Serendipitous Collisions are Bullshit
The post-pandemic discussion around return-to-work is getting pretty annoying. The benefits of working from home (for those lucky enough to work roles in industries that have the opportunity to) are well known by most people at this point. But businesses are still fixated on two main positions. The first is the “forever remote” businesses where everyone will stay remote forever. The second, are the businesses that are counting down the day to when they can get everyone back in the office. I keep finding issues with the rationale (aka excuses) the latter keep using. Rather than admit to their fear of losing control, they toss out these complaints:
“But people won’t hear each other’s calls or conversations which spur dialogue.” — That’s not serendipity, it's eavesdropping. If it’s business-related, employees should be comfortable dropping that information into a CRM to document what they talked about (something they should be doing anyway), or dropping it into a social tool like Teams or Slack with the interesting thing they learned or questions that they have. Saying this means either they’re scared that people won’t do it (that’s a hiring or leadership problem) or that putting info into systems somehow puts you at risk of espionage (that’s a psychological problem). All too often, those eavesdropped calls are not work-related. If you’ve ever had to take a call about a medical issue in front of a room of your peers, you know what I’m talking about.
“But I’ll miss a chance to see someone that will remind me to email them.” — Seriously? That’s not a benefit of being in the office, that’s a consequence of poor task management. Have something to do? Put it on a list and work through it. Manage your shit. If this is something that happens a lot, it’s another hiring problem.
“But the culture will suffer if we’re not able to be together.” — Culture permeates space. You don’t have to be in the same geo to build a culture that people respond to. Unless you’re building a really weak culture that stipulates extraneous regimented processes in meetings or mandatory happy hours… but those aren’t the kinds of cultures that most people respond to anyway. This is a far bigger problem than remote vs on-site.
“How do we train new team members if they can’t sit in the backpack of seasoned people and watch how work gets done.” — The concern here is that work being done isn’t being done the same way — not that it’s observable. Doing it the way they’ve always done is easy, just shadow the veteran. Go to meetings, watch them input, talk through how they think. But in a Zoom world, forget about it. Except, actually, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to build into an onboarding program does it? It’s not harder, it’s just different.
“We’re a collaborative business, and it’s important for us to be together.” — Voice, video, microblogs, digital whiteboards, and about a million other software companies would like to show you their solutions for collaborating. Everything you whiteboard in person ends up digitized anyway (hopefully), soooo how about just starting there?
“There’s an energy of being together.” Maybe true. But this one is entirely contingent on someone’s intro vs extrovert balance. What extroverts feel as an energy source, introverts feel as the opposite.
“Businesses have made people come back to work and they haven’t lost staff.” — Yet. The job market is nutty right now. Once many of those people get over the newness of being back in the office, they’ll start to judge their job differently. And then, like a diseased tree collapsing, they’ll look elsewhere. It won’t be a single-factor decision. Finding a job never is, but just because people haven’t looked around after a few months of being back, doesn’t mean they won’t go back to yearning for the alternative.
“It’s really hard to be the person on the phone when everyone else is in the room.” — This one is painfully true, but again, it’s not a problem with being remote. The disadvantage the remote person has should be treated as an accessibility issue and leadership should enable changes to the meeting structure, format, etc. that make it fully accessible for everyone. This often manifests in better meetings overall as well, e.g. less small talk, less loss of focus, more decisions, etc.
On and on the excuses go, but I’d applaud the leader that just comes out and gives the real reasons.
· We hire poorly and must look over employees’ shoulders.
· We stupidly over-invested in real-estate not paying attention to where the market was going and now, we must justify our location by putting butts in seats.
· Our workforce management practices are pathetic and we don’t know how to keep track of who does what without being in person and seeing what looks like people doing actual work, even if they are just pretending and the people that are doing the best work are already done and seem to be working less. We’ll never know, and we don’t really care to fix it.
· We don’t have time to train people on technology and thoroughness.
· Our leaders aren’t great at building actual culture, they just manage the widgets getting made.
· Et cetera.
There may be specific roles that require people to be on-site. There may be people who still would rather work on-site. All of that is fine. But to pretend that people need to be face-to-face just because scared you’ve lost some of your power, or because you haven’t figured out how to make business work is weak-sauce.
