The Reasons Work From Home Will Destroy Businesses
The phrase gets overused, but it’s an unprecedented time for office workers. Over a year ago, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many industries to send their office workers home in a grand experiment of remote work. Most of these organizations had remote work forced upon them, and they begrudgingly accepted. As vaccines have become widely available, however, many employers are counting down the days until they can reopen their offices. Unfortunately for these businesses, many of their employees have stated that they would look for other work if they were forced to work in-office full time.
You don’t have to look very hard to find article after article describing how bad work from home will be long-term for businesses. Most of these argue that, while work from home was a good stop gap solution to keep workers going during the height of the pandemic, work from home would be a disastrous long-term work structure. Let’s take a look at a few of the ways that transitioning, or maintaining, full time work from home will destroy businesses.
Employees Won’t Be As Productive
Letting your employees work fully remotely will make it more likely that employees aren’t focused on work and make it more difficult to measure their productivity. How do you know if someone is working hard or hardly working if you can’t pop your head into their office? They may not even sit at their desk for eight hours at a time! They may not work through lunch! Managers won’t be able to properly manage without the beloved “walk around the office.” (Insert Office Space meme here.)
Unfortunately, for many co-location is a crutch for bad management practices. It has been for us in the past. Years before the pandemic, we resisted going remote because we didn’t feel like we could manage employees without being in the same office. We were flexible with remote work on a temporary basis, but full-fledged remote work scared us. Most of the businesses in our industry were already fully remote; we enjoyed being the co-located unicorn. To make matters worse, we ignored suggestions from employees that we go fully remote, which was a mistake. Like most office-based businesses, we had been co-located for years, and we were set in our ways. It was a familiar setup, and we fell into the “easy to measure whether people were working” trap.
What we failed to realize is that keeping track of when someone is at their desk is a bad proxy for what we really wanted to measure: productivity. We don’t apply this same logic to other parts of our lives. In school you still have to do homework and pass tests, even if you have perfect attendance. If you don’t have good metrics in place to tell whether or not an employee is producing what you expect, simply measuring whether or not they are in the office won’t tell you anything meaningful. Every role should have enough defined, measurable expectations that it’s easy to determine whether or not they’re productive completely apart from the amount of time they spend at their desk.
Productivity can also be affected by distractions. Work from home isn’t necessarily a solution to distractions, and, as articles like those mentioned above will surely tell you, it may make distractions worse. However, we had the complete opposite experience. While our employees may have enjoyed the easy comradery that comes from being co-located, many of them were frustrated about not being able to do deep work while at the office. Early on, employees tried shutting their office doors, but that didn’t stop the too-frequent pop-in from a boss or co-worker.
After a while, many began working from other locations, like a local coffee shop, just to avoid the distractions in the office. They were protecting their focus. (Like any tech startup that wanted to be the next Google or Apple, we had a ping pong table, a pool table, and some dart boards.) Work from home can give employees the space to deeply focus on their work, because remote communication should protect their focus.
As we wrap up talking about remote work and productivity, I’d argue that productivity may be the wrong thing to measure. We posted just the other day about how productivity isn’t necessarily progress. Anyone in your business can produce enough detritus to be considered productive, but that doesn’t mean that the activity moves your business closer to your goals. Heck, they may even be doing what you’re asking for, but you’re asking them to move paper from one stack to another. Remote work can cut through the “busyness” of business so that people can focus on the work that actually moves the business forward. But it does mean that we have to change our perspective on what productivity means and how we measure it.
Employees Will Work Less
If everyone in your company works from home, they’ll spend less time “at work.” Home is where all their stuff is, stuff that will distract them from getting the job done. You may wind up paying someone to play video games or take their dog for a walk over their lunch break. They might even go to the doctor during the day without putting in PTO!
How much time is wasted in a co-located office? How many birthday parties, forced conversations, and useless meetings are there on a given weekday? If employees work from home, the chances are pretty good that they’ll spend less time “at work.” That is to say that they’ll spend as much time as it takes to get the job done and not more.
What some employers see as “working less” is actually just cutting out the parts of work that aren’t really work: dealing with co-workers or bosses trying to steal your focus, appearing busy, etc. Without the physical distractions of co-workers, and more importantly bosses, people can get more focused work done. For salaried employees, does it really matter if it takes them less “time” to get their work done? They aren’t being paid for their time; they are being paid to produce something specific, something that should be measurable apart from time.
