Remote vs. In-Person
Why we’re having the wrong conversation
Scrolling through LinkedIn this morning, I stumbled upon this post from Dave Cairns, and a Google search away, I found the original article, “Dear entitled white-collar workers: Time to grow up and return to the office.”
The topic of returning to the office has filled my LinkedIn and X feeds for the past 6-months, and even within the Zoom halls of my own company, we’ve had numerous conversations about getting back “In-Market,” which for most people at my company and most others means, “back in the office.” We use terms like “mentorship, relationship building, and collaboration” as reasons to bring people back together, yet I’m not seeing any real change to improve those things. Somehow, we have this belief that just by bringing people together, mentorship/apprenticeship, relationship building, and collaboration just happen because we actually believed it was happening before. Which, for some, it was, but not for everyone. Especially those of us who are underrepresented.
In Dave’s LinkedIn Post, he shares fantastic statistics on why remote work is more productive and has a better employee experience. In the prompting article, the author basically implies that white-collar workers have been coddled too much and need to grow up and be adults. Which means that we need to conform to the traditions that we set from our first days in kindergarten, that we can only function if we are doing in the same space.
I believe we’re all having the wrong conversation.
It’s not where the work gets done but that the work gets done. But honestly, that’s only one part of the equation, yet it’s the only part we seem to focus on.
First, let me set a foundation for this topic.
My Four Laws of Business
- The goal of every for-profit organization is to make money. (Don’t confuse goal with purpose. The goal is the outcome you want. Your purpose is what drives you and determines what you should focus on.)
- Every company shouldn’t just be profitable but thrive. We’re not on this earth just to survive but THRIVE people!
- Customers must be at the center of a company’s ‘Why.’
- Employees must be at the center of a company’s ‘What’ and ‘How.’
Using these four laws, please allow me to share a perspective of how we should see this as an opportunity to improve what it means to thrive at work.
A Little History
Our model of productivity begins with our education system. It was established to teach essential reading, writing, math, and core American values. It later evolved to prepare people for jobs in factories and corporations where they labored in assembly lines and massive rooms, executing rote tasks day in and day out.
Fast forward several decades later and entering a new century, that model still persists. Even as factories began to move from the US to other parts of the world, we continued using this anchoring company model of having a single place where workers come to ‘get work done.’
Then COVID happens.
COVID forced so many things to happen, one being the realization that we could ‘get work done’ from anywhere. Or at least, most work done. It opened up many possibilities, and a wave of things happened simultaneously. Companies created remote-work policies, people began moving from urban centers to more rural locations, and people didn’t have to live in the same state or even country as their office.
Mindfulness became a loud theme due to the many social inequities in our country and workspaces. And companies championed more policies to help their workforce prioritize better mindfulness practices.
These tidal forces (many others not mentioned, like the economy, Russia/Ukraine, etc.) radically changed how many saw what was valuable to many of us. TIME.
Time with our loved ones, time to focus on ourselves, and time at work.
And with the threat of a pandemic behind us, companies scramble to regain what they have always known. To what is comfortable. To what is safe. Back-to-office is at the top of their lists; hence the many thoughts shared online and in this article.
The Three Pillars
Organizations around the US are having many conversations using a limiting belief that Productivity, Culture, and their People are at their best when they are in the office. I say it’s limiting because it does not allow for the possibility that they can thrive using a different model.
What if this isn’t the only way? And what if we instead looked at a thriving company a bit differently? Using the four laws above, what if we rethought the office to be a conduit but not the hub to build Productivity, Culture, and People?
Let me tackle each of these pillars through this lens.
Productivity
If you’re like me, heads-down time is when I’m most productive. Yet, if you’re like me, you’re in back-to-back-to-back meetings pretty much all day. I have to put blocks on my calendar just to get work done. As a leader, meetings are essential since communicating with people is crucial to my day-to-day responsibilities. Yet, I find most meetings with more than two people to be soul-crushing activities that steal my productivity than add to it. And I have more meetings now than I did pre-pandemic.
The constant context switching from one meeting to the next robs me of my energy and motivation because I don’t have the time to devote to the topic or the people I lead. Thus, I’m less productive and effective because of it. That isn’t solved by being in person. Especially when you have multiple offices, and your teams are spread across the globe.
I go into the office about once a week and try to visit my clients as often as possible. I love people. I love seeing people, laughing with people, and giving fist bumps all day long!! It’s literally one of my favorite things about being with people. Yet, I don’t honestly do this in my office. That’s because my teams and clients aren’t in my office but in a window on my computer. So I sit in a cubicle or closed office and talk to people like in my home office.
It’s the same for many of my co-workers: being with people is vital to our work experience. But being in-office doesn’t make us more productive.
What makes us more productive is using our time as efficiently as possible to focus on the 1 or 2 critical things that need to get done that day, that week, and that month. Yet, meeting after meeting, we pile on more shit to the list of things to do and create a mess of priorities that hinder productivity.
Culture
One of the hardest things to define is work culture. I like to think of work culture as the collective ‘DNA’ of how a community of people come together to accomplish their goals. I focus on the how because that’s what we spend most of our time doing at work. The ‘how.’ The way we collaborate, the way we communicate, the way we have hard conversations, or not. These are all implicit cultural values we live out every day.
In a recent meeting with my peers, we discussed how being in person impacts culture, like the act of being in person cultivated culture. I like to think that being in-person amplifies our interactions, but it doesn’t define it. I am not nicer in person than over Zoom. I don’t treat people differently in person than on Zoom. I do get more excited in person than over Zoom, and my energy is higher in person than over Zoom, but I’m pretty much the same person regardless of my location. I get the sense that most people are like this.
