Conventional Wisdom Take-down: In -office is Better Than Remote?
As companies continue to work through their approach to remote, hybrid, and in-office work, I thought it might be useful to consider some of the conventionally wise ideas that support the notion that “in the office is better than remote.”
It’s not that I believe that in-office is better or worse than being remote. It’s just that the conventional wisdom tends to skew heavily in the direction of “in-office is better,” and so I just wanted to take a moment to question a few of the predominant ideas that tend to be almost taken for granted as ground truth.
Am I saying that they are, in fact, false? No, I am not. I am simply challenging them, because, honestly, they deserve to be challenged. I mean, like really deserve it…. bad.
Conventional Wisdom 1: "People are working less"
The Conventional Wisdom: work from home means work on something else. People are working less and this is a problem.
Another perspective:
Maybe? Or maybe just a few? Is this happening systematically or is it happening in the noise? Should we devise policy for the noise or the signal?
Anyway, this "people are working less" is inherently an inputs - oriented perspective. Instead of focusing on “how much you are working” type inputs, let's be clear about our goals, set them as stretch and hold people accountable for their impact, not how much they are working. By the way, let's also lead by example by focusing on outputs or controllable input metrics and communicating a consistent, impact-orientation to our people.
I'll go one step further: we shouldn't focus at all on the “amount of work” until such time as there is evidence that “working less” is leading to poor outputs/results/impact.
Some companies set records during the pandemic, some with tailwinds, some with headwinds. Others struggled, also with both kinds of winds. Rather than asserting "people work less at home," let's really try to understand why a company thrives or struggles with a preponderance of its workforce at home.
Conventional Wisdom 2: "When people come together, good things happen."
Conventional Wisdom: there is some magical energy that comes from people aggregating. In-person collaboration leads to better innovation.
Another perspective:
The office is loaded with distractions. I mean loaded. The biggest distraction is probably the drive-by. Each drive-by - whether a friendly hello or a "hey you got a sec?" is not a big deal. The accumulation of them means productivity exchanged for those conversations. My gut is that's a bad trade, but that's the trade. Most office environments have lots of other distractions.
What exactly do you mean by "innovation" when you say that? Are you implying that we don't develop products as well or hack our business processes together because we don't physically see each other? I think that to take this conventional wisdom point seriously, we need to sharpen our pencils on what we even mean by “innovation.”
Conventional Wisdom 3: "The serendipitous lunch-line meeting can't happen when we're remote."
Conventional Wisdom: "When people are physically together, they can make something discontinuous happen because of their regular and random surface area with other folks."
Another perspective:
We know what we need to get done to make our company successful. If we're banking on the ol', highly romanticized serendipitous lunchline meetings for our business' long term success, then we are failing as leaders.
Also, how exactly does the serendipitous lunchline hail mary work when you have, say, 5 offices... or 30 or 60? We are just cool with excluding the other offices from these incredibly valuable accidental meetings that bring the company to new heights? The serendipitous lunchline meetings exclude literally every other office literally every single time.
Conventional Wisdom 4: "The meeting after the meeting is good."
Conventional Wisdom: "The meeting after the meeting is good, it's where some of the most important work gets done, and it happens more commonly and seamlessly when we are in the office together."
Another perspective:
COVID has near-equalized everyone's voice (at least to a far greater extent than before), perhaps as far as we can go without controlling for personality and heavily prescribing air time limits/minimums in meetings.
The “meeting after the meeting” excessively prioritizes the person's perspective/voice who:
does not have another meeting to hustle off to in that moment, which is most likely a function of randomness.
is physically present in the room - again, we exclude our naturally remote colleagues.
Is that really the voice that deserves the largest say? Of course not.
The meeting after the meeting also leads to bad politics. Now people are trained that the real decision gets made later. They might be more likely to, say, withhold their perspectives until after the meeting, which means that perspective was neither challenged nor built upon, which almost certainly means the conclusion/decision we reach will be suboptimal. The winning idea will have not been put through the rock tumbler.
Conventional Wisdom 5: "The energy"
Conventional Wisdom: "There's an energy when large groups come together."
Another perspective:
Yeah, for extroverts and neural normal people. People like me (massive introvert with acute ADHD) - are absolutely drained after about an hour and need a nap.
The energy of the office is not inherently bad, but it's not inherently good and it advantages a very specific slice of employees. Could be a large and predominant slice, unsure, but asserting that "the energy" of the office is "good" is a very narrow view.
Conventional Wisdom 6: "Are we doing long term damage with people not forming relationships that lock them in?"
Conventional Wisdom: we're doing long-term damage because people don't know each other; we think people are more likely to attrit quickly or are just more likely now because the relationships they were supposed to form haven't happened. We cite anecdotal examples of people who started during the pandemic and left quickly or a colleague who left abruptly for a company that was fully open and in the office.
