The class struggle takes different forms in different eras. In the Middle Ages, peasants revolted over their feudal dues (essentially their obligation to till their master’s soil for no pay). In the 18th century, weavers smashed mechanical looms. In the 19th and 20th centuries, workers struck over wages and conditions. Today, as the pandemic wanes, another flashpoint is emerging: whether knowledge workers should be herded back into the office or allowed to continue with their newfound freedoms.
Across the world bosses are issuing stentorian memos telling their charges that they are expected back at their desks — and workers are blanching at the thought of resuming the daily commute and working out their resistance strategies. Should they ignore the memos? Or drag their feet as much as possible — can’t March be pushed back to April and April to May? Or retire early? Or invent a new disability — fear of being loaded into cattle cars and forced to breathe other people’s disease-bearing breath?
Read more: Who will win the great return-to-the-office face-off?
This us-versus-them picture is perhaps a bit broad-brush. Some companies have embraced the work-from-anywhere future. “Why should I, as an employer, care as long as you can get the work done and you’re highly productive,” International Business Machines Corp.’s CEO, Arvind Krishna, asked. And some workers, particularly younger ones, prefer working in the office, either because they are short of space at home or because they want to draw a bright line between home and work. But it nevertheless tells us something important. The recruiting firm Korn Ferry points to data that suggest “the gap between C-suite and employee visions of the workplace continues to grow”: For example, 53% of US companies consider themselves either “fully office” of “mostly office” workplaces while 78% of knowledge workers want “location flexibility” and 72% are unhappy about their company’s current level of flexibility.
The hard reality is that there is a fundamental asymmetry of interests between bosses and knowledge workers. JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Jamie Dimon was good enough to say out loud what other CEOs were thinking: “People don’t like commuting but so what?” In other words, we pay you, we own you.
Bosses’ worries start with bums on seats: Having spent billions if not trillions of dollars collectively buying or renting real estate, they want a return for their investment. Leaving a desk empty is tantamount to burning money. But they also include fuzzy things like culture and creativity. How will new recruits be trained and acculturated into the distinctive ways of the company if the old hands are working from home? And how will companies continue to innovate if workers don’t bump into each other by accident and shoot the breeze over coffee? “Homeworking means that serendipity is supplanted by scheduling, face-to-face by Zoom,” says Andy Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England.
For their part, workers want to defend their quality of life. The period of enforced homeworking during the pandemic has not only allowed them to reconnect with their families, pets and neighbors. It has also taught them that they can be just as productive if not more so if they are freed from the time-suck of the commute and the petty distractions of the office. The data support this feeling. A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. survey in July 2021 found that US worker output per hour rose 3.1% in 2020, more than double the growth rate in the previous business cycle. A Harvard Business School study of the timeframe for the first and last daily communications of more than 3 million people from more than 21,000 firms during Covid lockdowns in 16 cities in the US, Europe and the Middle East showed the average workday lasting 8.2% longer, an extra 48.5 minutes. Wall Street banks posted record profits and revenues during the pandemic despite the perception that banking is the quintessential face-to-face business.
The face-off between bosses and workers will provide an interesting test of the relative strengths of the two groups. The pre-pandemic decades were glorious ones for bosses, as the twin forces of globalization and technology gave them access to millions of cheaper brains in the emerging world. In Silicon Valley, employers talked of “zero-drag hiring” — that is the desirability of finding workers with no family lives to distract them. In South Korea, the government introduced legislation to tackle the problem of “death through over-work.” But the balance of power is shifting back toward the workers. Labor shortages look as if they are here to stay, particularly in the knowledge economy. And the corporate world is divided between gold-plated companies like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, which tend to want their workers back full-time, and insurgents or, in IBM’s case recovering giants, who see flexibility as a tool for hiring talent.
Is there any way of avoiding a destructive tug-of-war through compromise and conciliation? The most widely touted solution to the problem is the hybrid workplace: Employees spend two or three days a week working from home and two or three days working in the office. Though this idea is popular, it is by no means as clever as it sounds.
