The Where (of Working)
As we start to see a return to the office in a post-COVID era — organizations and leadership play a key role, in terms of how they choose…
As we start to see a return to the office in a theoretically post-COVID era — organizations and leadership play a key role, in terms of how they choose to adapt in terms of setting expectations of when, where, and how people work. This time, people have had a taste of flexibility and trust, now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, can it really go back in?
Pre-COVID, many organizations were focused on consolidation workforce strategies to enable cost reductions and co-location (assuming this was done with that in mind). This rationalizing of workforce provides a way of reducing real estate costs (e.g. from 3 buildings to 1, or even from multiple cities or countries to a lower cost location).
This may have even been referred to as an agile workplace — where people have to book desks in the new offices, they move their belongings to the desk and simply turn up to a generic ‘terminal’ and plug in. There is no longer a sense of belonging for people at a desk, but rather than area. If you are unlucky you might be competing for that corner desk on a regular basis. Feeling at home in the office becomes a little harder if you need to keep booking a desk.
This is one of the appeals of working at your own home office, the comfort you get from your own unique setup.
Whilst that approach had some merit in terms of cost savings and better utilization of real estate it does so at the expense of belonging. It locally optimizes and leads to individuals vying for the best seat or focusing on their preferred days in the office rather than using the office as a place of community where the team all come in on the same day to get the value of human interaction.
In recent years, there has been more tolerance for people being able to work from home and the office (often referred to as hybrid working), the expectation was that working from home was more of a reward for trust and good behavior rather than a right.
If you are building teams and they are geographically distributed, you need to be able to embrace diversity with everything that entails. Perhaps a topic for a future blog.
What is clear, is that if you are all in a specific location and something happens the entire team can be displaced as a result. That doesn’t feel like a theoretical risk any longer.
If we can agree, that having distributed teams can work and even be a positive thing (even if it requires more work to make it successful), we can agree that people require psychological safety from their managers to not only feel trusted but also able to speak up and share concerns without fear of retribution or losing the work from home privileges. There’s little opportunity for watercooler type conversations and serendipitous relationship building so intentional effort is required to establish trust.
Establish a clear view on why and what, the team can learn the how.
A lot of ‘modern’ work (knowledge work), is increasing in complexity and often requires doing something either you or the team have never done before. There are often no best practices for this type of work and if there are it’s questionable if they work in all contexts or just specific ones.
We constantly find ourselves having to learn how to do things for the first time and that is becoming the norm in knowledge work. The job requires learning, experimenting, adapting, and collaborating. We don't have the luxury of months or years, to find out if an approach is wrong, we need to do that in the shorted timespan possible.
We don't have the luxury of each person in the team individually learning the same things, this is where we need to share with the team and collaborate so that we aren’t all starting from zero each time we work on something for the first time. It doesn’t require a knowledge base of best practices but sharing learnings and stories can help — especially if they are failures — we often remember stories of failures far more vividly than positive stories of success. We know this from the stories we tell children that we all still remember vividly today.
Hansel and Gretel — lesson beware of strangers with candy.
We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, with increasingly less time to complete the work. If you are focused and working on one thing at a time, you won't tolerate bad or bureaucratic processes and tools. Filling out that old time sheet application each month is an exercise in frustration.
What they don’t realize is that only comes through focus, clear prioritization, reducing batch size and reducing work in progress. The executives need to change, not just the way teams work.
Agility requires impediments to be addressed, not just identified. Executives can help if they focus on eliminating issues and impediments that are outside of the teams control or escalating them to be solved by the people who can. This gives teams a reason to trust in leadership and is a great sign of servant leaders.
During the pandemic, productivity stayed OK — the research is still accumulating — my thinking is that the systems were so flooded of busy work that people still had enough work to keep them busy. That ensured little to no dip in productivity as people were busy working, but that doesn’t mean they were able to deliver value if they were stuck waiting and starting up new items instead of finishing the existing ones. People are as fast as the systems allows them — the bottleneck is often the system and not an individual.
Healthy, happy people
If I had to speculate, the impact on mental health, anxiety, and work life balance, has been extremely underplayed. Everyone has had some level of fear around potential job loss and therefore, everyone has been on their best behavior to overcompensate but that cannot last.
