Rewind
571 days ago, we made the difficult decision to shut our offices and shift to remote work because of the coming COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I thought we’d all be back in the office in a few weeks. Hindsight is 20/20 and, holy cow, was I wrong.
A little over a year and a half later, we are in the midst of a wave of the highly contagious Delta variant. I contrast where we are now with where we were a year and a half ago. Before the pandemic, almost all our people were in the office every day. Now, a majority of our people are not co-located. It’s a big shift. The shift happened fast, and the old normal hasn’t returned.
This is a unique dilemma within the American economy. More than 60% of workers in the United States have no choice over their place of work. A majority of workers must be in a factory or some facility to be able to do their job at all. These folks are constantly in my thoughts as they bravely continue to do their jobs in uncertain conditions.
But in the knowledge economy, we have a lot of discretion around where we might work. At Atomic, we had the luxury to do what was safe 18 months ago. As I look at where we are as a services firm in the fall of 2021, I wonder: what will we choose as the future of work?
A Division of Concerns
When we talk about the future of work, at a high level I believe we are talking about two things: what the employee wants from the future of work and what business needs.
I’d like to explore this division of concerns briefly at a more meta-level. Sometimes, the concerns of employees and businesses are aligned. An example: an employee wants to get paid for services and expertise. Businesses want to make money. Employees perform work that adds value to the business. The business makes money, and talent gets paid. There is symmetry in the relationship. Everyone wins.
Sometimes, these concerns are in tension. An example: An employee would like to work 32 hours a week but maintain the same salary they receive from the business. However, a business needs 40 hours a week from the employee in order to maintain profitability. These two positions are fundamentally in tension. Talent is unhappy and less productive because they don’t receive what they perceive to be a benefit. Business isn’t happy because talent is less productive. No one wins.
The reality of the matter is that the relationship between the two is not divided but rather symbiotic. Yes, there can be tension, but the two are intertwined, not necessarily in opposition. Not recognizing this fact or believing the relationship to be a zero-sum game is to deny long-term realities. A business that takes advantage of the employee will lose over the long term. Employees who bleed the business dry will find themselves without a job over the long term.
The reality is they need one another to survive. The division isn’t actually a division, but the reality of a connected relationship in which both need to win for each other to succeed. With regard to the future of work, businesses must find a solution in which everyone wins.
What Employees Want from the Future of Work
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, less than 5% of people in the US worked from home more than three days a week. As of April 2020, as many as 37% of Americans were working from home full-time. If 60% of American workers were unable to work from home (as stated above), then almost all knowledge workers were working from home during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As pandemic restrictions have decreased with the introduction of vaccinations, work has not resumed as it was before the pandemic. In a McKinsey survey of 800 executives, the majority of respondents did not believe they would be able to get back to co-located work as they did pre-pandemic. Leaders across many industries have opened up offices for optional in-person work and have not seen people return.
Why aren’t people returning? I can’t say for sure. As a small business leader and manager, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the impediments are.
I think the answer lies in what workers need. In a very informative video from the Evergreen Journal, Lisa Picard of EQ Office expounds upon a “Worker Hierarchy of Needs” a la Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As we discuss what workers want from the future of work and the workplace, this hierarchy of needs offers interesting insight.
As with Maslow’s Hierarchy, Picard’s Hierarchy starts with base needs. Workers have physiological needs like being able to breathe, eat, sleep, drink, and have balanced homeostasis. They also have safety needs. Those are needs like having enough money to live, provide for their families, maintain a healthy lifestyle, etc. It’s reasonable to expect a job in a market economy to make contributions toward these needs. Any job that doesn’t contribute to these needs is probably not a job at all.
If businesses want workers to come back to the office, they’ll have to contribute to these base needs by making co-located work safe. And they need to do this not just during this pandemic, but in all future pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our understanding of many aspects of workplace safety that were previously ignored, unexamined or unknown. The best places to work in the future are going to have to be the safest places to work.
As we get further up the pyramid, the needs become more complex and nuanced. The needs at the top of the pyramid are not supplied in the short-term, but rather over the long term. I’d venture that social and self-esteem needs supplied by work come from what we typically refer to as “good” jobs. We find friends and get some social needs met through the organization in which we work. Self-esteem grows as we become competent and confident in our roles, achieve excellence in work, and gain the respect of our managers and peers.
At the very top are growth-oriented needs that only the best jobs provide. The best jobs provide creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, durability, and adaptability.
I believe that this hierarchy is very relevant to the future of work. As I interview, hire, mentor, manage, and lead people within a small company, I see people who want to be socially connected. I see people who desire to be seen by others, recognized for the good work they do, and fulfilled by the work they do with their team.