On top of work-based distractions to productivity, how many hours of focused work does an average employee really get done in an eight hour office day? A few hours? How many Amazon purchases are made during the work day? It’s not that employees are lazy or don’t want to get work done, but there’s a definite limit to how long we can maintain what some have called “deep work.” The kind of work that taxes our brains and requires us to be creative and solve complex problems. Our work day isn’t a linear trek of productivity. Stretches of this “deep work” have to be broken up by periods of boredom and recharge. It’s much more like a series of sprints than a marathon, and the eight hour office day ignores this fact and pretends that everyone can be “on” for eight hours at a time.
The hand wringing around not being able to track employees as well if they work from home hides an insidious truth: there’s no real distinction between salaried and hourly employees. If someone is being paid by the hour, then it makes sense to track how they are spending their time; they aren’t being paid for a specific output, but for their time. Salaried employees, however, are ostensibly being paid for producing a result. If that’s the case, why are managers so obsessed with tracking how they’re spending their work day? I said it above, but it bears repeating: if the only way that you know employees are working is walking by their desk and hoping to “catch” them doing something else, you have a broken system.
All of that isn’t to say that employers should stack more required outputs onto their employees just because they are salaried. It means that if we’ve assigned a reasonable amount of work, we stop caring so much about whether someone worked a 30, 35, or 40 hour week. Being able to get the real work done without the cruft of office life will leave everyone with more time to enjoy their families, recharge, and ultimately do a better job. Our article Work/Life Balance is a Scam, discusses this idea in a bit more detail.
Company Culture Will Disappear
If you close your eyes and listen hard enough, you can hear the panicked cries of escape rooms, paintball courses, and facilitators of all kinds. As remote work becomes more common, what will happen to the culture building businesses that have popped up around corporations like mushrooms around an old tree. If trust falls and team building exercises are a thing of the past, what happens to company culture?
Without seeing everyone in the office everyday, how will companies continue to grow and shape their culture? Without a water cooler, where will employees share hot office goss and pretend to like popular television shows? Without being forced to sign a co-worker’s birthday card, how will employees learn to grudgingly accept one another? Remote work threatens to destroy the very fabric of ad hoc work relationships and a very accidental company culture.
In all seriousness, every organisation has a culture, those written and unwritten rules that everyone lives by. How do we give and respond to criticism? How communicative do I need to be with the rest of the team? You get the idea. Some companies do a great job of purposefully creating a culture that feels supportive and inclusive, while others let culture form naturally. Of course, the latter has lots of room for error and could result in a toxic culture that hurts people. Surprisingly, this choice has very little to do with whether a team is co-located or remote. Both types of businesses can have a great or an awful culture, because creating a culture that people want to be a part of requires hard work and discipline.
It feels easier to create a specific kind of company culture when your business is co-located, but that’s not necessarily the case. The hardest work of creating a culture isn’t deciding what that culture should be or how it should be conveyed. It’s consistency. Whether you’re posting a message for your employees in an online thread or having an all-hands meeting, consistently reinforcing your values is the only way to build the culture you want. This doesn’t require a specific message format. It’s incumbent on a leader to not confuse what makes them comfortable with what’s right for their people.
Is the current culture of many companies even worth saving? If going fully remote costs us the toxic, hustle-driven, and often misogynist company culture of the past, I’d say that’s a win. Businesses have the opportunity to reshape their culture as they move towards remote work. We can create more inclusive, equitable, and inviting company cultures. We can be purposeful with our messages and hold everyone to better standards.
It Will Be Harder To Communicate
When all of your employees are in the same office, it’s much easier to communicate with them. If you need a piece of information, or you need to give feedback on a project, it’s easy to interact with team members. Remote work removes this ease of communication and replaces it with video calls, more emails, and message threads.
On the surface, it can seem like losing the opportunity for instant face-to-face communication would be a major blow. If we’re being honest, though, instant gratification communication is better for leaders and managers than it is team members. The reason we like this type of communication is that it fills our needs. However, for the employee, the constant threat of interruption makes it very difficult to focus and get deep work done. Removing this threat shows your team that you value their time. This leaves managers and leaders to learn better, more efficient ways to communicate.
It’s true that working remotely, especially when you’re communicating mostly asynchronously, requires more thought and discipline than popping your head into someone else’s office. But it protects the focus and attention of every employee. No one can take that away without the permission of the team member.
Communicating through message threads can be more difficult than in an in-person office setting, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be good communication.
Does work from home work for every company in every possible situation? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that we need an avalanche of pundits demonizing something that can help make employees and businesses better. There are very few business methodologies that are one hundred percent transferable between every company.
As I said earlier, it would appear that to more and more employees, working remotely is no longer a nice to have. Companies that don’t recognize this and adapt are likely to find themselves missing out on business-changing talent.