Author: Frederick Pilot

A great post pandemic sorting among knowledge workers and organizations at hand.

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More than a year into America’s great work-from-home experiment, many companies have hailed it largely as a success. So why do some bosses think remote workers aren’t as committed as office dwellers? Recent remarks of numerous chief executives suggest the culture of workplace face time remains alive and well. At The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit this month, JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon said remote work doesn’t work well “for those who want to hustle.” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has called it “an aberration that we are going to correct as soon as possible.”

Source: Bosses Still Aren’t Sure Remote Workers Have ‘Hustle’ – WSJ

These comments demonstrate that for some organizations, gathering daily at a centralized, commute-in office (CCO) is an integral part of their cultures that cannot be easily erased in a single year. But it should be borne in mind that while CEOs have a large degree of influence on their organizational culture, it’s not absolute. Cultures are defined by all their members.

Now that their staff members have been freed of the personal time burden of daily commuting, many are understandably reluctant to reassume it. Knowledge organizations are now having to redefine their cultures for the post pandemic world going forward. They’ll undergo a sorting process as some staff depart for more virtual organizations while others who prefer working in a CCO align with CCO-based organizations — most likely those who live close by.

Certainly working in a CCO has its advantages, such as the social contact and in person communication with colleagues. But as commutes grow longer as metro areas sprawl and housing costs rise, the daily trip to and from a distant CCO becomes impractical where it might not be in small towns and less congested areas where knowledge workers can commute to the office by foot and/or bicycle. These less populated locales have also proven popular as CCOs closed down over the past year and knowledge workers sought more affordable and less congested settings, some in other states and countries.

Some knowledge CCO-based organizations may become the office equivalent of teaching hospitals where senior staff and managers closely interact with and supervise more junior staff and inculcate them in the cultural ways of their organizations. Others such as boutique consulting shops won’t have CCOs and attract as they have in recent years experienced people who can work as location independent team members and don’t require close supervision.

Washingtonian staff goes on strike after CEO Cathy Merrill’s op-ed about remote work – The Washington Post

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In Thursday’s op-ed, Merrill wrote that she had discussed the downsides of remote work with fellow chief executives and estimated that unofficial office duties such as “helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture” made up 20 percent of their work.

Source: Washingtonian staff goes on strike after CEO Cathy Merrill’s op-ed about remote work – The Washington Post

The public health restrictions that shut down centralized commuter offices (CCO) shone a spotlight on the high cost of maintaining an office-based culture. There’s the direct cost to knowledge organizations to keep all that brick, mortar and glass that house cube farms occupiable.

Then there’s the indirect commuting cost that has historically been externalized onto workers. The predominant management mindset pre-pandemic was staff chooses where they want to live. How far away that is from the office or how long it takes for them to get here Monday through Friday is not our problem.

But housing choice isn’t fully within the control of knowledge workers. High housing costs in metro cores have forced knowledge workers farther from them in search of affordable housing. That leads to longer commutes — borne directly by knowledge workers who sacrifice time that could otherwise be spent on health promoting activities such as exercise, sufficient sleep, and home prepared meals as well as in their communities and with their families.

Now that so many knowledge workers have been freed of these personal costs during the pandemic, their value has become very clear. They’re understandably reluctant to surrender the personal time they recovered. Particularly since their organizations have gone on functioning largely without the CCO for more than a year, thanks to advances in information and communications technology.

Work from home still reigns as offices plan to reopen – Los Angeles Times

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Human beings have not been fundamentally changed by the coronavirus, Dezzutti said, and will again seek one another’s company in busy metropolises.

“In history, there has been no pandemic or plague or natural disaster that’s killed off the city,” he said. “Our need to live and work in urban clusters, and the concentration of people and economic activity that occurs there, is just too strong.”

Source: Work from home still reigns as offices plan to reopen – Los Angeles Times

This analysis overlooks a powerful trend over the past two decades of information and communications technology decentralizing knowledge work out of urban centers. Also, high housing costs in urban areas and hours wasted commuting from more affordable outlying portions of metros that come with too high a cost for daily gathering in a centralized, commute-in office. True, humans are social beings and like to gather. But they most naturally do so in close proximity to where they live.