For one thing, it doesn’t really solve the problem: Employees will simply fight over who gets the three days and who gets the two. For another, it will create a logistical nightmare. How do you make sure that workers don’t all take the same days away (usually Mondays and Fridays)? How do you deal with the split between workers who may be working remotely and dialing into conference calls while others are in the office? And how do you deal with the possible emergence of a two-track workforce — people who turn up every day and those who prefer to work at home? Studies showing that people of color and highly educated women with young children are relatively keener to work from home make the two-track problem even more troubling. If offices confer big advantages in terms of culture and creativity, why only go there for two days a week; and if they don’t confer those advantages, why go there at all?
A better solution is to engage in a more fundamental rethink of office work. The pandemic has encouraged management thinkers to ask some searching questions about white-collar work. What are offices for? Do they really encourage those famous “water-cooler moments”? And even if they do, are a few random encounters worth the candle of commuting? Are offices the best ways of delivering obvious corporate goods such as creativity and cultural continuity? Or are better ways available? (Two new books looking at these questions contain much food for thought: Redesigning Work by Lynda Gratton, a professor at the London Business School, and The Nowhere Office by Julia Hobsbawm, a networking entrepreneur.)
The pandemic has also unleashed a wave of creativity in the more far-sighted companies. Dropbox Inc is deliberately avoiding the hybrid model. Employees will get together at least once a quarter to work as a team and reinforce bonds but will do individual work from home. Under this plan the software company won’t have traditional offices but will instead have “studios” configured for meetings. Alphabet Inc is reconfiguring its offices on the assumption that employees will come to work to collaborate rather than to work in parallel with each other. There will be “team pods” featuring shared desks and central white boards. These pods will be flexible so that they can be reconfigured according to the size of the group. There will also be “campfires” where physical attendees will sit in circles interspersed with impossible-to-ignore vertical displays that allow remote workers to participate in the conversations on the same footing as people in the office. The software giant Salesforce.com Inc has signed a multi-year booking agreement for a 75-acre retreat set in the redwoods in Scotts Valley 70 miles south of San Francisco. The idea is to use the retreat to introduce new employees to the company’s culture and to hold team meetings.
Here are a few principles that should guide management’s thinking about reinventing the office for the post-Covid world.
Don’t impose one-size-fits-all solutions: Managers need to focus on what is appropriate for particular tasks rather than on targets for getting people back into the office. The office might be the ideal place for brainstorming sessions or performance reviews. But it is foolish to travel to the office to do something that you can do equally well at home such as processing information or reading scripts.
Don’t assume that offices hold the key to creativity: Offices can be as much about distraction as creative interaction — the noisy neighbor on the phone all day or the over-friendly colleague constantly dropping in to see how you’re doing. The open plan revolution — the attempt to encourage the circulation of ideas by knocking down cubicle walls and creating open spaces — has produced mixed results. One 2019 study of a Fortune 500 company that had abandoned cubicles for an open-plan arrangement found that face-to-face interactions fell by 70% while digital interactions rose to compensate. Workers seal themselves off from the hubbub of the borderless world by wearing headphones and communicating by email with people sitting in the same room. Offices are particularly hostile when it comes to generating the sort of deep concentration — what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” — that produces the most creative work.
Explore other ways of transmitting corporate culture: Senior figures tend to think that just because they learned their jobs by putting in 15-hour days and occasionally running into corporate legends in the lavatory that is the only way of preserving corporate culture. But there are other ways of transmitting the corporate DNA which don’t rely on long hours justified by the occasional serendipitous meeting: organizing boot camps either in the office or elsewhere, arranging regular social get-togethers, running mentoring programs both on- and off-line. Serendipity is too important to be left to chance.
The pandemic has demonstrated how quickly the corporate world can configure itself in the light of an existential shock. It would be a tragedy if companies ignore everything they have learned over the past two years in a rush to fill empty desks and get back to the (far from ideal) world before the virus struck.
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