You wake up. You’ve got some time to gulp down a little food and make yourself presentable, so you do that, half-heartedly. You walk like a zombie to the bus stop. A bus comes along and you squeeze inside it.
Two hours later, you’re at the office.
Your colleagues greet you. The bus ride has drained you out even before your day properly starts, but despite the lack of cheerful energy, you greet them back, just because you want to be nice. Years of practice has helped you perfect the fake laugh, so you throw around a bit of that and start “working” at 8:30.
For the next 9 hours you sit at your desk and pretend. Your caffeine-induced working spree does not feel productive at all. In fact, you’re only producing 4 hours worth of real work. At 5:30, you pack your bags and head home. You spend another two hours in the bus. Now you just want to collapse on to your bed.
The next morning you can start worrying again about missed deadlines, and how you’re wasting time not getting anything done.
Now imagine this: You wake up at 9 (because you’re not a morning person). You don’t have to waste an iota of energy thinking about and picking what to wear to work, because you’re not going to work today! Instead, you take the time to prepare and enjoy a good meal. You’re ready and fresh come 10:30. You walk into your home office (your tiny desk!), log into your computer, and start working. And this time you’re not faking it.
Your colleagues know that you start the day at 10:30, because you’ve communicated that in advance. You’re well rested, so it’s easier to concentrate. You’re at peak productivity at this point, so you keep going until it’s time for lunch. After that, you get a 20-minute power nap (your colleagues won’t ping you on Skype because they know this too!) and you start working with fresh energy again.
At 5, you feel like going for a run, so you do that. You get a fresh start again at 7 and go on until 10. You take a little rest, and get to work again, but this time on that cool freelance gig you’ve been excited about. When you’re done, you still have time to read the book you’ve been enjoying for the past few days.
Too much wishful thinking? I don’t really think so. This might seem like a stretch for the ordinary knowledge worker, but successful companies have been effectively using remote workforces for years. The idea of allowing employees to work from anywhere while adjusting their work schedule in a way that fits their personal lives is not new at all. Although massively influenced by the gig economy, this is not some hipster freelancing thing — these are secure jobs in prominent companies.
Two good examples I can think of are Automattic and Basecamp. Automattic, the company behind WordPress on which 27% of the world’s websites run, has a fully distributed team spread across 53 countries. Basecamp, the popular project management software maker, has a similarly distributed team with employees from 26 countries working remotely. Automattic has been around since 2005 and is now valued over $1 Billion. Basecamp is even older. The company was founded in 1999, and proudly claims authorship to the book Remote: Office Not Required.
Companies like Yahoo have vocally opposed the “working from home” model. Their reasoning: employees are more collaborative and innovative when they are together in an office.
The collaborative innovation card has been played enough times. While there is certainly a need to bring together teams to work together from time to time, forcing them into collaborating won’t do any good. In fact, the Open Office concept which was supposed to facilitate easier collaboration, and which, largely thanks to Silicon Valley, was embraced by companies around the world, is now being frowned upon as more and more businesses understand that we don’t collaborate the way we expect to. Interestingly, both extroverts and introverts claim that constant unplanned interactions with co-workers make them less productive.
What the open office, or in fact any office, is inherently good for are distractions.
Distractions, and the endless headache of context switching
For most people, especially the creative types (and by that I mean people across diverse skill sets, like writers, programmers, designers, engineers; anyone whose role requires thinking deeply about problems they have to solve) long periods of uninterrupted focus is essential to get meaningful work done. It doesn’t help when every five minutes you’re being dragged into a meaningless chat or an unproductive meeting. Or when you are constantly drowned in the endless chatter of your coworkers.
These distractions force you to take your mind off what you’re really supposed to be doing. This shift between unrelated tasks is known as context switching, and it will leave you daunted. It can take as much as 30 minutes to get back in full gear and continue the original task.
A sensible question, then, to ask is: does work really happen at work?
And if the results are out there for everyone to see, why aren’t more companies moving to, or at least experimenting with, remote teams? Capital costs and operational expenses will be much lower because an office is not required; employees won’t have to waste time and energy commuting; everyone can easily stay connected via the Internet; and employees will get more done because of all this. Seems like a pretty good business case, right?
Apparently it’s not as simple as that.
Fear of losing control
Bad managers fear the loss of control more than anything. Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, says the managerial entitlement complex hurts companies more than the millennial entitlement complex does. “Paying someone a salary doesn’t mean you own them,” says Jason. Unfortunately, they are more bad managers than good ones, and when it’s time for work they wouldn’t let employees out of their sight.
Even after decades of urging businesses to embrace Theory Y style of management (which Douglas McGregor, in his book The Human Side of Enterprise, articulated as the “participative style of management which assumes that people will exercise self-direction and self-control in the achievement of organisational objectives”), we are still pathetically bad at letting go of our egoistic insecurities.
Of course, not all employees can be trusted to be accountable and to get work done with minimal supervision. After all, years of obsessive parenting and an education system that spoon-feeds information have left many of us precariously dependent. But then, should you have hired such employees in the first place?
Companies should hire smart, self-motivated people and leave them alone. Allowing people to organize their own work to be done from wherever they want is a great first step. That the remote approach makes communication difficult is but one of many myths. When managed correctly, a remote workforce brings in many benefits than drawbacks.
The Future of Work is not here yet. To get there, managers should seek to remedy their paranoia, and we should stop making paranoid people managers.
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