The Work
I’ve followed with interest all the debate over Work from Office vs Work from Home, and I think all of them miss the point. The debate on RTO and WFH is a debate about the nature of work more than where it is done. But where it is done — or rather where the CEOs think it should be done — reflect how they think about the nature of the work they demand.
The debate on RTO and WFH is a debate about the nature of work more than where it is done.
I want to paint a picture of two work days…..
In the first, you wake up, you get breakfast, take your kids to school and hop on the freeway. An hour later, you arrive at an office. You park, you make your way inside, to your desk or (if lucky) an office. You plug your laptop in, wait for it to recognize the external screen and then go get coffee. On the way there you run into some co-workers, exchange idle chit chat.
Then it’s standup, and you try to stand, but at least two people are in remote offices and so you sit, and stare at a screen with headphones on. While waiting your turn you check out the ticket queue, maybe an over-night build for breaks, or maybe look at the latest metrics.
An hour later, you open VSCode (or whatever), pull changes from the code repo and start working. But wait, it’s lunch. And it’s pizza! By the end of the day, you’ve had maybe two hours of full productivity. Wired in, so to speak. Never quite in a flow state, but you manage. You’ve had three meetings, one hallway chat that was of semi-consequence, and then get in the car to head home.
Or
You wake up, take the kids to school, maybe go for a walk. You make breakfast. Maybe take coffee outside, enjoy the spring time weather. Then you log in to work, check the Slack channels, Zoom into standup and start. No one interrupts you, meetings are purely transactional and so fairly infrequent. Your manager checks in via Slack, but as everyone is asynchronous it’s easier for them to just pull a Jira or aha! report, or check Tableau or Amplitude. You can get into a good flow for a few hours, and log off at five or so, take the dog for a walk and enjoy your family. You’ve driven maybe ten miles, only for the school drop off. If that.
Transformative vs Transactional
In one scenario, the relationship between you and work is transformative. It’s a relationship built around management through vibe. Through inference. Through a drive for a common culture (whatever that means). The Successorization of leadership. The vagueness is the point, because the “work” so to speak is not the product produced, but a mutually agreed upon idea of what the “work” should entail. It’s work about working to then get to the point of working.
The glass walled offices, the open floor plans, the free food and ping pong tables and native plants serve to four wall the day. A simulacrum of home to mask the fact that all of this (gestures around a massive expensive corporate campus) is meant to distract from the fact that when it comes to “what you do” for the company, they often have no idea, so long as you do it there. Until there’s too many of you.
In the other, work is a transactional relationship. Its defined by a very strict set of agreements in terms of what you produce, why it matters, what happens if it fails, what the expectations are and how it fits within the over all conceit of a very tight corporate strategy. Where you do the work doesn’t matter as much as if it’s done, and done well. Your life is your own to live, but your work is the companies to own, and that relationship defines the culture. No fuzziness, no out of focus ideas about mission and vision. Just a definition: we make this to make money, you contribute in these ways, and we pay you for that.
Which do you think an executive likes more? The one where all the gloss and sheen and native landscaping can mask the fact that no one knows what the fuck they are doing? Or worse, why they are doing it? Or the one where the relationship is defined by a clear articulated long term strategy with short term executions? I think the answer is obvious.
The W in WFH/WFO
The WFH / RTO debate really is a debate over the relationship we have with work, and consequently work life balance. In one corner, work should be transformative, which is another way of saying your life is subjugated to the vagaries of strategic vision pointed toward a work product. In the other, it’s a transactional relationship, where the expectations are defined, but work is work, life is life; never the twain shall meet. Both can work in office, but only one really works when fully remote.
Which is why is WFH a threat. When the relationship between work and workers is purely transactional, the fluff that can hide poor leadership, bad decisions, or a company that shouldn’t be viable, doesn’t exist. Work from home inverts the onus of proof from employee to the employer. Now, the employee doesn’t have to prove their worth based on the fact that they are for all intents in a constructed world of “work” with permission. Now the company is inhabiting their space, and needs to justify why they should be allowed in.*
When the relationship between work and workers is purely transactional, the fluff that can hide poor leadership, bad decisions, or a company that shouldn’t be viable, doesn’t exist.
Where do I fall on this?
I love being around people, and I love that indescribable feeling of, what I call, “good people doing good things” in one place. But then in March 2020, I sent everyone home, and then everyone ended up dispersing. Suddenly, instead of being at the front of a room with a big screen, I was on Zoom, a tiny box among tiny boxes. Suddenly, the “management by walking around and talking” ended up me, wandering my house. And suddenly my team was ten times as productive, and demanded ten times as much productivity from management in terms of setting clear, articulate vision and helping them execute it. That was very difficult, as the cult of personality (and R.E.M. stories) couldn’t translate well in tiny boxes on screens.
There may have been a guitar at every desk, and musicians around, but that could be pointed to while management caught their breath and deliberated strategy. The “vibe” was a conversation filler. The “um” while you found the right words. But now, versus everyone coming into an office, the office was intruding into their home. That demanded a very strict statement of time and value.
I do think there is a value to everyone being together, but I think the value becomes much more purposeful and less “conversation filler.” Less “um” and more of a direct statement of intent and purpose.
There are other benefits to remote/WFH, including the ability to hire a broader swath of candidates, the avoidance of employee burnout by giving people healthy balance, happier children/spouses/pets and a healthier workforce (which is ultimately good for the bottom line).
But I think there is a bigger and broader reason I like it, as it relates to the work itself. The products we make are meant to live in the world. I think it’s a net benefit to have the people making those products make them within the world they will ultimately exist in. When lack of physical proximity serves as a fitness function to product development, the products are better. They are designed within the environment they will ultimately be used in.
The reality is, the office as a destination is anachronistic. The office as campus was a conceit, a way to make industrialization suburban friendly**. It was always a physical conceit to own the headspace of an employee through reification of the concept of “work”.
The employee now rents that head space out to the employer. Land lords don’t like being tenants. Too bad.
*It’s worth noting that a lot of the people advocating for return to office are people you wouldn’t want to hang out with anyhow.
** It’s not an accident that the first of the “corporate campus” parks — Bell Labs in New Jersey — is now the set of a dystopian television show about offices and work life balance (Severance).
