Who Shattered My Workplace?

If the one-size-fits-all workplace is gone forever, what should yours look like?

I remember a time when we all went into the office, had laughs in the break room, shared office gossip, and most weeks, went out for happy hour at least once with my co-workers. Lifelong friendships developed, relationships bloomed and faded, and we all generally liked the rhythm of the workweek. What the hell happened?

In my recent LinkedIn post (link) featuring WSJ’s coverage of Eric Schmidt’s now-retracted comments regarding Google’s laggard AI efforts, blaming their work-from-home (WFH) policies, a wealth of people commented, revealing how complex it is to make even the most basic of generalizations, as I was trying to do:

For the type of work that benefits from working together, things go better when people are together working.

In the comments, someone disputed that there was research supporting my opinion (there is plenty), but others pointed out that the research as a whole is quite mixed. But that’s not a very useful answer if you’re trying to lead a company. Here are a few tips for navigating this complex topic.

Whither the Workplace?

As I note in Chapter 2 (The Origins of Bad Managing) of my recent book, UNMANAGED (link), our basic notions of what a workplace is date back a century or more to the Industrial Era, its factories, and the advent of a daily wage, which many employers took to mean that they “owned” the employee’s time, and anything that the employee did to avoid work (by taking a break for lunch) or god-forbid, leaving the property, was a form of “shirking” or stealing the employer’s money. In some ways, the workplace was a prison of contractual servitude, not something we should idolize.

In reality, my workplace memories of the 1980’s are flawed. Even then, pre-internet, our sales team was rarely in the office. Technically, they should have been there when not visiting the client or prospect, but results mattered more, so the best of them were more like Black Swan sightings than an office fixture. And yet, they still did meet in the office regularly in meetings I often attended — I was amazed how much I, a newbie, was learning from just hearing them talk, swapping stories and anecdotes. Presence, for those who did not need presence, did make a difference.

Most situations today also have this sort of nuance to them. In the software technology world, where offshoring, nearshoring, and subcontracting have long been prevalent and practical models, they always seemed to benefit from greater levels of connection and presence. In the 2000s, when I led Sapient’s Los Angeles office, we had 400+ people based in Gurgaon, India, working as part of our West Coast team. Frequent communications between the two regions were essential, of course. Still, physical presence seemed to make things go better, and so we flew people in both directions to increase the connections between the teams, also bolstering understanding. It seems presence, in obvious and subtle ways, matters.

But that was then. Today’s work-from-home workplace threatens to shatter this idea. Is the workplace a nostalgic relic? Do we need to get together?

Key Question #1: What workplace presence versus autonomy does our work demand?

For your kind of business and the type of work you do, what is the optimal mix of presence versus separateness? When do your people need to be together, and how do we make that a reality?

Famed organizational researcher Henry Mintzberg showed, over fifty years ago, that optimal organizational form follows function: that the highest-rated firms of any given “type” (business function) had many commonalities in terms of their form and key functional elements, including the types of systems, the nature of hierarchy, and the ways in which they actually managed and developed people.

Let’s add “workplace style” to that list — the shape of your work should be a factor in the shape of your workplace. At least what’s left of it.

We regularly conduct pod-design workshops for agencies and other high-innovation organizations. In their case, a key factor is the needed level of interdependence, the degree to which work is optimally performed with a lot of alignment (mutual awareness) and collaboration. These things don’t happen by accident and require at least some form of work process and key rituals…and presence. You can run your business without workplace presence, but innovation and collaboration will likely suffer. Our client’s teams are always surprised at how much more effective (and enjoyable) their work is with some added presence in their workflow and process.

The other side of interdependence is autonomy. WFH can enable greater autonomy (assuming you can limit interruptions), boosting the probability of productive flow. You can also do business without enabling autonomy, but other things like productivity and morale suffer.

Your company improves when you optimize the mix of interdependent and autonomous activity.

It also appears to be an imperative these days. Research that I did a few years ago on knowledge work and AI at RAND suggested that the last high ground of human knowledge work will be based on a mix of collaborative alignment and individual autonomy. This is the recipe for what humans can do that AIs cannot, at least in the near future. This is the work you need people for, where you can differentiate what you do.

And presence is powerful stuff, and a little bit, well placed, can go a long way. Toward the end of COVID, we ran a large Alignment Workshop for a pharma company’s 80-person diverse product marketing group for a recently approved drug that was a true game changer. They struggled to get everyone aligned in the chaotic remote and WFH environment. But with just a few days of presence, using exercises designed to create intersubjective dialog, the group gained massive alignment as to what they should collectively focus on, an alignment that likely would have taken months more to accomplish in a remote model.

How to decide? Leaders may just need to enable and guide rather than dictate. One of our favorite clients, Starmark International (case study here) in Fort Lauderdale, developed a novel team-driven model: teams decide when they should meet (or not) to best get the work done. Starmark re-built its whole office space to enable these drop-in-drop-out meetings that would include remote participants. This is the same sort of awesome re-thinking of un-managing that one can find in CEO Ricardo Semler’s books, Seven-day Weekend and Maverick.

