“When are we really going back to the office?” Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, asked his employees. Jassy got to the heart of his concerns in a second question, “Do we need to be working in person together every day to collaborate and invent best?”
Not every leader will ask first and tell later. An executive at a healthcare company wondered how she would approach this discussion with their founder and CEO. She pointed to a room of empty chairs and said to me, “Our CEO feels something is missing when he walks by an empty chair. How do you persuade an emotion?”
Managers want to see productivity with their own eyes. Leaders like to feel the energy of a room. CEOs hate, really hate, walking by an empty chair.
And then there’s Elon Musk. “If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned,” he wrote in an email to Tesla employees.
Remote work. Return to the Office. Hybrid. We are making a mistake by not thinking big enough, not thinking brave enough about the win-win opportunities for companies and individuals. In this article, I’ll summarize what is known and not known — two years into a pandemic — and discuss a way forward.
What Do People Want?
It’s a myth that most office workers want to work from home full-time. In a survey of 24,000 people, 80% said they want to come into an office at least some of the time. Surprisingly, more people prefer to be in the office full time than at home full time (37% vs 20%).
What people want is more control over their lives. 64% said they would consider looking for a new job if required to work full-time in an office.
“Wait for the next recession,” a voice said during a conference call for Chief Human Resources Officers across the Fortune 500. “I think we’ll see a shift in sentiment. More people will be willing to return to the office.”
Sentiment does change with the economy. What’s different this time is the strength of the demand signal. For example, even if sentiment shifts 25 percentage points, a company with a rigid in-office or at-home policy may lose access to 38% to 65% of its talent pool.
The think brave opportunity here is to give people more control over their lives. Doing so creates a competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining talent.
Are People Less Productive at Home?
The unspoken fear is that people will “slack off” if not in an office during work hours. Their concern is not unfounded: You and I can watch TV, start a load of laundry, or take a nap. The more relevant question is whether this creates a net negative or positive for productivity.
The most devoted talent can spend 40 hours in an office and not be productive for 2,400 consecutive minutes. People need attention renewal activities such as breaks, scrolling through social media, or staring into space. 60 to 90 minutes is the natural limit for staying engaged, which amounts to about 6 hours of actual engagement on a typical work day.
The need for attention renewal exists in the office and at home, so the more authentic (and less polite) question is whether managers can trust their team to their jobs. The macroeconomic data suggest yes. Productivity rates have averaged higher since the pandemic.
A clever data extrapolation discovered that employees devoted 35% of their former commute time to job activities and 60% to personal activities such as household chores and child care. The daily commute was not productive or paid time, making that 35% an unequivocal gain for employers.
The think brave opportunity here is to trust teams to do their work from anywhere. Use transparent goal-setting, feedback and scorecards to enable teams to see how they perform.
Will Collaboration Suffer?
A study of Microsoft employees found communication decreased when people worked from home. As shown below, almost every metric went negative.
This study was novel but occurred during the summer of 2020, when we were still figuring things out. In another study, McKinsey found companies were moving “20 to 25 times faster than expected” and “40 times more quickly than they thought possible before the pandemic.”
The skepticism towards collaboration across physical distances can be traced back to our emotional experiences. For example, recent team reunions — after a two-year gap — have been filled with joy, hugs, smiles and laughter. Those moments are special and remind us that in-person connections cannot be entirely replaced. However, that burst of positive energy will not repeat if routine. The way to replicate the energy, albeit at lower amplitude, is through intermittent in-person encounters that sum up to something greater.
The think big opportunity here is to strive for better collaboration beyond a default network. The opportunity is not just about learning to collaborate across physical distances; it’s also about reaching out across teams, time zones, cultures, and working styles.
Is This the Death of Innovation?
In the past 50 years, most Nobel Prizes have been awarded to two or more people who worked together on something meaningful. Seldom did the winners work in the same building or city. Innovation at the highest level has been proven achievable across distances and time zones. And yet there’s a persistent concern about innovation slumping with remote work.
