Work from Home is Failing Us. What We Can Do About It.
At the time, most would agree that the initial “order” for everyone to work from home was an appropriate short-term reaction to a serious problem.
The duration, however, continues to be uncertain. The data and opinion of experts suggests that we already know many of the tools to get society functioning again, even in advance of a vaccine.
History has shown that after major societal changes the world has always needed to adjust. At first the adjustments felt extreme, unusual, and uncomfortable. We saw this in the mass roll-out of turnstiles and security check-in policies when entering major office buildings after 9/11. We accepted the implementation of these new procedures as a means to ensure others felt comfortable returning to high rise buildings.
Nearly two decades later, the presence of these measures persists even though there has not been another terrorist strike on an office building in the United States since. Despite the resulting inconvenience of entering office towers, we have learned to coexist with these measures and processes for close to twenty years.
We are experiencing new life-altering changes. Although this time it is an attack from an invisible enemy, Covid-19. Of the many changes, working from home (WFH) might be one of the most dramatic of them all. At first, WFH seemed a miraculous notion and in some cases triggered fantasies of a permanent world-wide uncoupling from the traditional work setting. Although, after a number of months in physical isolation and calendars jam packed with back-to-back zoom calls, many are now craving to be surrounded by colleagues and a more structured work environment.
In addition to employee frustrations with WFH, we are also learning that few organizations are equipped to institute an everlasting long-term WFH policy for their entire workforce. To do so would take overhauling years of legacy policies, procedures and infrastructure. This would be an expensive endeavor for many organizations.
Social interaction is perhaps the biggest failure of the current WFH experiment. For some, asynchronous working may better support a remote strategy when assignments are more task driven (i.e. software engineering/programming). Although even software design and programming demands significant amounts of physical interaction, which is critical to collaboration in the early stages of its life cycle.
But most companies don’t survive and thrive by just successfully completing tasks. Companies win by attracting the best talent and fostering great culture while innovating and creating better products and services than their nearest competitors. No one understood this better than Steve Jobs who in the early 90’s (while at Pixar) was way ahead of today’s trends. He intentionally placed a café, mailboxes and a gift shop in the center of his workspace to ensure that employees “collided” with each more frequently. As Archie Bland wrote in The Atlantic, “Pixar’s employees started to bump into each other. They shot the breeze. Sometimes, the chatter would yield something useful, and one of the participants would head back to her desk with a new idea.”
As important as these serendipitous collisions are, we can’t overlook that employees also need physical interaction with their mentors and superiors to accelerate personal learning as well as career advancing-opportunities.
Collaboration, innovation, and the recombination of ideas will always spread when people are in close-proximity and interacting intellectually, physiologically, and emotionally. These things are inhibited when an organization is operating only under a WFH strategy.
WFH was indeed a blunt instrument to help flatten the curve. But we are better understanding new ways (that scientists have been explaining all along) to cautiously conduct ourselves that permit in-person group work to resume responsibly. It is the broad embracing of these recommended new protocols (mask wearing, professional distancing, air quality care, cleanliness, respectfulness, and general courtesy to one another) that can help us to get the engine of the economy revving again. These behavioral adjustments are some of the tools that have the potential to become as persistent as the appearance of turnstiles found in most office building lobbies today.
Rest assured, the pain and inconvenience of wearing a mask and following these otherwise simple but effective recommendation is nowhere near the economic and personal devastation that’s around the corner if we don’t get our society back to the offices and workplaces that enable us to thrive as a nation.
