Headlines are rife with the “The Great Return” trumpet call to reverse so much of the progress made in dynamic working since the catalytic cataclysm of COVID. The press releases trot out the vague and buzzword-laden rationalizations centered on “culture” and “relationships”. While these qualities are important factors in a high-performing team, they are also often scapegoats to mask disfunction in the company leadership. Sequestering people exhausted from a tedious commute on uncomfortable chairs in fluorescent-lit cavernous rooms with battery-farm aesthetics burying their heads in their computer screens most of the day is not going to contribute to any of those aspects. The companies who claim to care about such aspects often don’t invest in tools, skills, time, and resources to truly foster them (beyond the odd pizza Friday and day out of the office).

Beware the real reasons behind the wizard’s curtain as to why management is frog-marching people back to the office…

1. Inability to Manage Outcomes – The primary reason that management balks at supporting remote working is that they don’t know how to manage outcomes. As a result, they instead just manage activity in the desperate hope there is some correlation between activity and results.
2. Management Facade – In a smoothly running organization with effective empowerment and delegation, “management” in many cases is not a full-time job. As a result, those managers want to be judged on activity to keep the higher-ups from realizing that the outcomes they directly affect are so limited. As a result, back-to-the-office managers want to create the pretense of their workload. Traditionally, this has taken the form of time-wasting meetings and dust-gathering reporting processes. A presenteeism fiat means they can appear “busy” by sitting in their private offices (but still doing not much).
3. Weak Digital Capability – Many managers and executives who have worked their way up the corporate ladder are still in the Gen X and even Boomer generation whose digital skills are not their strongest suit (some barely have keyboard skills).  Remote working is frustrating for them as they go from being the smartest in the physical room to the most inept on the virtual room (undermining their authority). And, despite being two decades into the Digital Age, many companies remain woefully underinvested in reasonably current IT technology to increase efficiency preferring to extract productivity out of the hide of the workers instead the capex budget for better tools.
4. Dependency on Social Manipulation – For management that rose to their positions through a range of social manipulation (from the snake-oil of NLP to emotional bullying), these antics work best face-to-face (especially where the is no digital recording or written trail).
5. Sunk-Cost Fallacy of Bricks and Mortar – Say the bean-counters, “We’re paying for this damn office so we are going to use it.”
6. Confirmation Bias – A small portion of people do actually prefer to come into the office every day for a range of reasons (live nearby so low commute costs, inhospitable home environment, preconceived notions about the status of being in an office, favoring the office ritual). These examples are cherry-picked to argue that all employees are happy to be in the office more.
7. Strategy Revolving Door – Managers are often challenged by their stakeholders “what are you going to do to improve things?” and the weak ones grasp at highly visible (even if ineffectual) changes to appear proactive (see “Amazonian Raindancers”).  “I know what the problem is…remote work!…Bring everyone back to the office!”  Strong echoes of the yo-yo strategy shifts between centralization and decentralization that earned McKinsey billions where the new guy in a couple of years will proclaim his revolutionary strategy for the business…more remote working.
8. Inflexibility – Flexible work location is just one aspect of “flexible working” which also includes flexible times, flexible roles and flexibility commercial arrangements (ie. how people get paid). Flexibility where the work gets done often prompts questions about when, how and under what terms it gets done as well. For example, remote and digital work very quickly becomes asynchronous which induces time flexibility. All this flexibility, which is the cornerstone of certainly resilience and often effectiveness, can be very difficult to adapt to for managers who cut their teeth on strict paint-by-number management nostrums designed for white-collar factories instilled from their vaunted MBAs.
9. Oversight Skirting Reduction in Force – More than a few three line whips to return to the office have been thinly veiled maneuvers to avoid messy lay-offs by putting the screws to employees enough to get them to depart on their own without the onerous process and the redundancy pay.
10. Incarcerated Boredom-Driven Discretionary Effort – If a person in the office gets their key work done, then they often will get on an do extra work to fill the time of being stuck in the office, but working remotely, once they get their required work done, they will go enjoy themselves with all of the personal distractions available (this one is really a corollary of #1).