However, as I look at this hierarchy of needs and tie it back to a discussion about the future of the workplace, I have more questions than I have answers. I wonder if workers pushing for more time to work remotely are thinking mostly about the lower half of the pyramid. As we move toward the growth part of this hierarchy of needs, I have a hard time understanding how the isolation of working from home serves the needs of the worker. I have a growing concern that we are making short-term decisions with a long-term impact on our careers and growth potential without thinking deeply.
As a manager at a small services firm, I’m concerned that the current zeitgeist about co-located work is driving decisions largely by base needs on this pyramid. I question whether we are making present decisions with a long-term view toward our growth and achievement. As a worker myself, I want to be as close to the person managing me and the people I’m managing. I want connection, and I want to be seen by my manager. I want to see the great work that those I am managing are doing.
What Business Wants from the Future of Work
Now let’s pivot to look at what a service firm needs to get from the future of work and the workplace. I’d say most service firms need to be profitable. That’s really the base need. But a firms’ existence isn’t just about money. There are higher-order needs like doing good, interesting work for clients who are satisfying and fulfilling to work with. This results in high retention and high engagement from employees, which guarantees the firm little turbulence and continued existence. So how can the future of the workplace impact the personified “happiness” of the firm?
I believe the answer lies in what types of services the firm provides to clients. A spectrum of services a firm could provide is outlined in David Maister’s seminal work “Managing the Professional Services Firm.” (Quick aside: It was actually an article by Nanda and Narayandas at HBR that got me thinking about the role of workplace in work at a professional services firm. Well worth the read.)
Services at a professional services firm range from commoditized tasks with little complexity to highly specialized, state-of-the-art problem-solving. In my experience, the more the service provided is commoditized, the easier the service is to deliver as a remote team. If I’m leading a team that is making updates to a massive Ruby on Rails system, we can do so with very little communication and collaboration. Conversely, the more advanced and innovative the service, the more we require a co-located, collaborative environment.
Interestingly enough, a research group at Microsoft examined the effect of collaboration, communication, and innovation on their 61,182 US employees as they transitioned from a co-located workforce to a remote workforce over the course of 2020. The results of that study are fascinating. Their study showed that remote work caused the collaboration of workers in and across teams to become static and siloed the longer the team members were remote. They also found a marked decrease in synchronous communication such as chat and video calls. They saw an increase in the use of asynchronous communication, which dropped efficiency and effectiveness broadly.
I don’t think it’s a leap to state that a hallmark of early-stage innovation work is the need for synchronous communication across teams and team members. Making individuals siloed and communication networks static is not conducive to high-value, ambiguity-taming work. A firm that wants to specialize in providing services that are more innovative, experimental, and state-of-the-art will want its employees to have a high degree of co-location on a regular basis.
A firm providing more commoditized, rote services may honestly not care if folks are co-located or not. In fact, they might prefer a fully remote workforce, seeking to cut the expense of the workplace and broaden the pool of recruits. A group of highly experienced individuals providing a commoditized service probably won’t gain much from being co-located.
Conversely, a team with varying experience providing high-value innovation services will require the close collaboration and growth opportunities that come with co-location. Those less experienced people will need exposure to new folks across the organization to learn and grow. They will need to build trust, take risks, and get outside their collective comfort zones together. I’d venture that growth and innovation simply don’t happen in isolation.
Fast Forward to the Future
Going forward, I think we’ll see an increased bifurcation in the future of service firm work. Some firms will go fully remote and may get pushed into more commoditized, low complexity work. I believe innovation service firms will return to co-location out of necessity as workplace safety returns. If they want to do truly complex, innovative work, they will need to further close collaboration and synchronous communication in and across teams.
What about the employees? I believe we’ll see a split there too. People who want to be involved in innovative projects will be the first to return to the office. They will want to lead, to have their managers see them doing great work, and to contribute to the growth of others directly. At top firms, that will not happen from the isolation of home. Those employees will be confident that their lower-order needs are already taken care of. They’ll be focused on stretching toward those higher-order needs focused on building social excellence, mutual respect, increased creativity, and growth. Others will opt to focus on their own core strengths. They will appreciate the focus and efficient execution that comes from the isolation of home. They will end up doing more rote, repetitive, defined work for firms focused on providing commoditized services.
Neither of these options is right or wrong. And certainly, there will be a spectrum between extremes. But my hope is that many in our industry take a long-term view of their short-term decisions and understand what road they are starting down as they define the future of work and the workplace.
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