Rebalancing Irish residential settlement for information economy

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Like other countries across Europe, the hollowing out of once vibrant villages and small towns has contributed to wider social divisions, and scholars and public policy experts have warned that the split could become a major source of tension in Western democracies. Ireland’s proposal, “Our Rural Future,” is one of the most ambitious efforts announced in Europe to address the issue, prompted by the changes brought about by the pandemic. Among other things, it proposes legislation that would give employees the right to request to work from home, the establishment of a network of 400 remote-working hubs, and funding for better internet connectivity nationally.

Source: Covid-19 News: Live Updates – The New York Times

Pandemic hastens end of the centralized commuter office, heralds “Distributed Age.”

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A year after the coronavirus sparked an extraordinary exodus of workers from office buildings, what had seemed like a short-term inconvenience is now clearly becoming a permanent and tectonic shift in how and where people work. Employers and employees have both embraced the advantages of remote work, including lower office costs and greater flexibility for employees, especially those with families. Beyond New York, some of the country’s largest cities have yet to see a substantial return of employees, even where there have been less stringent government-imposed lockdowns, and some companies have announced that they are not going to have all workers come back all the time.

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“We believe that we’re on top of the next change, which is the Distributed Age, where people can be more valuable in how they work, which doesn’t really matter where you spend your time,” said Alexander Westerdahl, the vice president of human resources at Spotify, the Stockholm-based streaming music giant that has 6,500 employees worldwide.

Source: Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Manhattan May Never Be the Same. – The New York Times

Pandemic showed work can get done without centralized commuter offices

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Work, too, has been transformed. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of people around the world had to figure out how to get things done without going into the office. It turns out that for many white-collar jobs, this is not just possible; it comes with a variety of upsides. Commutes, to take one example, are unhealthy—they waste time and potentially increase our sedentary time, which is associated with many adverse health outcomes, and perhaps worst of all, driving is among the most dangerous activities we undertake each day. The competition to try to avoid long commutes distorts property values and can worsen inequality, as those with money pay extra to live near centers of work, while other residents can no longer afford to live there.

Source: Three Ways the Pandemic Has Made the World Better – The Atlantic

Pandemic forced organizational change, shattered Industrial Age boundaries defining knowledge work

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Pandemic social distancing restrictions served as an organizational change intervention, forcing knowledge industry organizations to reassess their cultures and beliefs about how work gets done. Pandemic restrictions virtually overnight switched off the gravity that pulls knowledge workers into a centralized, commute-in office workspace. As those restrictions are lifted amid mass immunization campaigns, knowledge organizations continue to confront these fundamental questions.

For most knowledge organizations, their cultures are strongly rooted in the belief work is being definitively performed when people are present in the office, reinforced by social connections made there and functions such as group lunches and celebrations. The organizational hierarchy is visually represented and reinforced in the office layout, with managers assigned corner and window offices and the rank and file in cubicles on the inside of the floor. A knowledge worker’s manager is clearly identified on the organizational chart. Clocks on the wall define when work is expected to be done.

A decade before the pandemic, author Dave Rolston in his 2013 book Four Dead Kings at Work predicted the death of these anchors that traditionally defined the boundaries of knowledge work in the Industrial Age: 1) One centralized workplace; 2) A single manager; 3) Performing a single defined job and pay grade; 4) At the same time each week.

The pandemic hastened their death requiring organizations to flex or abandon them. The elimination of the centralized office workplace and the erosion of the 8-5, Monday through Friday work time diminished the first and last of the kings, bookended by the daily commute. After more than year of foregoing commuting, knowledge workers have realized the enormous personal time burden it imposes, taking time away family, community, and health promoting behaviors such as adequate sleep, exercise and home cooked versus takeout and restaurant meals. Not to mention clothing and transportation costs.

This realization within knowledge organization has major implications for where knowledge workers will live in the coming decades and for traditional urban planning predicted on centralized settlement and development patterns forming sprawling metro areas requiring ever longer commutes.

What is the Future of Offices When Workers Have a Choice? – The New York Times

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Post-Covid for example, a Brooklyn or Queens resident who previously commuted to Manhattan may opt to work several days a week in a shared space within a 10-minute walk from home. Some large employers are already experimenting with satellite offices in the suburbs of cities in which they already have a downtown headquarters. The main office will remain important for most companies, but fewer employees will be expected to be there all day, every day…Offices will need spaces for specific tasks like focused work, team brainstorming, client presentations and employee training. And they will need to be more focused on individuals, even if these people work for a large company.