Admittedly, the above list is enumerated in a unapologetically cynical tone about management primarily because I have simply heard too many similarly cynical aspersion cast on the workforce about what’s wrong with remote working (eg. “lazy millennials!”). If there is any “shirk from home” going on, then it is simply because the company leaders don’t know the first thing about performance management.

In the vast majority of the cases, the optimal approach is a hybrid between remote and in-office. In fact, most of business is about balancing such trade-offs (eg. short-term versus long-term, structure versus flexibility, centralization versus decentralisation). Setting the dial depends on the context of the problem being solved and how the solution operates best. Businesses should definitely be constantly examining the nature of their business what mix of remote and in-office work is optimal, but it should be done with a focus on business problems and not attachment to legacy weaknesses and dated misconceptions.

• “I’ve still been doing my job haven’t I. I’ve never let you down, have I? Have I?!”

When I first started Dynamic Work, the notion of remote and flexible working was an innovative notion.

Now remote working is so normalised that it is entering the cultural lexicon. Our daughter Isley Lynn’s riffs on this new way of working crafting a tale of ‘dynamic working’ in her latest production, “Jobsworth”, to be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Dynamic working has now gone beyond being how the majority of work gets done to now being part of the cultural zeitgeist.

“How Money Works” is a superb YouTube channel providing vlogs on a variety of topics in no-nonsense and easy to understand treatments tinged with a bit of humour. Their piece on “bs jobs” – “Your Job Achieves Nothing… (probably)” underscores the criticality of aligning actual output to responsibilities. One would typically think of a shorter work week as a dividend to dynamic working, but they are actually advocating it as a means to dynamic work:

• “Is there a solution to this?  Yes…embrace the idea that it is okay to not work 40 hours a week.  The idea that a job is either bullshit or not bullshit is not entirely correct.  In reality, all jobs will have some level of bullshit built into daily routines.  If it was acceptable to say ‘My work is done.  I’m done for the day’, then it would be a lot easier to see who is contributing nothing.”

Managing outcome not activity is a critical cornerstone to dynamic work.

This clip from the delightful film “Office Space”, illustrates the fundamental issue with managing presence (“face-time”). The biggest obstacle to remote (and flexible) working has been the lack of management skills in companies to effectively manage outcomes. So managing activity has been seen as the next best thing. Well, actually, as the clip illustrates, they’re really just “managing” presence. “Presence” might be correlated with “activity” (ie. if you are there you might as well do something), and “activity” might be correlated with “outcome”, if you’re lucky. But in many situations, you’re most likely to get “15 minutes of actual work.”

The inflection point in remote/flexible working that the pandemic lock-downs precipitated forced companies to take on the difficult challenge of figuring out how to manage outcomes. And now that is done, they are find remote worker much more productive than in-office workers ever were. Part of this increase is the productivity enhancements of avoiding energy depleting commutes, the availability of the ergonomic comforts of home, etc. But probably the biggest contributor is finally getting companies to manage by outcome.

While “remote” working is getting lots of airtime with the pandemic lock-downs, the emerging new normal distinction between “remote” and “flexible” (or “dynamic”) remains important. “Remote” working refers to being away from the main office space, but that is not the objective for dynamic work. Instead, finding the *best* place to work is the key. And that might just be at a conventional office space for certain activities. Or people.

When I first introduced flexible working at Microsoft and Red Bee Piero, I expected everyone to jump on the opportunity to avoid the dreaded commute and stay in the comfort of their own homes. But in both cases, several staff still came in regularly as if nothing had changed. A recent Dilbert cartoon (see above) humorously illustrated a very real and respectable notion that some people simply *want* to commute for extended periods of time to sit in fluorescent lit white-collar factories.

