Back-to-office policies are BS

[tl:dr]
Companies don’t recall their staff to the office because they are concerned with culture and productivity. They recall them because they are concerned with the bottom line. Strict back-to-office policies are likely to spark an uptick in voluntary attrition, which is cheaper than paying severance packages.

Flexible work arrangements are here to stay and companies should focus on flexibility – when it comes to work policies but also when it comes to their real estate strategies.

In the end, what we all need are good colleagues and good leadership. Let’s focus on that and the rest will follow.

A conversation with the chairman of a tech company a left me frustrated and motivated. He wanted to talk to me about ways to increase his staff’s productivity. After some very good years in the company’s early stage, they had settled into a comfortable growth rate with acceptable margins. Everything seemed fine. But when the pandemic hit, the company struggled and performance suffered. The rate of innovation hadn’t been great for years but now it became a real problem. Customers used the pandemic to look around and found better services elsewhere. With no sales strategy in place to guide the team, revenues quickly dropped to a dangerous level. Something needed to change.

Like so many companies, they had shifted to a very generous WFH policy during the pandemic. As a tech company, the shift was logistically easy and the policy was very popular with their staff. Even after the official restrictions were eased, a large portion of their employees used their home office more than the company office. Some had redesigned their lives around those new opportunities and had moved further away. Often to be closer to their families which helped with child-care logistics (grandparents and aunts make for wonderfully reliable and cheap babysitters) or with elder care.

And that, the chairman was convinced, was exactly the problem. People, he told me, had become too lazy and too comfortable. They should work more and, according to him, this was best accomplished in the office. Noticing how reactionary that made him sound he added that he was very concerned about the company culture and “team cohesion.” The conversation left me frustrated because I knew how that this new policy wouldn’t bring the company back on track and I was motivated because I realized that my work won’t be eaten by AI anytime soon.

It is striking how similar the recent announcements of companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Zoom sound. These companies announced that they are calling their workforces back to the office. Of course, they don’t go so far as to say that their employees are lazy but they do emphasize culture and team cohesion as important rationales behind the decision. I call BS.

Amazon, for example, is not a company you should join if the focus on company culture is something you value in an employer. You go there to be part of a super successful company, hopefully to learn a lot, hopefully to be well compensated, and hopefully to prove that your personality is suited for the relentless demands of the machine. So yeah, when Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says that "it's easier to learn, model, practice, and reinforce a culture" when employees are physically together, I call BS.

What these companies all have in common is that they are all investing heavily in AI. This means that they are all anticipating some form of restructuring. And the first rule of restructuring is that you don’t talk about restructuring – for as long as possible. Instead, you make the environment more uncomfortable, more acid, less suitable for (work) life.

Flexible work arrangements rarely are the cause of a company’s problems. On the contrary, multiple studies and surveys from sources like Mercer, BCG, Gartner, and Stanford have found that allowing your staff to work from home can improve productivity dramatically.

Remote work policies, however, are also rarely the salvation of a company in trouble. Employees who feel disconnected will find it even more difficult to feel part of the team while working remotely. Nothing beats a well-managed company. And typically, this all boils down to people. And that is where things get messy and hard. You need to talk to people, listen to people, work with people. And people are messy and hard. But, until our AI overlords have figured out a better way, it is our only road to success.

Traditionally, offices made a lot of sense because this was the only place to make a certain kind of work happen. Slowly, collaboration tools emerged (does anyone still remember Polycom’s "star-shaped" conference phones?) and by the mid 2000s we already had a good enough infrastructure to think about the workplace in different ways. But the traditional office set-up persisted. It persisted because the way we designed offices literally cemented hierarchical structures. For example: early in my career, out of pure luck and coincidence, I had an office that was way too big for my status. It often helped me win office politics because the assumption was that I must be further up in my career ladder than they thought and therefore my word had a little bit more weight. Sounds stupid? It is, but it worked then and it still works today. This is the experience of many managers and executives. And now that is supposed to change?! Wait a minute…

The problem is that the genie is out of the bottle. Had the pandemic lasted for a couple of months (as many of us hoped), the genie might have been persuaded to glide back into the still warm bottle. But it’s been out too long, it’s had a lot of fun outside, and the bottle is now cold.

So, what can we do? There are many ways to party and many ways to work. Let’s look at several benefits of living in times of cheap, smooth, high-res video calls, cloud computing, and AI-infused services.

We don’t need to give up the office. Many people enjoy having a work-home, and for many, the ritual of going to work is an important and cherished part of their life. And that’s okay. I don’t think that the office as such will disappear but I can’t see how those oversized cathedrals that some companies have built over the past centuries will make sense in future.

We don’t need to have expensive offices in city centers where it is hard for many people to get to. We need places to meet and collaborate but that can be temporary. More and more companies are rethinking their real estate strategies and partnering with providers who offer flexible and modern co-working spaces in attractive locations and at competitive rates.

We don’t need to decide whether work remotely or work on-site is best because both can be. It’s in the mix, baby! More and more companies are coming to this conclusion and adapting meetings, office design, and even benefits around it. Helping with the cost of the commute, helping set up safe and modern workspaces at home or providing company bikes instead of cars are just a few examples.

What we need is flexibility. We need flexibility from our employees to accomplish important and sometimes hard things as a team. That means that sometimes we stay longer and come into the office on days we had planned to work from home. And we need flexibility from our employers to help us make our lives less stressful. Our kids need us, our partners need us, our parents need us, our pets need us. And we need them and our friends and our hobbies. If the conditions are right, they all fit well into our lives side by side with our jobs.

And this is why we need good leadership and good colleagues that we can rely on. Sure, work will always be transactional: Someone gives their time, experience, skills, and energy and someone else gives money. But work is also emotional, and meaningful, and a collective experience. So, let’s focus on becoming better colleagues and, if we are privileged to lead people, to become better leaders. To do that, we actually need to do something deeply human: stop working every now and then and have a good conversation. Because yes, we are here to work but we are also here to make sure life doesn’t suck.

Photo by Domenico Loia on Unsplash