Key question #2: How does presence affect our ability to attract and retain talent?

Businesses also operate under constraints, and the availability of talent is among the biggest ones for knowledge work organizations. Knowledge workers, especially in technology and creative industries, have more choices than ever. Not only have the job markets been strong for a while now but are increasingly pervasive, even global, and high-quality internet access enables both a work-from-anywhere opportunity and a work-for-anyone choice of employers. Remote workers have been a reality for decades, but telepresence is increasingly seen as equivalent to actual presence, at least by employees.

Though some may argue with this point, there is a trade-off with remote workers, especially when the work is better performed with presence. We know of an agency whose top creative recently decided to move several hundred miles away. While the actual work of a creative might be performed as well (or even better in some cases) in the seclusion of separateness, the manager’s role needs consideration. In UNMANAGED, I argue that one of the most critical managerial responsibilities is mentoring and socialization in the workplace. I believe that we socialize and mentor better in person.

While companies can extend their reach further now, employees are also growing more distant. Some are de-prioritizing work as a central aspect of their life or increasing their emphasis on non-work life by moving to preferred climes, closer to nature or family. While it is increasingly common, it is not universal, and many others will still find value in having a workplace, a community of sorts, and even a place-based sense of belonging. We seem to forget the many people who were all too ready to leave the house and return to the office after COVID.

Dismissing the need for presence has long been a business guru topic du jour, yet we have natural forces that draw us together; we are communal creatures, highly pro-social, and, in most cases, enjoy the feeling of connection with each other. Why would we want to fight that arguably quite natural instinct? Even Jason Fried, the subversive management guru and author of Remote: Office Not Required, has a preference for having some level of in-office presence (link)

Key Question #3: Are you driving them out of the office?

A sad and ugly reality emerged from the LinkedIn comments, which I can only paraphrase as “I hate your stupid workplace.” Yes, not all workplaces are good, fun, or even healthy. How is yours? Do you have people who make your workplace worse? Michael Lebowitz, CEO of SPCSHP (fka Big Spaceship), a company with a great culture, stated his policy as “Nobody is good enough to be an asshole.”

Indeed, toxic workplaces exist mainly due to genuinely toxic people, often in management or other positions of control or responsibility. Even more common are somewhat subtle effects of the wrong managerial style, usually due to a lack of skill and understanding rather than malice. These include:

• Use of dominance, usually vertical dominance of the more senior upon the more junior, including being overly directive, inappropriately critical, dismissive, or condescending.

• Over-managing, or micro-managing, is disempowering and productivity-killing, creating additional non-productive noise.

• Bias. Managers are almost always bad at assessing their people. An eye-opening study sponsored by Deloitte showed that the most significant factors in employee assessments were personal, not work or achievement-based.

• There are more.

It is probably also worthwhile to note that these workplaces also suffer from a form of innovation suicide — the combination of bias and dominance in a group setting can be toxic to genuinely innovative thinking. Diversity of thought and the power of different viewpoints are some of the first victims of mismanagement in the workplace. Some commenters noted that the slower pace of remote communications enabled them to both form and make their voice heard, something which felt more difficult for them in the workplace. RAND’s early, ground-breaking work in strategic decision-making showed that slowing the conversation down increased the beneficial effect of diverse thinking, creating better results.

One last note: don’t ask your managers how good your workplace is or isn’t. As revealed in the Deloitte study, the best test was to ask your workers to rate this statement: “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” I suggest you also ask them what could be better.

Assemble Your New Workplace: Hybrid is likely the new normal.

Start with hybrid. It gives you all of the options, and you can adjust from there. Extreme choices, like ditching an office entirely, are harder to undo. Make your office a great place to be hybrid, like Starmark did, optimized for the experience of being together when together is needed.

Make some basic rules. Your workplace rules need not be draconian or numerous and would likely fail if they were. Instead, set your sights on a few simple ideas:

1. Alignment and connection. When should we be together, in terms of teams, squads, and the whole organization? Defining productive and healthy togetherness is crucial in building whatever sense of community and belonging you want. Being together can also be virtual — and probably will always be for some — but not everyone will feel like they belong when they are always distant.

2. Autonomy. How do we ensure that people are as productive as possible when we are apart? The proliferation of tools like Slack means that even when hidden away in my Utah log cabin, the whole company can interrupt me at will. Set some rules for “Day Structure” to enable the productivity that WFH can unleash.

These are the cornerstones of the new “Way” in your workplace. You should re-align (or establish) values and a vision for your now-hybrid business that aligns with the above behaviors. This will form the core of your organization’s new culture.

Jack Skeels, CEO of AgencyAgile, is an award-winning author, entrepreneur, think-tank researcher, and leadership consultant. Jack’s work and company combine decades of business research, cognitive and behavioral science, and practical techniques learned from working with over 200 organizations into simple lessons on managing today’s complex, project-driven organizations more effectively. To learn more about how to make yours a better organization, visit AgencyAgile.com

Jack’s new book, UNMANAGED, a Gold Medal winner for “Independent Thought Leadership” at the 2024 Axiom Business Book Awards, is available now on Amazon.