As a result of this experience, I identified a number of reasons why sometimes the best place to work is, indeed, the office itself:

• HABIT – Some people just have gotten into their routine and are content to keep in their routine. One team member commuted a long distance, but he had gotten into the habit of reading books during his train journey and looked forward to the couple of hours of quite time to read every day (he was convinced that his house would not have provided him the peace and quiet or lack of distraction to enable an extended reading session)
• CHANGE OF SCENERY – As the pandemic has unscored, we do everything at our homes – eating, sleeping, entertaining, relaxing. If we do our working there to, it can become effectively a guided cage. Going into a workplace can provide a welcome change of scenery to one’s life.
• NON-OPTIMAL HOME ENVIRONMENT – Sometimes home is not as sweet as the saying says. People have shared living arrangements, limited privacy, no common space, problematic Internet connectivity, ambient noise and a whole host of other issues which make their home a non-optimal place to work and conduct video-conferences.
• ESSENTIAL EQUIPMENT – While less and less of an issue in our increasingly digital world, some roles do require access to specialised equipment which cannot be transported to one’s home because it is too big, too expensive, too sensitive and too many other things.

While some over-ambitious workplace plans strive achieve bean-counting cost cutting by jettisoning all staff from the office space to save on rent and other bricks-and-mortar overhead, such expected savings are short-sighted. Right-spacing the work space to the staff who need or want to be there is a critical component to dynamic working.

Now that’s a corner office!

With remote working the new normal, why not take “remote” to the limit? Why set a fake backdrop to your Zoom meeting, when you could have real paradise?

My other blog covers all things to do with Maldives resorts and today’s posts features the quite idyllic desk of the Hideaway Beach water villa. As I noted in the write up, people wonder why I would want to interrupt paradise with thinking about work. I just see it as an investment…by doing 5% work during my stay, I can often extend my stay at least 50% (at 10x return of parardise time).

Just one of the potential upsides of not working side by side.

Necessity is the mother of re-invention.  And the necessary precautions of the coronavirus pandemic are transforming the business landscape. The current crisis is mostly accelerating existing trends. The wave of ecommerce is so last millennium, but the degree to which it has penetrated our lives in the past six months is nonetheless unprecedented. The same for remote working teleconferencing, logistics, etc.

Commerce has always evolved as the environment of technology, geopolitics and economics shifted spurring adaptations to survive. But the course to true evolve never did run smooth. Geoffrey Moore compellingly modelled how technology diffuses through lumpy stages with a particular wide “chasm” to “cross” between adoption by “early adopters” and “early majority”. His model echoed evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould’s “Punctuated Equilibrium” which argued that evolution experiences periods of dramatic change over short periods. The COVID19 period is one such leap of change.

Metaphorically, the tide of innovation has been rising precipitously while businesses built cultural levees to mete out just how much transformation dripped onto their fields. That is until the coronavirus crisis busted the dams completely.

The pandemic is one of those punctuated bursts of change in our workstyle and lifestyle.  In short, needs-must imperatives are wiping away the obstacles which previously had served as speed bumps to the march of progress:

• Fear – “Shirk from home”:  Old school managers have been afraid to try new approaches to work driven from a mixture of fear of the unknown and fear of control loss.
• Skills – “You’re on mute!”:  As with many situations, fear and ignorance are often intertwined.  Not knowing specific outcomes that managers really wanted from their workers, how to measure those outcomes, and how to support their performance remotely have all stood in the way.
• Tools – “What’s the payback?”:  Remote working isn’t just kicking people out of the office and cancelling the lease.  An upfront investment in tools and skilling is required.  Sometimes these investments are as simple as just getting people laptops.  But requirements for security, communication (eg. videoconferencing), collaboration (eg. virtual whiteboarding, document sharing) all come with a cost in time and money that most businesses have preferred to delay.
• Habits – “We’ve always done it this way”:  One of the most intractable obstacles in any change is habit.

The tectonic plates of business change are creeping by the millimeter until an earthquake erupts which shakes up everything. And COVID19 have been a 9+ on the Richter Scale of business.