Witness the many Return To Office initiatives requiring workers to be back in company buildings at least a few days a week. Stated rationales for RTO include:
Collaboration, including scheduling and decision-making and communication, is easier and more effective when employees are in-person.
New employees receive better training and mentorship from their peers in-person.
Company culture and morale improve when people are physically together.
Spontaneous “water cooler” conversations involving people who wouldn’t normally encounter each other in their usual round of remote meetings can spark new ideas and deepen organizational relationships and weak ties.
You can imagine there are other reasons companies might want employees back in the office — reasons they might not want to say out loud. For example, it could be easier to monitor employees’ productivity and work habits when the bosses and workers are in the same building.
Let’s go ahead and assume that at least some of the leaders calling for RTO have positive intent and furthermore that some of the points above could be valid. Remote communication is a very recent phenomenon from the perspective of human evolution so the claim that in-person collaboration is more effective could have merit.
We communicate with each other with many layers of nuance including vocal tone, facial expression, hand gestures, body posture, physical distance, etc. When we are physically together we experience each other through multiple senses with extremely short delays. But the current suite of collaboration tools flattens us into tiny 2-D videos that show just the face and partial upper body with relatively low-fidelity audio and frequent lags.
So the claim that in-person collaboration is better than current options isn’t outrageous. Recent research supporting the value of in-person interaction includes the effects of the pandemic on learning loss in US schools, the negative effects of online lecture availability, and the benefit of local collaboration in academic learning.
Conversely, people really, really like the option to work remotely and value the autonomy and commute time savings that remote work offers. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that remote work saved over an hour of commute time each day. That is a crazy amount of wasted time (and energy, a lot of it generated by fossil fuels) that isn’t remunerated. Furthermore, the NBER found that some of that time saved is spent working!
All of which means the case for RTO is mixed. Working together in-person seems to have clear benefits but working from home does too. So “hybrid work”, where employees spend some amount of time physically co-located and spend the rest working remotely, is an obvious compromise.
Hybrid work has to be more than designated office days
The simplest hybrid work policy is “everybody comes in on these particular days of the week”. Simplicity is the only nice thing about this policy, otherwise it’s not fabulous:
It’s ham-fisted: requiring people to come in reduces the autonomy over their own time that people clearly value.
It doesn’t cover all employees: companies have taken advantage of remote work to hire people geographically distant from long-term company real estate and to reduce their office footprint (and thus expense) below levels that would comfortably accommodate everyone simultaneously.
It’s inefficient: while working in-person with certain people is useful, it’s not like you need to see every person in the company when you go into work. Requiring everyone to be in the same building at the same time when only a fraction will actually collaborate together on any given day adds up to a lot of wasted commutes.
It doesn’t solve the problem: A lot of the people you need to collaborate with will be at different sites, or different organizations, producing the “I went to the office and spent all day in online meetings” effect – the worst of both worlds.
Remote tools can get better
First, let’s acknowledge that current online meeting systems are a huge improvement over conference calls, which are themselves miraculous compared to any previous remote communications technology in human history. It’s easy to forget we live in a time of unprecedented technological capacity, albeit very unevenly distributed.
We can imagine better tools without disparaging the ones we currently have. So far, the “metaverse” has been risible hype, but the impulse to provide a more immersive collaborative experience is completely understandable. By all means, keep making fun of Mark Zuckerberg who deserves all the jeers he gets and more, but let’s cheer the people quietly working to make remote collaboration better. I would gladly trade a small screen of tiny people in boxes for an immersive 3-D view of whole people with accurate hand and facial gestures, high-quality lag-free audio, etc., but without a ridiculous and bulky headset. I hope some smart folks figure this out!
Coordination tools can get better
Ham-fisted as it is, forcing people into the same building every day mostly solves the “coordination problem” between the people at that site. That is to say, if you and I work in the same location and I need to talk to you, I can just walk over to your office or cubicle and there you are – because you have to be there just like I do. Coordination problem solved!
We can do better. The coordination problem is an information problem:
Inputs:
Who needs to talk to whom about what
Where are people located
When are people available
When they can be in the office
Outputs:
When we shall meet
Where shall we meet
Will it be virtual or in-person?
Since we are supposedly living in the Information Age, it’s disappointing how often scheduling a conversation boils down to something like this:
I send you an email with some free times I picked from my calendar at random.
