene factors (maintenance factors such as status, security, salary, etc. including office space) do not exist on the same axis. A productive work context is an office hygiene factor, and likely has little long-term effects on motivating employees. Managers big and small can scapegoat remote work for lack of engagement or productivity all they want, but their teams know what is real.

Most importantly, in-person management doesn't scale. Rather than playing a massive multi-layered game of telephone, remote-ready managers tap into the flow of information to connect and direct. As the company and operating complexity increases, these managers are those who can find insight into metrics and make responsive adjustments. As their team grows to be national and global, it becomes easy to operate asynchronously on leading indicators rather than disrupt everyone's sleep schedules on weekly 4-hour global sync meetings.

Perspective diversity is an undervalued asset

The pandemic year was also a wake-up call on just how thick the walls of our echo chambers are. As mixed as modern societies are, our political views, ideas, and cultural norms are still local. One of the most rewarding parts of working in a global company is the richness of perspective you have access to.

However, by the time an office gets global, regional office cultures are mostly established. The interactions are more hub to hub rather than individual to individual. Captain East Coast and Captain West Coast need to have a quarterly executive retreat in Aspen to align their two teams.

Successful remote companies prove that it is possible to unite teams through their shared work and passion rather than location. With more and more talented people choosing to pick their location of work, why not lean into the diversity that enables? Once you remove the location requirement, the available pool of diverse talent widens and deepens.

This is not workplace strategy advice

Every company and workplace is different. What we know is that no matter what happens, our workplaces won't just "go back to normal". Even before the pandemic, companies have been looking more closely at their office expenditures. In the potential post-pandemic world, companies will absolutely have to. If overspending on space and custom millwork doesn't convince people to come back, maybe the resources are better spent on transforming the culture. It's always an unnecessary cost on the environment when capital improvements result in underutilized space.