Laboratory experiments conducted across multiple cultures point to idea generation being more difficult over video conferencing, while idea selection is just as effective in a remote context. This insight suggests teams should gather in person for the most creative and intense parts of their work; and not fret over where people work at other times.
Does innovating in person have an intuitive appeal? Yes. Will ideas be missed because people didn’t come together in the flesh? Maybe. Are ideas made possible because more expertise and more diverse perspectives can come together without the friction of physical proximity? Yes, and this is a crucial realization.
The think big opportunity here is to be more innovative than we ever were. Achieving this takes the right mix of hearts, hands and minds, and all that expertise is not always in the same office.
Will Remote Work Ruin Company Culture?
Company culture is an elusive myth to most people in a company. Only 1 in 4 say they feel connected to their company’s culture. So what exactly are we ruining?
Early signs point to culture being sustainable in a virtual context. Look at the growth of online gaming, where a distinct culture has formed, and many gamers never meet in the flesh.
Another example is how dating migrated online in the past 20 years. In 2002, very few single adults thought they would have an online profile for the world to see. It was embarrassing. It lacked human connection. And then it happened.
Perhaps the best evidence is our experience with the millions of people hired and onboarded during the pandemic. Are they failing en masse? No. Do they sometimes feel lonely or less connected to the company? Yes. Will they change your company culture for the worse? Probably not.
The think big opportunity here is to have great work and people processes serve as the channels for culture.
The Way Forward
The conversation thus far has asked us to select one: Work from Home. Work from the office. Hybrid.
That’s a false choice because there are more than three options; and a company may need more than one. For example, Amazon has decided to let individual teams decide. The company is so large and diversified that one answer across the board was difficult to justify.
A variation of Amazon’s approach is to have event-driven gatherings, where teams agree on the type of work they should do in person. With this strategy, the rhythm is driven by the work that needs to be done rather than an arbitrary repetition within a week. A social contract that empowers each team member with a “Gather Together” button that convenes the team in person will help with unexpected needs.
Many companies have asked teams to work from an office twice a week. There is early, but not yet conclusive, data suggesting two days a week is optimal for communication. Other companies have instituted 4-day weeks to balance the need for those jobs to be in a specific location and the need to stay competitive on workplace flexibility.
CEOs should ask three questions about each job type: Which arrangement optimizes job performance? Will we be able to attract enough talent? How do we know this to be true?
If there’s not enough evidence, consider deploying a series of A/B tests to learn what truly works. Then iterate with empathy.
“We’re running the mother of all experiments because we don’t know,” said Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. “We’re trying to find the best of both.”
Technology Will Help Us.
In 1992, a Cornell student wrote a program called CU-SeeMe, creating the first desktop video conferencing platform. In 2020, we got to know Zoom. Today, technologies such as Jugo and Deephow are taking the next step toward better collaboration across distances and time zones.
How we gather is about to take a step-level change with metaverse-like features such as 3D immersion, integrated polling, real-time engagement stats, on-demand language translation, AI-based coaching, and a virtual reality headset. All except AI-based coaching are commercially available today.
Imagine a private coaching bot. Perhaps you want to speak up more in meetings. The bot can nudge you to participate when you’ve been quiet for 42 minutes and give you a graph of your participation level from meeting to meeting. Perhaps you tend to be overactive or verbose. The bot can tell you your word count, pace and share of total air time; and suggest phrases you can use to invite others to talk.
Another example is how Deephow is bringing the magic of Youtube to workplace learning and collaboration. Anyone in a company can create high-quality videos to share how they do something in minutes. The footage is automatically translated into multiple languages and segmented into bite-size chapters. Your whole workforce can be teachers. Your managers and subject matter experts can spend less time repeating themselves.
Technology and human capability can take us into the future of work. We have an opportunity to think beyond the way it was and ask ourselves how to do better for productivity, collaboration, innovation— and families.
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