Some time later you notice the email and open up your calendar and cross-check your free times with the ones I sent you. None of them work. You pick some random free times from your calendar and reply to my email with them.
Some time later I notice the email and pick one of the times you sent and reply to you.
In the time between you sending the email and my reply, the time I picked was booked. We go back to step 1, missing a small piece of our souls.
There are applications like Calendly that supposedly solve this problem, but in practice they just move the effort all on one person, the person without the Calendly account who gets to cross-check their calendar with the other person’s free time. The solution is not for everyone to have Calendly accounts, though Calendly probably disagrees.
Here’s what I really want:
I know I need to talk to you about something, so I tell my calendar I want to talk to you about that thing.
My calendar talks to your calendar. Our calendars know:
When we are free.
Where we are going to be when.
Days we could go into the office if someone was there to actually talk to.
Other options for where we could meet if we happen to be near each other.
The only thing you need to do is indicate if you are willing to talk to me. The calendars take care of the rest:
Picking a time when we are both free and scheduling the conversation.
Creating the online meeting or booking the meeting room or co-working space. Or just picking the coffee shop where we could get together!
Letting us know the days we need to be in the office and by when.
Bonus points for minimizing commute times and putting multiple in-person meetings at the same location on the same day.
Nobody has to play calendrical Tetris and we only commute if there’s an actual in-person conversation to be had at the end of it. And this should work even if we are using different calendar applications. Standards and protocols are useful for a reason.
I can imagine a similar function to help people get together just to be in-person:
Each person indicates days they would go into the office if they knew it wasn’t going to be a ghost town.
The system now knows which days could achieve “critical mass” if only everyone willing to come in knew it – and tells them!
Current calendar systems work mostly like semi-shared spreadsheets with cells we all have to fill in by hand. They should be focused on helping us have the right conversations in the right ways with the least amount of commuting and fuss.
Policies can get better
Better tools can't compensate for bad policies. Between “everyone works at home” and “everyone comes into work five days a week” there are lots of possibilities and policies should be designed after figuring out what concrete outcome they are supposed to achieve. “Everyone geographically near a company office comes in on these days” is not the same outcome as “There are lots of opportunities for in-person collaboration and spontaneous conversations while maximizing autonomy and flexibility”. If the latter is what you say you want, then think much more expansively about how to produce that outcome and then form your policy.
Here are some suggestions:
Choose collaboration tools that help people discover opportunities to get together in person and help people use them to full effect.
Incorporate co-working spaces into real-estate planning. Office space is going to be cheap for the foreseeable future and co-working offices can be a low-cost option for occasional in-person collaboration that can be deployed wherever there are geographical clusters of team members.
Demand more from your productivity suite provider – calendars could be much smarter!
Demand more from your online meeting provider – tiny people in boxes can’t be the last word!
If you are working for a productivity tool company, take the need for in-person collaboration seriously. The arguments over RTO can disguise the fact that lots of people genuinely like working in-person with their peers and there is a growing body of evidence that it can produce better outcomes. Productivity tools need to get a lot smarter about geography and available working spaces (including bookable co-working options).
Hybrid work should just be work
Being in-person is not optional for lots of jobs. But we now know it is optional, at least some of the time, for lots of other jobs. Large numbers of people worked from home for the last three years and work got done. It no longer makes sense to presume that unqualified “work” means going into an office and anything else needs to be qualified as “remote” or “hybrid”. Commuting is a big expense, including wasted time and environmental costs, and that expense needs to be justified either by physical necessity or some other equally compelling reason. Absent a good reason, people shouldn’t have to do it.
It could absolutely turn out that working in-person some of the time has significant tangible benefits. Great! Let’s help people to do that with tools and policies that still provide autonomy and flexibility.
Furthermore, people who really have to be physically at work should be compensated for the time and expense of commuting. This is where better tax policies would help. This website explains that you can’t deduct your commuting expenses, but gets the justification for that state of affairs exactly wrong:
You cannot deduct commuting expenses no matter how far your home is from your place of work. Consider it like this: Everyone needs to get to work, employees and business owners alike.
Ok, I considered it like that and it’s totally wrong, it’s obviously empirically false and we all know it. Let’s consider harder and then come up with tax policies that encourage less pointless commuting and compensate people who need to commute because of the nature of their jobs.
Hybrid work is just work without pointless commutes.