What We Have In Common
Clifford Geertz | What Does Zoom’s Return To Office Mean? | Give Them Offices
Quote of the Moment
As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This is what we have in common.
| Clifford Geertz
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What Does Zoom’s Return To Office Mean?
It’s actually laughable how the mainstream media extrapolates from a few high-profile announcements about organizations attempting to get workers back into the office to the ‘end’ of remote work. The newest cascade includes this air-raid-siren headline— Is remote work finally coming to an end? Zoom, White House call employees back to the office. — by Alexander Nazaryan, who adds some details lacking in the headline:
Last week, Zoom said that its own employees needed to come back to the office, at least part of the time.
“We believe that a structured hybrid approach — meaning employees that live near an office need to be on-site two days a week to interact with their teams — is most effective for Zoom,” a spokesperson said.
However, clicking that link doesn’t lead to a Zoom spokesperson saying that, but instead, yet another Yahoo article declaring remote work is dead. The actual source is this NY Times piece by Emma Goldberg, which similarly confuses readers with the title, Even Zoom Is Making People Return to the Office.
To be clear, the new Zoom policy is NOT a strict ‘return-to-the office, 40 hours a week, 5 days a week’ policy. It is a ‘structured hybrid’ model, where most workers would coordinate with managers and teams to figure out how to use time in the office to coordinate and interact with others, with a proposed baseline of two days a week.
This is quite like what is emerging as the new post-pandemic normal, as Nicholas Bloom has been tracking. A few months ago he said perhaps the smarted thing about hybrid:
“Well-organized hybrid is the best of all,” said Nick Bloom, an economist and remote work expert at Stanford. “The problem is that organizing it requires managers to have discipline.”
He tweeted in July that all evidence — office occupancy, transit data, and more — points to two days per week as the new baseline:
And he declares that, objectively, the ‘return to office push seems to have died’, although that doesn’t stop the blaring headlines.
One of the persistent arguments made for RTO is that distributed work leads to lesser outcomes. This however is belied by other research, as this case, reported by Derek Thompson (emphasis mine):
Modern scientific research is a team sport, with groups spanning many universities and countries. Groups working without face-to-face interaction have historically been less innovative, according to a new paper on remote work in science. For decades, teams split among several countries were five times less likely to produce “breakthrough” science that replaced the corpus of research that came before it. But in the past decade, the innovation gap between on-site and remote teams suddenly reversed. Today, the teams divided by the greatest distance are producing the most significant and innovative work.
I asked one of the co-authors of the paper, the Oxford University economist Carl Benedikt Frey, to explain this flip. He said the explosion of remote-work tools such as Zoom and Slack was essential. But the most important factor is that remote scientists have figured out how to be better hybrid workers. After decades of trial and error, they’ve learned to combine their local networks, which are developed through years of in-person encounters, and their virtual networks, to build a kind of global collective brain.
Despite growing evidence, most mainstream media people are more interested in apocalyptic headlines and quotes from other ‘pundits’ who simply aren’t up on new research.
A great example to the contrary is Michelle Goldberg, who dug deep into the issues in The R.T.O. Whisperers Have a Plan (emphasis mine):
Workers whose professional and personal lives have been transformed by remote work are ready to fight to keep their newfound freedoms. More than 90 percent of workers who can do their jobs remotely want at least some flexibility in where they work now, according to Gallup, and the ADP Research Institute found in a survey that nearly two-thirds of employees said they would consider looking for another job if asked to return full time.
She talks to a number of ‘return to office whisperers’ — consultants who help companies coax workers back into the office in disciplined hybrid models of various kinds (emphasis mine):
Most return-to-office experts share [whisperer Gleb] Tsipursky’s antipathy toward mandates, especially ones requiring workers to come into the office five days a week. “Mandates are a nuke,” Zach Dunn, a founder of the hybrid-work-technology company Robin, told me, “when a much less severe thing will work.” Top-down rules from executives make employees feel disempowered, and as the labor market remains strong — with nearly two job openings for every unemployed person — white-collar workers know they don’t have to accept conditions that don’t suit their needs. Business leaders have also tended to struggle with enforcing mandates because they don’t know whether to actually discipline people for defying them. “I don’t think the mandates have power,” Dunn says. “No one knows if they’re working or not.”
The ‘answer’ to workers’ reluctance is to dig into the different sorts of objections that different sorts of workers have. For some, it’s the commute and time away from home (like mothers of young children), for others — like people of color or LGBQT+ — it’s freedom from microaggressions and office conflicts, and many senior, productive workers are simply skeptical about the supposed ‘benefits’ of occupying a desk downtown instead of in their home office, where they know they are more productive.
Approaching the issues through psychology, rather than an ideological attack that promulgates the company’s rationale, is likely to have better results, as Goldberg details. And I love her close when she says the back-to-the-office whisperers are
foretelling a new world of work: one in which workers get the value of the office and the benefits of flexibility at home. “The pandemic is the largest change to hit the labor market since World War II,” Bloom says. “It turns out we’ve opened Pandora’s box, and what’s in Pandora’s box is pretty good. It’s a new way of working and living.”
Companies, they say, are simply in denial of the new reality. Many in-person activities have returned to prepandemic norms. OpenTable found that in-person dining late last summer exceeded its 2019 numbers. Air travel over Labor Day surpassed prepandemic levels, too. Only offices have remained far below their baseline — meaning workers have voted with their feet to demand that the workplace’s future will not resemble its past.
And all the graying CEOs who want to demand a return to the pre-pandemic status quo will need to adopt new management techniques — especially for first-level managers — so that Bloom’s disciplined hybrid techniques become the new norm, and every sensible company will work toward Frey’s vision of ‘global collective brains’.
But I expect the truly dumb headlines to continue unabated.
Give Them Offices
Very related to the previous section, Megan McArdle asks, Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office. Apparently, McArdle caught some flak from her ‘lazy girl jobs’ piece, so she’s intentionally taking the side of the worker and not our corporate overlords:
Let me now offer some advice to employers who want their workers back in the office: Why not give those workers offices worth returning to?
And I mean this literally: offices. Not open floor plans where people can hear every word, sneeze and gum-chew that comes from a co-worker’s mouth. Nor dispiriting cubicles that make them feel like rats in a maze. But small rooms with desks and doors that close.
[…]
Bosses are presumably well aware of these drawbacks, since so many of them arrange to have, you know, offices. Surely, they can understand how employees might find offices enticing, too.
Noting that office occupancy has dropped, so the cost of renting office space is falling:
Cheaper real estate presents an opportunity for employers with vision. Rather than try to threaten or cajole their way to the productivity-boosting benefits of in-person work, they can bring their workers together by giving them space to keep apart.