Working from home: trading long-term damage for short-term gain?
The seductive lull of local minima
People have been able to work from home (WFH) for a while now. It was usually availed on an ad-hoc or limited basis. Then came the pandemic, and with that came lockdowns. To comply with directives, 5-day WFH came into existence. The pandemic persisted longer than anticipated. The interim measure soon became the norm. As the pandemic is “declared” to be over, there are calls for people to return to the office. This is proving way more arduous than expected.
WFH is convenient and suits everyone. But does it really benefit anyone?
Noble intentions
Around 15 years ago, offices supplied only desktops. There was no real concept of WFH. Gradually these were replaced by laptops. With this portability, remote work became possible. As software improved, secure connectivity became easier — going from tokens to seamless sign-on. WFH started to pick up. Around 4 years ago, many offices were changing their layout to “smart-spaces”, a nod to the idea that employees with laptops could work anywhere in the office floor, office building — or home.
Being able to work from home has many benefits:
- Flexibility
- Saves time wasted sitting in traffic
- Allows certain chores to be attended easily without the palaver of taking 1/2 day leave etc.
Flexible working is today advertised as a benefit or perk, and rightfully so.
Excess consumption
When used judiciously, WFH stimulates better work-life balance and engagement. When over-used, it becomes an addiction.
WFH is seductive. No surprise then that employees don’t want to return to 5-day WFO. Not that anyone is asking them to. Management themselves are loathe to return to the 5-day office routine!
Those who thought post-pandemic life would revert to the pre-pandemic “normal”, have had their naivety was shattered. A new “normal” is taking shape. While some organizations have famously demanded a return to 5-day work from office (WFO), others are struggling to get employees to commit to even 2 days WFO.
Extended or permanent-WFH has created several issues.
- Productivity has declined — considerably; by an order of magnitude in my anecdotal observation. What took hours takes days, days push to a week, weeks to a month etc. Everyone looks busy. There’s a lot of activity — but very little productivity.
- Communication quality has declined: the “richest” channel of communication — face to face, is substituted for inferior “remote” interactions. With this, opportunities for serendipitous interactions are also lost. These can be very useful, especially when things are complex, intricate or require innovative approaches.
The health and productivity of a team is directly proportional to the quantity and quality of communication channels. Extended or permanent WFH attacks both these fundamentals.
Other follow-on effects have also transpired.
- New staff almost never get to know their full office “family”. With different people WFH on days, or permanently even, new staff lose the opportunity to build relationships and take longer to integrate in the organization.
- Employees working mostly from home, become insular over time, leading to the local maxima problem. They deliver their individual work fine, but the state of disconnect created by extended WFH means that the team does not even fully become the sum of its parts.
- With work now being available 24/7, the distinction between work and home is blurred, leading to psychological and physiological implications.
Systemic impacts
As employees favour convenience, employers counteract by turning towards economics. Many have reduced office spaces or relocated offices into smaller premises. Can we blame them? Not entirely. If employees are demanding extended WFH, why incur costs for unused office spaces?
If we take a systems view, we see two interdependent parties, forced to operate in the new normal, each trying to make sense of it in a way that maximizes their own gains.
The illusion of the local maxima strikes again. Both parties maximize their gains (convenience, economics) in a tangible manner. This “optimization” comes at the expense of the system (workplace production).
The actors who were meant to collaborate are now pulling in opposite directions. The system is stressed. As second order effects play out, it will reach breaking point.
The world is more connected than ever. Remote work is more prevalent than ever before. What can be done at home, can also be done remotely — and also in another country! It’s not difficult to foresee offshoring become the nett result of extended WFH. With the leaps AI is making, the offshoring this time may be to robots rather than humans!
Ultimately, this is a management problem (and decision).
Some organizations have mandated a (return to) 5-day WFO. This has received backlash, and not entirely without reason. Lingering COVID variants are one; the mandate being too “radical” is another. Reconditioning people is hard, and has to be done with tact and timing.
Others are trying hybrid options, only to be let down by an inadequate understanding of systemic implications and practicalities.
Consider an organization that requires 2-days WFO. Anticipating lower occupancy, it’s already reduced its premises lease. Teams are told to have their choice of 2 office days. Monday/Friday are de-facto write-offs. That leaves 3 weekdays. Whichever way it’s cut, at least 1 day will see demand outstrip supply. People will struggle to find desks and meeting rooms. Their office experience will be worse than ever before; they will want to WFO less and less! Vicious cycle.
Then there are organizations who don’t want to fix it. Perhaps they don’t have an appetite for managing this change. They let things drift and either don’t make any WFH policy, or don’t enforce it. The short-term gains of extended WFH (convenience, rental costs) are too seductive to think about longer-term systemic dysfunctions.
What began as an interim measure has established itself as the norm — a fluid, nebulous and seductive norm that suits everyone in the immediate term but benefits no one in the long run.
