Back To The Office. WTF Now?!
Hybrid work isn't the best term, but it will do. CONTEXT COLLAPSE! 105
Warning: Another post about remote work and the return to the office by remote employees ahead. There have been a lot of these lately, and they’ve been written by a lot of people! Gonna do some total knowledge worker class inside baseball. If this isn’t your thing, skip ahead—no worries at all.
TLDR: Organizations are gonna need to get comfortable with hybrid work.
So I just finished reading a great essay by Steven Sinofsky, a well-known former Microsoft exec, called Creating the Future of Work. From Trauma to Opportunity. Sinofsky argues (and I agree with him, FWIW) that the pandemic has existentially unmoored a lot of people, and that this disconnect is going to affect the way white-collar workplaces operate as offices reopen:
We’ve all started hearing from friends, co-workers, or employees that the next steps in work are not as certain. There’s a broad re-evaluation going on about jobs, careers, and the relationship people have to work. It is not only expected, as the pandemic has been (and remains) a traumatic experience, but also provides a unique opportunity for everyone to find their own answers. Whether one suffered from direct loss, personal illness, loneliness or being too crowded, too much work or too little work, extended family challenges, or any other situational stress they all add up to a significant trauma in the strict sense of that word. Recovering from such an event is never a return to how things were before, everything is different in some way.
I’ve discussed before how one of the things we never discuss about 2020 is that COVID-19 was the most geopolitically disruptive event we’ve gone through in decades. Apart from the disease stuff, massive supply chain disruptions. Negative petroleum prices for a little bit. Exponential decreases in air travel. In the United States, liberals shouting for the borders to close and conservatives for massive unemployment benefits. The world escaping a global depression only through a lot of hard work and a lot of luck. Anyway, this is all to say that this s**t is gonna have ramifications for office work.
Sinofsky’s a Microsoft guy, which means he carries certain biases. One of them is that software makes remote work much easier. And he’s right! I mean, apart from the undying nightmare horror that is Skype for Business, Microsoft’s products make it a lot easier for employees and managers in remote places to get stuff done. At a larger scale, collaborative software tools like Zoom, Google Docs, Salesforce, Microsoft Office, Jira, and all the rest allow for work to get done without a conventional hub.
But the challenge is that organizations aren’t just about the work they do. They’re about the organizational culture that accumulates alongside the work they do, and which usually outlasts employees and executives. A lot of organizations are having and will have a lot of trouble adjusting to a remote-first future.
On the employee side, it’s a mix too. There are lots of people who, for many good reasons, are happy to continue working remotely forever. There are also lots of people whom, for equally valid reasons, miss working in the office. I know a lot of people whose main friendships are based around their job. That’s fine! I know a lot of people who have trouble working at home for a whole bunch of reasons. That’s fine too! That stuff is what it is.
There’s also a lot of knowledge work that is much crappier done remotely than in person. Important meetings—not busywork meetings, but real, mission-critical meetings—are a million times easier IRL. Classes and seminars are less effective online than in-person. Team-building and group exercises are way more effective in-person. Last and not least, there’s also a ton of institutional resources and processes invested in in-person work that I think will be more resilient to the post-pandemic world than we expect.
But our current description of “hybrid work” won’t necessarily map onto what we’ll see in the future. I think we need a new way to describe how teams will work together going forward when some people are at home, some people are at the main office, some people are at satellite offices, some people are at co-working spaces and some people are just on a desk at the coffee shop. I’m genuinely curious to see how this’ll work.
-Neal
And, with that said, a programming note. Context Collapse will be back in September.
I’ve been working non-stop since January 2020 and, honestly, have been working even on my days off. I need some time that doesn’t involve staring at a computer screen or a phone. I’ve been answering work emails from the doctor’s office and while I’ve been fixing the car. Running your own business means it’s too easy to fall into a routine of working 24/7. In other words… I need a break.
I’ll be working a bit this July on existing client commitments but am taking much of the month off. I’ll be back in August on a reduced work schedule, and then back to the usual grind after Labor Day.
We’ve got some great stuff planned for the fall both for this newsletter and for some other projects I’m involved in. Can’t wait to see you all then.
Have an amazing summer.