return to office

Return to office debate and organizational communications culture

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The return to office controversy has been about where knowledge workers work. Due to the sunk cost fallacy, anchoring and present cognitive biases, the management of many knowledge organizations — particularly those with substantial investments in office real estate –– believe that should be in the office most of the week. On the flip side, many knowledge workers disagree, arguing knowledge work is more virtual and doesn’t fit into a factory paradigm of set daily shifts measured by office attendance.

But the issue isn’t merely about office space and cube farms and the commute to them. The larger underlying issue is how work gets done and specifically a knowledge organization’s communication culture. In some organizations, the culture is spoken. Staff talk with each other in real time, in conference rooms, break rooms, and in offices and cubicles. In others, it’s more written and asynchronous, expressed in collaboration and project management platforms, emails and chats.

Organizations whose communication culture is more real time spoken-based are naturally more office centric whereas those that are not are more virtual. The former tend to have more difficulty with non co-located work. Calendars get overloaded with meetings since those are the primary means of communication and decision making. This situation existed for decades before the public health restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many organizations out of the office. Knowledge workers complain it’s difficult to get work done in a day filled with meetings; the dominant speaking communication culture interferes with more concentrated thought work. When done virtually, it leads to “Zoom fatigue.”

In some organizations, management frowns on staff informally chatting among themselves, thinking they are not getting any work done. Ironically, these same organizations argue staff must be in the office to bump into each other and talk informally, contending these activities promote collaboration and serendipitous creativity. So there’s a bit of a conflict going on between these expectations that requires organizations to engage in some honest introspection. If real time, spoken communication is truly at the core of an organization’s communications culture, management must determine how that’s best done: where, when and how often and for what purposes.

For those organizations looking to become less office-centric, their challenge is to build a communications culture based more on asynchronous written communication and select the collaboration and project management platforms that best support it.

At its core, return to office debate about redefining knowledge work

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Personal computing and communication devices and the Internet have decentralized knowledge work and made the daily trip to centralized commuter offices (CCOs) obsolete. Knowledge workers discovered its irrelevance and enjoyed recovering personal time spent commuting during the public health social distancing measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now as some organizations demand they return to the office (RTO) on a set number or designated days of the week, many are understandably rebelling.

But the real debate isn’t about showing up in person at the CCO on a prescribed number of specific weekdays. It’s about redefining knowledge work and specifically how it’s done and managed.

In his 2013 book 2013 eBook Four Dead Kings at Work: The Decentralization and Blending of Work in the 21st Century, author Dave Rolston predicted the imminent death of the four primary tenets or kings of knowledge work in the Industrial Age:

  1. Set job duties;
  2. Managed by a single manager;
  3. Performed at one place (the CCO);
  4. At the same time (8-5, Monday-Friday).

This definition worked well before 1990 when the tools for knowledge work were at the workplace and not portable like today’s personal devices, online databases, collaboration platforms and more recently, AI chatbots.

Now, organizations and knowledge workers must adjust to the post-Industrial Age environment. That entails determining when co-located work is beneficial and when it isn’t. It also requires assessing the communications culture.

When knowledge workers were regularly in the CCO, meetings — both scheduled and ad hoc — were frequent. Even too frequent for many knowledge workers. They express a real time, speaking-based communication culture.

To fully utilize today’s communication and collaboration tools, knowledge organizations must adopt a more written, asynchronous communication culture. They also must find the right balance between this and spoken communication and when knowledge workers must be assembled to discuss and sort through complex and difficult issues that benefit from synchronous, in person discussion. That is driven more by business needs to complete reports and projects and reach decisions rather than the daily calendar.

It’s also critical that knowledge organizations keep their missions clearly communicated to staff so they can see how their work makes a meaningful contribution as this article in today’s Wall Street Journal implies.