This seems like a ticking time bomb; organizations are going to have to address it before the employees leave like rats leaving a sinking ship. People have had a taste of trust when working from home, any hard lines imposing of back into the office will quickly result in people changing jobs as a result.
Without adapting the working environment, policy and behavior, organizations risk being impacted by ‘the great resignation’. People have new ways of connecting and building one-to-one relationships in safety. More public calls with many people often result in Zoom fatigue and without effective facilitation and good practices, people can often lose focus or zone out. That is all possible in a physical meeting room too but it is that much harder to detect when remote. We are in a time where you have more options to communicate than ever before. I would recommend learning facilitation skills and techniques to make your meetings more effective. engaging and valuable. The practices of the experienced scrum master can be quite useful.
Organizations have an opportunity to choose how they respond and differentiate their previous approach. How organizations choose to respond, will quite determine how or if future employees will even want to apply for a job in your organization.
If organizations expect people to come back into the office, why don’t the executives consider leading their own offices and sitting with the teams as a sign of solidarity.
This is the opportunity for executives to leave their offices and convert them to meeting rooms or rooms to visualize the work. Other than confidential conversations, the executives should sit with everyone else.
This is a pivotal moment in time, embracing new ways of working, requires more trust and trust runs both ways. ‘Go to the Gemba’ is more important than ever before, executives should consider coming out of their offices and talking to people. Visualizing the work on boards can be powerful in these case but how that works in a distributed / hybrid world is something to put focus on or you end up creating outdated visualizations of the work.
A new opportunity
With the end of COVID in sight, executives are now calling ‘the troops’ back into the office, so that control can be re-stablished. People didn’t really think they could stay working from home for good, did they forget the company they work for never wanted that to happen in the first place?
I recently heard this referred to as COVID-agility to help convey a temporary agility foisted upon the organization — it was simply impossible to control people in such a distributed way. Trust was temporarily established so that business could continue but not thrive. Save the thriving for once things go back to ‘normal’. Only they never will, the trope of ‘the new normal’ makes sense. People have had a taste of how things can be and their tolerance for control is waning.
Unless organizations materially start changing their processes and reducing bureaucracy, people will leave! Be wary of organizations choosing to wear their ‘work ethic’ as a badge of honor.
I’m sure we are all familiar with stories of junior analysts working for companies trying to prove themselves by working 70 hours a week.
Communicating your return to office approach
So now comes the return to office communications — choosing how you word and position the coming back to the office can be both delicate and crucial to set the right tone and expectations. There is value in social interaction, seeing your colleagues face to face and even having experiences with them is where the real value exists.
People are conflicted with the options presented to them — many people moved out of town to a quieter more affordable lifestyle and in many cases a better quality of life. This move has inadvertently created an even longer commute, so there is now considerable effort to make it into the office — in some cases that is an extra 2–3 hours as well as the cost of increasing transport. If that means being packed into a train like sardines — it may not be that appealing.
If you aren’t careful, you risk coming back into the office and sitting at your desk on calls the entire day and never getting the social or physical value, the office environment provides. I’ve personally made this blunder multiple times and ended up finally chatting with some colleagues well past home time as we had both finished our day of calls.
This isn’t sustainable and I don't know that people are as keen to go for work drinks if their commute is now that much longer. Coffee or lunch dates are far more attractive if you can make the time for them.
If you had been at home, you’d already be helping prepare the dinner and spending quality time with your family.
These are exhausting times of uncertainty, listen to your colleagues and be there for each other. Use these times to discuss people’s concerns and challenges as a group or individually but they are important topics to work through. Learning how you and your teams like to interact and communciate is more valueable than ever before. If you haven’t had that discussion — why not give it a try and establish a team working agreement with a timezone overlay of each person so you know when people can interact and by how much.
How to adapt
I recently read the below book from Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby, there are a lot of aspects to consider when teams are forming and working in a distributed manner. There’s some great descriptions of the patterns of teams that are worth looking into as well e.g. co-located (within 30 feet), nebula, cluster etc.
Some videos to watch as well — have fun!