Shout To The Top
Living In A Box
The conversation about the future of the office continues. I say conversation, on the one side we have a rich and interesting exploration of the possibilities. On the other side we have the vested interests putting out articles about how not going to the office will damage your career, doom you to a life of poverty, give you cancer and consign you to the seven circles of hell. It’s like debating with a bunch of apes who respond to your arguments by flinging their poo at you.
The fixation on the office is understandable, it’s the most obvious aspect of change and it’s come as a bit of a shock (especially to the suited apes who make money from them). However, it’s a transitory issue and, once the change has worked its way through, we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.
It’s really about how we work, not where. In fact, it’s really about how we live.
That’s why it’s so important. For too long we have allowed work to define our lives, largely to our detriment. It has constrained our choices of where we live, how we spend our time, how we develop and grow as people and as communities. It has also damaged us physically, mentally and emotionally.
Now we have a chance to let our lives define our work. OK, it’s not available to everyone, just to those of us that are knowledge workers. But that’s a decent chunk, it’s a start. And if those of us with this privileged opportunity don’t grasp it, what chances have the rest got of improving their workplace experience?
The Way We Were
I keep saying this but what most organisations are grappling with isn’t new. As William Gibson said “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” Some of us have been working differently for decades.
In the 1980s, I had a BBC micro at home that I could connect to the Prestel service to send messages. I could also access our Prestel to Telex server and I can remember having to do so at 1.30 am one morning to reboot the bloody thing. Most of our developers had similar access and could work from home (yes, over dial-up. At 1200 baud) (I apologise to younger readers, for whom this must be baffling. Think of Prestel like a steam-punk version of the internet and Telex like string-powered texting. As for dial-up, you don’t want to know).
I was one of the first people to get a laptop (I had to get special permission), because I was product marketing manager for email services and needed it to use our mail product. When I travelled, I would crawl around hotel room floors looking for the phone socket so I could plug in and get my mail. A screwdriver and crocodile clips were essential ‘road warrior’ kit. It also had its downsides, as instead of spending my evening enjoying the luxuries of the hotel or the delights of San Francisco, I would be reviewing and amending documents that had to be turned around for the next day in the UK.
I was travelling because I was part of a distributed team that spanned London, Ipswich, Washington, SF and Paris. Our asynchronous platform of choice was our email service. I say ‘of choice’ when I really mean ‘only choice’. We worked synchronously through regular get-togethers (hence the trips to SF), phone calls and audio-conferencing (yes, really, and people complain about Teams. Sheesh!).
I spent half my week in London, where my desk was, and the other half in Hemel Hempstead, where I squatted wherever there was a free ethernet connection for my trusty laptop. I spent a lot of the time there in meetings, or wandering around chatting to people and being nosy (er, I mean, relationship building).
BT was a pioneer of distributed working. It was already moving people out of London and establishing satellite offices around the M25. It was not unusual to have teams spanning several locations, working the same way that I had been for some time.
I left BT 25 years ago. Yes, a quarter of a century ago!
The way that I was working then would translate directly onto today’s work environment, only it would be WAY easier. The networks are better (mobile phones! Wifi!), the tech is better, there is a smorgasbord of asynchronous platforms to use and I could work much more effectively.
Maybe my experience is a bit unusual but it’s far from unique. This way of working, whether you call it hybrid, remote, flexible, agile or omni-working, has been around for decades and is quite common in parts of tech, in sales, in academia, in all sorts of places. It’s there if you look for it.
So don’t tell me it’s hard to do, hard to make the change. It’s really not. The examples are there to follow. If you want to.
And if you don’t want to (which is an understandable but, I suggest, an unwise reaction), be honest about it. Don’t say you can’t when you really mean you won’t. And don’t complain when you’ve made yourself redundant, irrelevant or both.
Show Me The Way
What employers are saying is
“You need to come back to the office for collaboration, innovation, relationship building and networking!”
