Tag: work-from-home

The jury is out on hybrid work, but who’s really on trial?

~ cooloperations ~ 1 Comment

The year I graduated from high school, my aunt gifted me a shiny new coin. I was seeing this coin for the first time; the Canadian government had just replaced the paper dollar bill. I came across that coin recently, in storage for more than thirty years, and flipped it into the pile of change on the kitchen counter. Had my aunt intended a gift to last, she would have fished a paper bill out of her purse and given me that. The coin is now dull, ubiquitous – the bill is the novelty.

Working from home is like our dollar coin. Anyone who talks about “returning to normal,” if by “normal” they mean trekking every day to a shared office, might be trying to bring back the old dollar bill.

Job trends reporting on Canada’s workforce indicates that new postings offered as “remote” have gone up nine times since the pandemic started, to 12% of new jobs. Not only that, but those remote jobs attracted 20% of all applications. For software and IT services, remote jobs are 30% of postings, up from 12.5% pre-pandemic. For attracting and retaining talent, this upheaval in the market will have a disproportionate effect on support and service areas.

Still, as someone who used to have dollar bills in his pocket, I have had misgivings about remote work.

Ten years ago, our Operations team was on its own floor, behind a locked door, and for security reasons related to gift processing, the elevator didn’t even stop on our floor. Visitors had to get off on either the fourth or sixth floor, walk the stairs, and bang on the door.

The team was cut off from the life of the department and of the campus. We were largely invisible, which helped create an us-them dynamic in our support and service relationship. We were much less likely than members of other teams to volunteer for events, less likely to raise our hands to serve on departmental committees or take on new challenges. You might say we were remote.

Then the pendulum swung. We moved from our isolated aerie to an open-plan office. In-person collaboration increased, but there was less privacy and it was difficult to control distractions due to noise and people’s movement. Socializing became more visible and sometimes it was discouraged, either because it was disruptive to one’s neighbours or was perceived by managers to rob from time on task.

This is our story, but many workplaces have similar stories. Staff persons’ sometimes passionate defence of remote work is probably in part a backlash against the open-plan office.

That’s not all it is, though. I miss the old folding money, but I do favour employees having a choice about where work gets done. In that old office that isolated us from the rest of the department, I doubt having Zoom or Teams would have made the difference. Other things were missing – communication, shared goals, inclusivity – which by now we should know are not things we can leave to chance.

For hybrid to succeed, of course we must get the technology right. That’s only a start. We must look beyond individual productivity as the only meaningful measure of WFH effectiveness. We must consider team cohesiveness, engagement, shared values and goals, and culture. We must be deliberate about communicating objectives, about onboarding thoughtfully, about running meetings mindfully so engagement is not dictated by proximity.

In a year or two, this post might seem naïve – either the great experiment with remote and hybrid worked out, or it didn’t – but I don’t think it will be that clear. More likely, hybrid will succeed in some settings and fail in others. Its success in any given culture will be a judgment not on remote work but on the competencies of individual managers and leaders.

Beware this work-from-home truism that isn’t true

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You may have heard this one. “Working from home is bad for extroverts, great for introverts.” This was never true, and as time goes on its untruth becomes ever clearer.

All people need and desire connection with others, including introverts. All people need quiet time to process their encounters, including extroverts (although they might not enjoy it as much).

When the workforce emerges from this pandemic, organizations will face a new expectation that work arrangements be flexible. Whatever the pros and cons, we should not fear that our teams will split into in-office extroverts and stay-at-home introverts. That’s not how it works.

Different people at different times manage their energy differently. That’s all. It has little to do with desiring either stimulation or isolation as a default mode. Beyond figuring out how to work well together, the introvert-extrovert scale is a red herring that doesn’t have much bearing on anything essential.

For my early morning walk before work, I often choose the same wooded path. I sometimes meet a man and his dog who share my routine. The man is middle-aged and bald, and his dog is a poodle, I think, with fur of light maple. The dog’s name is Sadie. I know this only because this morning she chose to hate me, and the man had to restrain her on a short leash. We exchanged curt greetings and moved on.

None of us were pleased to meet on the path. That’s fine. There are plenty of other paths in the neighbourhood. We can each choose a way that suits our mood.

Employee engagement across all sectors is low, we’re told. What would be the result if we gave everyone the freedom to choose?

