By I WAS INTO REMOTE work long before anyone called it that. But it took me some time before I had a job suited for it.
Back then I was a Vice President at the much maligned, ahead of its time Pets.com — it was an early version of Chewy despite what Chewy’s former CEO says — I was working at the main office in San Francisco while my family stayed behind in Southern California. When I asked the CEO to let me work back home on Fridays and the occasional Monday, she shot me down.
I understood her reasoning — she felt there was constant change at a startup, and that senior execs needed to personally be on hand all the time — but I was disappointed because I know I could have made it work.
Five years later when I was Editor of a well-known HR & talent management magazine, I asked the Publisher about working from home on occasion. Bad question, because he was a line of sight manager who needed to have everyone on the Editorial staff where he could see them. His answer was something like, “not on my watch.”
Remote policies before the lockdown
Of course, there was another senior manager who had an office right next to the publisher who was frequently not around, and if you asked the Publisher about it, he simply said, “Bill had some personal things going on so he’s working from home today.”
That’s how a great many hybrid or remote policies worked before the big lockdown. They were based on whim, old-school managerial thinking, or a fear that if they allowed somebody to do it that EVERYBODY would want to do it.
For a great many reasons, they just couldn’t handle that.
That all changed, of course, when the lockdown came and companies with office-based white collar workers had to grudgingly agree to let people work remotely from home.
That was then, of course, and now those same companies want people back in the office and have been pushing pretty hard to make it happen.
Diminishing returns of RTO policies
I’ve resisted writing too much about this because there has been so much grousing about it everywhere else, but I got pulled in last week with a BBC story titled The diminishing returns of in-office mandates. Here’s the heart of it:
“An oft-cited reason for in-person work mandates is that they help drive connection among a team. As more employers push for four and five days in the office, rhetoric has focused on the importance of collaboration and a sense of belonging that some leaders believe can only be fostered in a shared physical environment.
Yet some data shows the number of days people attend the office doesn’t directly correlate to that sense of connection. In fact, there’s only a 1% difference in the number of employees who say they feel connected to their organization working four or five days a week as compared to those working two or three days on site. That slim leading edge went to the latter group, at 60%, according to a global survey of 1,115 employees by London-based workplace insights firm Leesman, seen by the BBC.
‘There just doesn’t seem to be huge gains from the number of days people are in the office,’ says Allison English, deputy CEO of Leesman. ‘It’s about the quality, not quantity, of time that matters. In fact, we see that the greater the number of in-person days, the less the worker is generally satisfied with work-life balance, impacting engagement and their connection to the organization.’ “
Other stories this week dig into the remote or hybrid, in person or not, workforce debate as well:
- Where you work matters less than who you work for in Fortune used data from its Best Workplaces ranking to make the point that “although employees at a typical U.S. workplace benefit from remote work, that doesn’t make those companies great workplaces. What does? The level of trust employees have in their leaders and colleagues.“
- 1 in 4 executives say they hoped for turnover with return-to-work policies in HRDive wrote about a new HRBamboo survey of return-to-office sentiment that found that “25% of C-suite and VP executives and 18% of HR professionals said they hoped for voluntary turnover with RTO (return to office) policies.” It also noted that “About 42% of employees said they feel like they show up at the office solely for the purpose of being seen by managers and bosses.”
- Leaders Need to Reframe the Return-to-Office Conversation in the Harvard Business Review made the case that, “Leaders must stop trying to push employees into the office against their will and focus instead on making the office an energizing environment where employees want to be.”
A push for old-fashioned managerial control?
HERE’S MY TAKE: Even though I have worked remotely for multiple companies since 2010, I still have reservations about working at home instead of an office.
In my experience, organizations benefit when everyone can collaborate in person, and I can point to a number of times where a solution to a nagging workplace issue was solved when people were connecting about something else.
There is a well-known influencer in the HR and talent management arena who has told me that maybe I’m focusing on things that really weren’t as good as I remember them.
That’s always a possibility, but I have decades of people management experience that tells me otherwise.
Although there are lots of benefits when it comes to remote work, I really believe that a well managed hybrid schedule is the best of both worlds.
My friend Lance Haun has written about this a lot, and a few months ago he made a pretty compelling argument in The diminishing returns of in-office mandates. He wrote:
“After I got back from a visit to our HQ in Texas, I had a conversation with a friend about the trip. We were talking about how disruptive it can be to transition from home to a very busy and energized office setting. …
She brought it up because her work is considering going from a hybrid environment to five days in the office every week. As is almost always the case, it isn’t driven by employee demands but by bosses who want to see people in an office every day working, feeling like this will be the thing that makes the difference in driving better results. Of course, nearly every survey of its type has shown that, while bosses want everyone back in the office, they themselves still want to remotely work or at least have hybrid flexibility.
Who could blame them? That sort of flexibility is nice. It would sure be nice if it wasn’t just available to bosses, though. …
It all seemed settled, didn’t it? Companies made grandiose promises about remote work forever, but as soon as things got a little more difficult to accomplish (whether or not that was reality), it was back to the office on a hybrid basis. A compromise, but one that might last.
Now, we’re still not sure. … It’s hard to not feel like this is a push for some old-fashioned managerial control. …”
Have a thought on remote, hybrid, on in-office work? I would love for you to leave me a comment here!
Other trends and insights
- Lars Schmidt on the unseen consequences of the Great Resignation’s hiring frenzy (From FastCompany.com)
- Who Really Benefits From the Great Remote-Work Experiment? (From TheAtlantic.com)
- Airbnb’s CEO uses this simple solution to combat loneliness in the workplace: “It’s a brilliant idea” (From CNBC.com)
- Corporate diversity programs could be headed toward the Supreme Court (From Axios.com)
- U.S. Supreme Court sides with Starbucks over fired pro-union workers (From Reuters.com)
- New Polls Suggest Big-Company CEOs Rethinking Digital Regulation (From ChiefExecutive.net)
- Wells Fargo fired employees for pretending to do work (From Quartz.com)
- The Quiet Phasing Out of Fridays at Work (From Forbes.com)
And your latest dose of AI news …
- Apple jumps into the AI arms race with OpenAI deal (From WashingtonPost.com)
- Five things Gen Z should do to prepare for AI in the workplace (From FastCompany.com)
- In the AI arms race, Big Tech keeps shooting itself in the foot and having to roll back flashy releases (From BusinessInsider.com)
- A new study looks at AI’s political leanings (From TechCrunch.com)
- Report finds that As AI skill demands rise, employers must figure out what they actually need (From HRDive.com)
- Apple Proved That AI is a Feature, not a Product (From FastCompany.com)
- What will a robot make of your résumé? The bias problem with using AI in job recruitment (From TheConversation.com)
- Generative AI job postings increase tenfold in the past year (From FastCompany.com)
ALSO: Managers take note; this Fast Company story has a headline that just make you want to read it — You’re a new leader and you’ve already pissed off your team. Here’s how to win them back.
Observation of the week
“My big admonition to all CEOs … is to pause. There is no rush to embrace artificial intelligence. In fact, one might reasonably conclude if you did the analysis that the technology is not actually ready for primetime and applying it into productivity use cases in corporations may in fact lead to perverse outcomes, similar to what we’ve seen with other internet technologies. So I would just encourage everybody to recognize not only is this battle not over, we’re just barely joining it.”
— From longtime Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee in Chief Executive magazine
Loyal Readers: I’ve been compiling this weekly wrap-up for over 20 years — from Workforce.com to TLNT.com to Fuel50 and now here at The Skeptical Guy. I’d appreciate knowing what you think, so email comments to me at johnhollon@yahoo.com.
