Dave Rolston

Aligning work, outcomes key challenge facing knowledge organizations — not office attendance

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The state of knowledge work has reached an accelerated transitional phase of virtualization and decentralization, beginning with the broad adoption of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the 1980s and 1990s. This megatrend has been sped up by the public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s knowledge work is largely digital, obsoleting analog highways and office buildings. It’s also less tied to what author Dave Rolston dubbed the four dead kings of work: one job duty, supervised by a single manager and performed at a set time and location. Knowledge organizations must now quickly plan how to navigate this paradigm shift relative to the mission and needs of their organizations. They can start by asking themselves these basic questions:

  • To what extent can the organization’s work be accomplished virtually and asynchronously? Who does the work and how is it organized?
  • What work requires co-located staff working in real time and how does this support the mission? How often, where and how and most importantly what are the expected benefits and outcomes?
  • Is the organizational culture like that of a think tank where staff regularly convenes in person to spitball ideas and white board or Kanban them? Or is most thought and planning work done individually?

For many, it might be a mix of this type of synchronous joint brainstorming and async, not bound to time and place, considering the best and most creative thought work often gets done and ideas and solutions to tough challenges bubble up when doing other activities such as exercising, walking the dog, housework and even sleeping.

Should they host two to four week seminars like that of a university where newer staff are tutored by more senior staff? What physical spaces would be most economical for these? Many organizations will find they don’t need dedicated spaces; smart ad hoc co-work locations will do.

It’s imperative organizations address these questions rather than adopting an arbitrary schedule wherein staff commute to an office location a certain number of days or on designated days of the week, referred to as “hybrid.” As coffee badging is showing, this approach isn’t sustainable. Staff morale will suffer if team members feel they are going through the motions without purpose other than to show up at a designated office site. It also fuels resentment, with staff feeling that their personal time is being wasted by unnecessary commuting.

Underlying these questions is a bigger question with major implications: Is the Industrial Age employment model outdated for today’s knowledge work along with its wage and hour requirements and state mandated workers compensation insurance? Does it really make sense with so many knowledge workers working in their own homes rather than a centralized commuter office?

The same question applies to employer medical benefit plans given reform of individual medical insurance in 2010 with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act designed to make it easier for individuals to purchase their own plans. Both it and state workers’ compensation laws could benefit from a thoughtful review and updating.

Workers’ compensation insurance mandates on employers could be narrowed to apply only to occupations that require on site duties that pose clear injury risk, saving knowledge organizations money spent on premiums. The Affordable Care Act mandate on large employers to offer group medical benefit plans conflicts with reforms aimed at boosting non-group plans. For now, getting around the mandate would require knowledge organizations to rethink whether their staffs should be classified as employees going forward given the change in the nature of knowledge work.

Some knowledge organizations — information technology companies in particular — tend to hire and fire en masse. Instead of employing, they should consider fully migrating to using contract staff and self-employed people and putting key personnel on retainer. They can be formed into teams to work on short term projects of a year or less as well as longer term initiatives. These outcome based models of knowledge work offer a great adaption to Rolston’s dying kings of work and offer knowledge organizations greater flexibility and significant overhead savings.

Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, suggested knowledge organizations – which he termed “decision factories” in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article – can avoid the cycle of mass hiring and firing by restructuring into flexible teams to work on defined projects rather than hired as permanent employees based on a written job description. That coincides nicely with both Rolston’s assessment of the changing nature of knowledge work as well as its accelerating virtualization.

“Coffee badging” symptom of need to redefine knowledge work

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As some employees are being called back to the office, many are subtly protesting by returning to the office for as little time as possible, Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs in Boston, told FOX Business. “Coffee badging is when employees show up to the office for enough time to have a cup of coffee, show their face and get a ‘badge swipe’ — then go home to do the rest of their work,” said Weishaupt. His firm, Owl Labs, which makes 360° video conferencing devices, did a deep dive into the trend’s data. The new trend of “coffee badging” at work is apparently in response to companies’ requirements that more employees return to the office. “Our 2023 State of Hybrid Work report found that only about 1 in 5 workers (22%) want to be in the office full time, with 37% wanting hybrid work options and 41% preferring to be fully remote,” said Weishaupt. 

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/coffee-badging-job-trend-business-leaders-high-alert

This phenom is a symptom of the struggle to redefine knowledge work that has been decentralized out of commute-in offices thanks to information and communications technologies that emerged more than four decades ago with the innovation of microcomputers, personal communication devices and the mass market Internet. The momentum and urgency of which increased considerably with the public health measures to slow the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some organizations have resisted the decentralizing trend, insisting their staffs must commute to centralized offices to collaborate in person. But “coffee badging” shows not everyone is on board with the idea – or that any meaningful collaboration is taking place. Particularly if they are showing up to work in a cubicle when they could just as easily get their work done in a home office and avoid wasting an hour or more a day commuting.

The redefinition of knowledge work will require deeper thought in the ICT and post COVID-19 era that has fundamentally altered it. It is no longer about showing up at a set location at a predefined time schedule — two of Dave Rolston’s “dead kings” of work. The new definition will must center on outcomes and goals and how information is developed and communicated to further a knowledge organization’s mission.

Hybrid work is not the future, says Meta’s former director of remote work | Fortune

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Hybrid, Dean told Fortune in an interview, isn’t actually an even split between remote and in-office work, despite bosses who insist it’s a huge step forward. Plus, she adds, the office is never going to be a solution to existing problems of productivity, innovation, or creativity. “Those are all how to work problems, not where to work problems,” she says. “The office won’t solve these problems. New ways of working will. This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done, but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”

Source: Hybrid work is not the future, says Meta’s former director of remote work | Fortune

That’s Annie Dean, VP of Team Anywhere at Atlassian, a distributed work policy at the software firm that encourages asynchronous, flexible work.