Positive new-normal won’t just happen, it has to be invented

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Earlier this year, I wrote that COVID-19 has accomplished what decades of scientific warnings have not: A dramatic curtailment in carbon emissions. The curtailment is temporary, but what’s encouraging is how quickly the status quo can change. Yes, we are capable of adjusting our mindsets and behaviours.

Alas, I forgot to add that this change has been forced. The underlying culture has not evolved. When the weight of the pandemic is lifted, human behaviour will bounce back like a coiled spring.

Same goes for any positive effects on universities and the workplace. There’s a lot of excited talk about work-from-home as the new normal, for example, but despite all the undeniable benefits, it’s a mistake to assume this will come about naturally.

Deep change is cultural change. If we want to retain anything positive from this crisis, it will require both direction from above and the active involvement of staff. Until administrative and operational staff are involved in working on these underpinnings, hope and talk will be forgotten as the dominant culture reasserts itself.

I suggest asking a few challenge questions. I admit these are heavy with process, policy, and tools. Hardly the stuff of inspiration, and having these things won’t cause change. But lacking them will certainly hinder it.

  • Is a telework policy being drafted, or revised, based on the assumption that work-from-home is normal? Are we planning to deal with the most challenging aspects of remote work (hiring and onboarding, performance management, alignment on objectives)? Are private-sector examples being studied for lessons?
  • Can we give everyone the tools to be mobile? Are meeting rooms equipped to serve a blend of on-site and remote attendees? Are work-at-home systems secure? Are employees trained to protect personal information?
  • Do we know how to maximize the return on staff travel, tightening criteria for approval, based on an assumption that the default engagement from now on will be digital?
  • Are we thinking about how to retool the measurement of engagement and meaningful cultivation activities in the digital world?
  • Are we adopting new tools and processes to move paper-based approvals to secure electronic signatures?
  • If there’s really a new spirit of pan-campus cooperation now, is it translating into something that will last, such as a university-wide data governance framework?

This disruption feels long because it’s unfamiliar and because we’re still in it. It’s hard to see it as temporary and fleeting. In truth, without taking deliberate action on the underpinnings of positive change, the disruption won’t last nearly long enough to make a difference.

Work-from-home productivity requires more than uninterrupted focus

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If each person on my team had a dollar for every time I stuck my head in their office for “one quick question,” they’d be set up for retirement. That would be pre-COVID, of course. Work-from-home means fewer interruptions (from the boss, if not from the kids), and that has some people feeling they and their teams are more productive now than they were in the office.

No doubt people are finding themselves better able to focus, better able to control how their discretionary time is used. Anyone who suffered in the high-traffic areas of open-plan offices is probably better off.

But how are we defining “productive”? Hovering over the inbox and leaving no email unanswered? Busy does not equal productive.

I feel we’ve done a good job in our shop along most dimensions of WFH. If I had to pick an area for improvement, it would be setting expectations and goals, and reviewing them regularly.

Cal Newport, writing recently in the New Yorker, says in the modern office, supervisors provide clear goals and leave employees alone to figure out how to accomplish them. This hands-off approach is appropriate for complex and creative office work, he says. Ambiguity and fluidity aren’t necessarily drawbacks, as long as they are balanced by continuous, informal course-correction. It’s this informal communication we’ve lost in the COVID era. (1)

These days, I’m much less likely to do the virtual equivalent of popping in. Not to overestimate the value of my unannounced visits, but these interruptions that contributed to distraction in the office were also the vehicle for a lot of clarification. The interruptions served a purpose, one we should replicate if employees are going to apply their newfound focus productively.

What was once informal (though disruptive) has not been effectively replaced by informal online interaction, which tends to require planning and a certain deliberateness. We have to be more deliberate not just about what we do, but how we do it, Newport writes. As organizations consider extending work-from-home into the future, beyond COVID, it is important that we diagnose these issues.

Newport suggests that our loosely-run organizations adopt some of the project planning tools of software developers, which provide transparency across the whole team as well as removing a lot of the ambiguity around which tasks have been assigned to whom.

“More structure, more clarity, less haphazardness,” he says.

Talk to your team and each individual about your, and their, expectations. Set goals and measures of success to ensure accountability. Regularly review goals and progress. Continuously reclarify at the team and individual level to maintain focus, and modify as needed to ensure progress is actually being made and that team members are engaged.

Remote work carries the promise of focus, but it will remain only a promise unless we ensure people are given a relatively small number of things to work on at a time and are able to go deep on them with a clear sense of direction.

  1. “Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed,” by Cal Newport, The New Yorker, 26 May 2020