Cultivating culture isn’t about ‘where’ we work with one another. It’s about ‘how’ we work with one another. It’s about having shared beliefs in our collective ‘DNA’ that allow us to bring the best out in each other to make the best work possible.
The People
I firmly believe that any organization wanting to thrive must orient itself around its customers and its people. This orientation should be the North Star to every decision they make. Not the business. The people. And for employees, they must feel valued.
For employees, they are at their best when they feel valued. And that is an outcome of having the right culture, tools, and systems to bring the very best out of them. But when an organization makes decisions around the business and not its people, it will eventually pay the price.
Two things I’ve learned in my 20+ year career are:
1) The best people will work where they feel the most valued. End of story.
2) Every company should want their employees to operate at their best.
For the best people, when a company mandates anything that doesn’t align with what they believe or makes them feel less valued, they will find a new place. Leaving a company full of people who can’t leave as quickly. Let’s be clear: not everyone is a rock star. We have all worked with people that we all question how they ever got the position they have. Well, when the best people leave, a company is left with those people. How successful can a company be when this is true? And let’s be honest, we interact with many mediocre companies daily.
When a company doesn’t invest in its people, that only exacerbates the mediocrity. When was the last time you were excited to go to the DMV? Contrast this to a time when you felt truly supported and valued. You were probably hitting on all cylinders and making magic happen. You were going the extra mile and going above and beyond. This is what every organization should be striving for.
Yet, I don’t see how that is happening when we ask people to come to sit in their cubicle farm and participate in their 8 hours of Zoom calls or that one meeting where three people of a 10-person team are in a drab conference room, squeezing around someone’s laptop and trying to figure out how to get the video conferencing system to work.
The Conversation we should be having
With all this preamble, let’s get to the conversation I believe we should have.
If the goal is genuinely mentorship, relationship building, and collaboration, let’s not just rethink how to use the office to do just this but rethink how we work.
The first thing to understand is ‘what needs to get done’ vs. how we can maximize 8-to-12-hour workdays to get more done. Remember Law #1. We must be profitable, and productivity is vital to a successful business. As an organization, understanding what needs to get done should be the priority of every leader at every level of an organization. And to be clear, ‘the what’ isn’t ‘the how.’ Leave that to the people doing the work. That may mean moving away from M-F 9–5 to a fluid model where employees operate within an agreed-upon model that allows them to be the most productive to serve the ‘why’ of the organization. Don’t get squeamish at the thought of that. Take a step back and ask yourself, “What needs to get done?” That’s all that matters.
As long as this is the objective and the team can align on the best way to do this in a way that amplifies the team, then you’re moving in the right direction.
With that figured out, let’s figure out how to maximize mentorship, relationship building, and collaboration. It’s easy to say these things are better in person. Like I previously said, I love being in person. To me, being in person amplifies my ability to connect with people. Yet, I think what’s most important is time.
For example, let’s talk about mentorship. Are we genuinely creating the time to mentor people? What does it mean to mentor people anyway? In my experience, it can be as simple as ‘watch me’ conversing with a client; let’s talk about it to see what you learned from it, let me watch you apply it to future conversations, have more conversations, and coach you to improve on some specific skill or understanding. It can be having a serious discussion about an area where you or I need to grow. Or it can be two people sharing stories and laughing with one another. Mentorship takes many forms, and I have found the best mentors to be close friends who make time to connect, answer big questions I have, or better yet, for me to question myself. It’s all about connection.
But regardless, the ‘where’ is less important than the ‘how’ and ‘what.’
The challenge is time. With our priorities focused on productivity, we maximize the time working vs. the time connecting. The reality is that the time connecting improves our ability to be productive. So, the goal should be maximizing connection, not productivity. That will be the outcome.
The Office
Where does the office come in? Well, if we focus on what needs to get done and maximizing connection with one another, what if we use the office as a place to maximize connection vs. a place to maximize productivity? If the work can happen anywhere, imagine if the office was transformed into a place where 90% of the space was about maximizing connection and only 10% about productivity.
Instead of cubicle farms, we created connection farms.
Rooms that focused on conversations with just two people and no conference equipment. It is designed to allow two people to connect. Spaces where teams can come together and collaborate and where the conference system allows for many angles in the room that remote teams can individually control instead of the top-down, long boardroom view. A place where the room could be configured to allow people to work in pods or as a single group, depending on the moment’s need. Whiteboard to collaborate and ways of digitally collecting those thoughts to ensure future conversations have a place to look back.
What if there was space to bring everyone together to fellowship? Share drinks, food, and stories. A place where we bring our families to and have them feel welcomed. This is more than just a kitchen. This would be a place designed to facilitate community.
For those of us in the client services industry, what if the office was a place to bring our clients to collaborate and connect? It is a place where clients get excited to come because it facilitates deep conversations to solve big problems. A place to strengthen relationships vs. a location to see all the people doing the work.
To be clear, an open office floor plan with foosball tables isn’t what I’m thinking. I’m thinking of intentionally redefining the office as a place of community vs. a place to ‘get work done.’
Here’s the thing: You may think I’m crazy for all of this. And honestly, you’re probably right. Maybe growing up a Hispanic man in a small factory town in North Carolina to a drug-addicted mother means I think differently. And that is 100% true. But it doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Or at least that this isn’t worth having a different conversation.
That’s my hope.
Let’s make magic people!