In 2011, author Dave Rolston announced the death of four “kings” of knowledge work and specifically how it’s performed: 1/ In a single, dedicated job role; 2/ Managed by a single manager; 3 /At one time (8-5, M-F). And finally, 4/ At a single location: the centralized, commute in office (CCO).

That fourth king is going through violent death throes as seen in the context of the hot debate over working from home vs. working in the CCO. It was about to climb onto its death bed prior to the public health restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s now laying upon it and drawing its last breaths.

While those in Rolston’s school of thought are proclaiming that king is dead, many organizations insist it isn’t, essentially shouting “Long live the king!” As noted in the Fortune article, those exclamations are driven in large part by the cognitive bias of sunk cost investment, with organizational leaders believing they must somehow recover the cost of CCO purchases and leases even if the CCO is no longer necessary to fulfilling the mission. We need that king to stay alive at least until that significant investment is recouped.

Dean is correct describing hybrid work in CCOs part of the work week as office-centric since the CCO remains as the primary workplace. (Similarly, the term “remote” work keeps the CCO at the relative center). Dean is also correct in framing the debate over hybrid working in the larger context, more than simply where knowledge work gets done as Rolston wrote more than a decade ago. As Dean notes, it’s how it’s done with modern day tools including microcomputers, the Internet and various communication and collaboration platforms. Those tools have disrupted, decentralized and transformed knowledge work as well as our traditional notions of it. It’s natural to want to return to the familiarity of co-located working rather than make a committed effort to adapt to something new.

Disruptive change is understandably uncomfortable for many knowledge organizations. Knowledge organizations themselves will be transformed. Like the traditional location of where knowledge work is done (the CCO), in the near-term knowledge organizations will no longer define themselves by their metro location, campus or high-rise headquarters.

Dean touches upon a major adaption knowledge organizations must surmount. It’s also one of Rolston’s four dead kings: doing knowledge work at the same time. With its decentralization out of CCOs comes working more asynchronously. This has been a big challenge for many knowledge organizations that have a spoken communication culture primarily dependent on real time discussions as the usual way of assessing information and making decisions. That has led to widespread complaints of back to back video meetings and “Zoom fatigue.” To work more asynchronously, knowledge organizations will have to shift their communications culture to rely more on written communication and reflection rather than frenetic jumping from one meeting to another. Knowledge work doesn’t have to be crazy and it’s not the emergency room as the authors of this book advise. Good knowledge work benefits from calm thought.

Survey shows shift away from traditional employment “larger than previously recognized.”

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Overall, we estimate that the independent workforce is larger than previously recognized: some 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population in the United States and the EU-15 countries are engaged in some form of independent earning today. More than half of them use independent work to supplement their income rather than earning their primary living from it. The majority of independent workers, both supplemental and primary earners, pursue this path out of preference rather than necessity—and they report being highly satisfied with their work lives.

This from the executive summary of a just issued survey by McKinsey Global Research illustrates the erosion of the traditional concept of employment, anchored by what author Dave Rolston described in his 2013 eBook Four Dead Kings at Work as the crumbling pillars of the traditional notion of working for a living: holding one job, located at one place, being there at the same time every day and reporting to a single manager.

As I wrote in my own eBook Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century, a driving factor is the decentralization of knowledge work due to the proliferation and maturation of information and communications technology. Before, knowledge workers had to work in a single location – a commute-in office – because that’s where the tools they needed to do their work – typewriters, telephones, photocopiers, in-house central computer systems – were. Even though obsoleted, this outdated model remains in place and continues to define employment. If you don’t commute to an office to work 8-5, Monday through Friday, you’re not in the traditional employment arrangement. Or “trapped in a cubicle” as the McKinsey Global Research report put it in the introduction.

We’re currently in a transition between this Industrial Age model of knowledge work that pays for time worked to one based on work projects and milestones completed. Time worked is fundamental to the legal definition of employment in the United States that keeps the Industrial Age model largely in place. It’s one of Rolston’s dying kings: one timeframe (8 hours a day, 40 hours a week) along with working in set office location for a single manager. But it won’t go away quickly as the tension between the old and the emerging models plays out.

ICT, declining role of CCO forcing redefinition of knowledge work

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The maturation and proliferation of information and communications technology (ICT) is upending the concept of knowledge work. During the late Industrial Age, knowledge work meant working Monday through Friday 8-5 in a commute-in office. If a knowledge worker made the commute and showed up every workday, 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week — ipso facto they were performing knowledge work. As Dave Rolston wrote in his 2013 eBook Four Dead Kings at Work, these strictures of time and place are breaking down.

In the process, that collapse is forcing a redefinition of knowledge work to mean, well, work and specifically the work product — and not a daily trip to appear at a centralized commuter office (CCO). After all, that daily commute adds no intrinsic value and in fact extracts significant personal cost from knowledge workers that can reduce their morale and interest in what really counts – their work projects.

The current time is one of transition away from Rolston’s dying kings of the traditional workplace. Take, for example, the growing buzz on workplace flexibility and telework or virtual/remote work. It represents a shift away from the CCO and illustrates the tension between the traditional CCO and new, emerging ways of performing knowledge work beyond the CCO.

The CCO took many decades to be established and knowledge organizations have invested enormous sums in them. So even though ICT has effectively obsoleted them by distributing knowledge work outside the CCO, they won’t disappear overnight. But their role will fade as time goes on. In the meantime, a new definition of knowledge work will be formed that is independent of the CCO.