Source: What is the Future of Offices When Workers Have a Choice? – The New York Times

These predictions are spot on. In the coming years, knowledge work will be done in a variety of settings instead of a centralized, commute in office — a trend that began to pick up steam in the decade leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Working from home (WFH) that got a giant boost due to pandemic public health measures to tamp down indoor gathering and support social distancing will continue. It will likely be most prominent in less densely developed exurban and rural areas where walking or cycling to a shared neighborhood office space is less practical. Homes in these areas with dedicated office space and served by fiber-delivered advanced telecommunications services will be in demand.

In more densely developed urban and suburban neighborhoods, shared office spaces within reasonable walking and cycling distance should prove popular once vaccines have developed herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2, particularly among households lacking dedicated office space or whose makeups aren’t ideal for WFH.

Traditional office spaces will remain relevant, but repurposed from regular daily workplaces to support the group activities that Dror Poleg lists in his article. These workspaces can be equipped with smart presentation rooms that can’t easily be emulated for interactive large group activities — at least not yet — with online real time platforms like Zoom. For smaller organizations with smaller office space footprints, conference facilities can support these functions. Finally, these co-located activities don’t have to occur on a set basis but only when the need presents such as kicking off a strategy or project or working through a challenge that requires a focused, group effort.

Going virtual requires rethinking how knowledge work gets done

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Transitioning to a truly remote workforce requires a top-to-bottom rethink of how business is conducted on an everyday basis, with an emphasis on asynchronous communications. This is the single most difficult thing companies face when making the transition from a “meetings-first culture to a writing culture,” Hansson said. “Most newbie remote companies thought remote just meant all the same meetings, but over Zoom,” he said. “That led to even more misery than meetings generally do. You have to make the transition to an asynchronous writing culture to do well as a remote company.”

Source: After embracing remote work in 2020, companies face conflicts making it permanent | VentureBeat

As knowledge workers and their organizations have de-emphasized the role of the centralized, commute in office (CCO) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the problem of too many online meetings has cropped up under the moniker of “Zoom fatigue.” Essentially, it’s creating an electronic office where working is defined by real time presence. As David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp (formerly 37Signals) explains, there is more to shifting from a CCO-based organization to a virtual one than where the work gets done and communication about it occurs.

The other factor in going virtual involves not just becoming more location agnostic. It’s also becoming more independent of when those activities are performed. Not everyone needs to be working and communicating at the same time, i.e. 8-5, Monday through Friday as established in the 20th century Industrial Age economy. As Hansson notes, that requires moving away from real time spoken communication in meetings to written communication.

And that’s a good thing. Writing forces people to more carefully think through their thoughts and ideas and what it is they want to communicate. It also provides a written record of challenges and progress on a given project. As more knowledge organizations become virtual, this is an important cultural step in the transition. And it has broader social and environmental benefit, according to Hannson:

Aside from operational efficiencies, remote working also benefits the environment, something that became abundantly clear early in the global lockdown. NASA satellite images revealed an initial decline in pollution in China, but as the country gradually resumed normal operations, pollution levels increased accordingly. Much of this change can be attributed to traffic, and Hansson feels remote work is one way to help the planet while improving people’s mental health.

“I’m less interested in how we might benefit [from a greater societal push to remote work] as a company, and more interested in how the world might benefit as a whole,” Hansson said. “More remote means less commuting. And for a large group of people, a better, less stressful life. That’s a massive step forward for the planet and its inhabitants.”

Silicon Valley adjusting to distributed work model

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Prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper sees significant but diminishing value in face-to-face work, and believes that as technology improves, more work will go remote. He and many others foresee a hybrid future for the Valley in which the type of work, type of company, and workers’ personal preferences determine who’s in the office — or even the Bay Area — and who isn’t.In-person meetings might take place weekly, monthly or quarterly, in shared workspaces or attractive destinations. “You basically offset those costs by rather than spending it on rent you’re spending it on travel expenses for that quarterly meeting, which ultimately will be a lot cheaper than maintaining an office and forcing yourself to hire people who are local.”

Source: Does remote work kill innovation? Silicon Valley’s big question