Another perspective:
What does your attrition data say?
How can you study this problem?
Are we choosing to extrapolate a few data points to create a narrative that suits bringing people back in the office?
Do the anecdotal departures represent the neural normal extroverts who feed off of in-office energy?
To harp on this without studying it is basically a coping mechanism to support the "get more people into the office more often" conversation.
This one feels, for me, like the most real danger, however, I would never assert it without looking for patterns in the data that support it.
Conventional Wisdom 7: "Our culture is best served with in-person interaction."
Conventional Wisdom: culture is taught and reinforced through in-person interactions.
Another perspective:
Maybe?
Most companies' cultures are defined by the mission + core values. It seems unreasonable to assert that core values can't be manifested as well in a virtual environment as in an in-person environment and seems unreasonable that a company's mission can't be understood and internalized just as well virtually than in-person.
I have always believed culture is something *inside* each of us, not necessarily between us. This makes sense to me given we can actually hire strong culture fits/cultural exemplars who have never been inside the company before. Is it possible that the "culture inside us" is more likely to manifest in person? This is certainly possible, but we should just be honest that we don't really know the answer to that question or let's really talk through how EACH core value is better served in an in-person environment than in a distributed one.
Let's ask why we're ok with having geographically distributed offices, since, according to this conventional wisdom, that is inherently disadvantageous toward manifesting our culture.
Some other considerations. We shouldn't ignore some fundamental, high quality ideas that were perhaps easy to ignore in February 2020, but suddenly matter a ton, as we all evaluate the future of work:
Commuting wastes a lot of stuff - most important is mental capacity.
Well understood: commuting is a huge waste of time; in aggregate across our employee base it's a massive loss of time.
Well understood: it is also a huge waste of resources (ie gas, car wear and tear).
What gets no air-time: most important that commuting represents a massive waste of mental capacity. People like Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Scott wear the same outfit every day, for one simple purpose: they understand they have a finite number of highly quality decisions/mental cycles each day, and by taking the what-to-wear decision off the table, they save a mental cycle. This is based on research, not opinion. A commute wastes valuable mental capacity for our employees. In aggregate, we're wasting so much of their finite brain power each day by insisting they commute.
Mixing remote and in-person seems to lead to worse performance - This is not at all being folded into anyone's thinking.
I was exposed to some research from Stanford, which showed “Percent of team remote” on the x-axis (0-100%) and “Performance” on the y-axis. The shape of the curve was more or less a smile curve.
The interpretation is that teams perform their best when they are either 100% remote or 100% together and perform their worst when they are mixed - worst is when they are mixed evenly (ie 50/50). If you think about this, it actually makes sense.
Mixing means those on the Zoom, let's say, are again inherently disadvantaged. The in-room perspectives are likely prioritized, and since all perspectives are not fully heard, the decisions made are less fully considered.
In other words, people in the room (when mixed) have an unearned advantage simply by 1) being present and 2) having, yes, access to the ol' meeting after the meeting.
100% remote means everyone is on the same level playing field. Everyone together, means no one disadvantaged on Zoom.
100% in-office means the same thing. Many larger companies, though, will not be able to overcome the fact that distributing their offices means, necessarily, distributing their teams.
I think remote work enables greater inclusion.
I've seen inclusion scores at companies that have improved through the pandemic, so it's hard to make a counter claim in those places that inclusion suffers (without the data, but you should check your data!).
I think everyday inclusion comes down to feeling heard and valued, your perspective - even if diverse or divergent - is fully heard and considered. "Make sure every voice is heard, including your own."
With zoom, we put everyone on a much more level playing field - everyone takes up the exact same amount of space and has just as much of an opportunity to contribute as the next person.
Oh and by the way, more remote allowances tend to make life easier for primary caregivers, who on average, tend to be women, an underrepresented category who usually feels less included at work.
Overall there are two toxic ideas that underlie the conventional wisdom above:
work from home means work on something else
the wrong question getting asked "how do we get people back into the office."
Leaders get paid to ask good questions, which in turn help teams discover answers which in turn help them to achieve more. Anchoring on antiquated in-office-is-better ideas, by framing things with a bias for in-office work, cuts off - amazingly - innovation around the other perspective. It’s frustrating and short-sighted.
Here’s the thing, though. Employees are increasingly challenging these ideas for themselves. Those that find themselves in an environment in which the senior team is pushing people back to the office, will ultimately vote with their feet; people want clarity on what’s expected of them, and then want the freedom and autonomy to achieve those things, and part of the “freedom” calculus is choosing where to work. The pandemic has made it such that folks have lots more options to work more on their terms, and so companies unwilling to really challenge these bits and pieces of conventional wisdom, are simply more likely to end up holding the bag.