But what they are really saying is
“We want you to come back to the office so you get to spend time that we don’t allocate to you in informal spaces that we don’t acknowledge so that stuff will happen that we don’t understand, recognise or reward because this is essential to the success of our business.”
To their evident surprise, this is proving less than compelling.
(This is the TL:DR version of a post I put on LinkedIN a few weeks ago)
I feel like I need to unpack this a bit because people keep misunderstanding my position as being ‘anti-office’. It’s not. However, if employers are going to ask people to attend the office, they need to have strong, evidence-backed justifications. Right now, they haven’t.
Let’s take innovation. If you say that presence in the office (and especially gathering around the holy water-cooler of inspiration) is central to innovation, then explain how. What’s the process for innovation? What, you don’t have one? So you’re basically leaving it to chance. So people need to come back to the office to play ‘innovation bingo’, right?
OK, so let’s look at collaboration. How does that work? People need to come together and then they collaborate, you say. Have you actually worked in an office lately? Half the time, the person next to you won’t even lend you their stapler.
Having people in the same space does not mean they will collaborate. So what do you do to make it happen? What’s goes on? How do you know it’s happened? What’s the output?
And if you can answer those questions, why is being in an office so critical? Don’t people from different offices collaborate? Or is there some sort of force field around an office that stops collaboration going beyond it, like those ones that lock the wheels of the shopping trolley if you go too far from the store?
Well, relationship building, then, that requires people to meet face-to-face, doesn’t it? When people are in proximity to each other, then they develop relationships. So if they are all in the office, they will develop relationships. If they have the time to talk to each other. And if they are not away from their desks a lot. Or sitting with their headphones on. Or emailing each other from adjoining desks. Or on different teams with little need to interact about work.
The thing is, it has long been assumed these things are reliant on people going to an office. Undoubtedly they happened in an office because everyone was there (actually, quite often they happened down the pub, or over lunch, or at the coffee shop, but that gets conveniently overlooked). But let’s not confuse correlation with causation. Of course they happened in the office (and it’s environs), where else could they happen? That’s the only place people were. But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be other places, and other approaches, that would yield the same outcomes.
In fact, because they would be intentionally created, rather than just left to chance, it’s a pretty good bet they would yield better outcomes.
Lots of people already do all these things without needing ‘an office’ together. Lots of teams within organisations do these things without needing ‘an office’. Lots of organisations (and it’s a growing percentage) do these things without needing ‘an office’. Other ways are not just possible, they are proven.
I’m not against offices. I am against the lazy assertion that offices are essential without the evidence and arguments to back it up.
Offices are not essential. They might be desirable but that’s a different conversation.
Blowing In The Wind
Well, this is a bit of an anger therapy session this week, isn’t it? So let’s crack on.
My original motivation for starting Decrapify Work was my anger and frustration at the unnecessary harm that too many workplaces cause to the people working in them. It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, this way is counter-productive, it inhibits performance and growth. Treating people badly is not just unacceptable, it’s bad for business. It’s not just evil, it’s profoundly stupid.
I still haven’t managed to read all the way through Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book ‘Dying for a Paycheck’ because it makes me too angry. He not only makes clear the consequences of the way we run organisations right now, he not only makes the moral case for change, he makes the business case for change - and still most ‘leaders’ ignore him.
The more I have looked into the issue, the more evidence I have found of the folly of the current orthodox approaches. We are not short of evidence of better ways of running organisations, better ways of treating people. We are not short of ideas, case studies, examples.
We are short of responses. They’re not listening.
So change has to come from elsewhere, from the only place it ever does, from the bottom. Or, more precisely, the middle, those who really make things happen, who actually set the culture for their teams, who try to mitigate the worst of the shit-storm that goes on above them.
The balance of power, for so long tipped in favour of the employers, has began to move the other way. A tight labour market and skill shortages have given employees more options, more choice, more influence. The evidence is that they are using it to change their circumstances for the better, to force change in their organisations or leave if it’s not forthcoming.
I hope this is a sign that the winds of change are gathering strength. It’s about time.