Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash

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Beacon NY 2020–08–29 | Minimum office (aka remote work) is still the biggest meme out there. No surprise.

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Quote of the Moment

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

| W. Edwards Deming

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Minimum Viable Office

Pinterest cancels huge SF office lease in unbuilt project, citing work-from-home shift | Roland Li reports on Pinterest about-face:

Pinterest terminated a massive 490,000-square-foot lease at San Francisco’s unbuilt 88 Bluxome project, citing a shift toward more remote work amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Minimum viable office also means saving a fortune on real estate costs.

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Working From Home: Why the Office Will Never Be the Same | Claire Cain Miller thinks workers are happier WFH:

America’s office workers have been miserable and burned out for a long time. The expectation of long hours at the office has been particularly hard on parents — especially mothers. Women, young people and people with disabilities have for years been among those on the forefront of pushing for more freedom in where work gets done.

Perhaps not surprisingly, employers have offered many reasons they can’t give people quite so much autonomy. People can’t be trusted to get their work done on their own, they have said. Clients expect in-person, round-the-clock service. Running into co-workers in the hallway is sure to spur serendipitous ideas, right? And, people need to attend meetings, as well as meetings to prepare for those meetings and meetings to debrief after them.

But in the last few months, it has become clear to everyone what was really going on. Corporate America just didn’t want to change. “All these things could be done yesterday: This is the reality,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan.

It’s also clear that America’s workers actually like the new way of doing things, even amid the challenges of the pandemic. In the survey by The Times and Morning Consult, which polled 1,123 people who have worked at home these past few months — representing the range of jobs, demographics and income levels of America’s remote workers — 86 percent said they were satisfied with remote work.

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It seems to be reducing stress levels. Even in a time of extreme stress over all, people who have been working from home were more likely than not to say they were less stressed than before about both work and home life. Roughly 60 percent said working from home had made them more able to focus on their health; saved them a lot of time each day; and made them feel more connected with their families.

Three-quarters said their productivity was either the same or improved. It doesn’t take a survey to tell us that interspersing work with rejuvenating activities like walking or resting often boosts energy and creativity.

Workers are already thinking about ways they can keep this going after it’s safe to return to the office. Only one in five said they wanted to go back full-time. Nearly one in three said they would move to a new city or state if remote work continued indefinitely, which companies like Zillow and Twitter have already said they would allow. Some people have moved to less expensive places, or to be closer to family or nature.

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However, the backlash against minimum viable office is starting, as in Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t So Great After All, as executives want to get people back in the office:

Months into a pandemic that rapidly reshaped how companies operate, an increasing number of executives now say that remote work, while necessary for safety much of this year, is not their preferred long-term solution once the coronavirus crisis passes.

“There’s sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of executives saying, ‘This is not going to be sustainable,’” said Laszlo Bock, chief executive of human-resources startup Humu and the former HR chief at Google. No CEO should be surprised that the early productivity gains companies witnessed as remote work took hold have peaked and leveled off, he adds, because workers left offices in March armed with laptops and a sense of doom.

They will come up with all sorts of reasons why we need to go back to the office, even if they are spurious.

Go read it.

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Remote work in the age of Covid-19 | Slack research reports:

Of the nearly 3,000 knowledge workers we surveyed between March 23–27, 45% reported working remotely. Of these, more than half (66%) say they’re doing so because of Covid-19 concerns, while 27% say they “normally” work from home.

Remote work snapshot

| 45% of knowledge workers surveyed work remotely

| 66% of remote workers are doing so because of Covid-19 concerns

| 27% of remote workers say they “normally” work from home

While the number of remote workers is certainly high, 55% of those surveyed are still going into work. There are several possible explanations. For one, stay-at-home orders have rolled out piecemeal across the country. As of March 26, 21 states had instituted stay-at-home directives. That number jumped to 30 by March 30, and 42 as of April 7. The number of remote workers has undoubtedly grown as more states have urged people to stay home.

Undoubtedly? Man, that’s an understatement.

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In Exploring the effects of trust, task interdependence and virtualness on knowledge sharing in teams, researchers D. Sandy Staples and Jane Webster advise companies to structure teams and tasks so that collaborators are either all distributed or all co-located, because hybrid teams can have the greatest communication challenges:

Social exchange theory was used to develop a model relating trust to knowledge sharing and knowledge sharing to team effectiveness. The moderating effects of virtuality and task interdependence on these relationships were examined. A strong positive relationship was found between trust and knowledge sharing for all types of teams (local, hybrid and distributed), but the relationship was stronger when task interdependence was low, supporting the position that trust is more critical in weak structural situations. Knowledge sharing was positively associated with team effectiveness outcomes; however, this relationship was moderated by team imbalance and hybrid structures, such that the relationship between sharing and effectiveness was weaker. Organizations should therefore avoid creating unbalanced or hybrid virtual teams.

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Work Management

The Anti-Facebook: 12 Years In, Facebook Cofounder Dustin Moskovitz’s Slow-Burn Second Act Asana Finally Has Its Moment | A puff piece celebrating the rise of Asana under CEO Dustin Moskovitz and its imminent IPO. But I have to fact check something from co-founder Justin Rosenstein:

Asana cofounder Justin Rosenstein long served as Moskovitz’s extroverted foil before stepping back in 2019. Says Rosenstein: “We are, to my knowledge, the two people on earth who have thought the most about the work management problem.”

No disrespect, Justin, but there are some of us who have been thinking deeply about work management long before you and Dustin started to work on it at Facebook. For example, I led a conference in 2003 in London called Social Tools for Business. And I coined the term work management, by the way.

Entrepreneurs in work management companies apply their efforts toward making a winning work management tool, but those of us who watch the market look at hundreds of products a year, and inhabit many perspectives, not just the improvements that can be made to a single system.

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Ride-Hailing

Lyft, Uber Get More Time as They Fight California Order | Preetika Rana on the newest turn in the Cailifornia v. Ride-Hailing:

Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. will be able to continue conducting business as usual in California for now, after a state appeals court on Thursday paused a lower-court ruling that required the ride-hailing companies to reclassify their drivers as employees.

The reprieve means both companies can continue operating while they fight a high-stakes legal battle with their home state.

The court’s decision followed a flurry of public messaging by the companies earlier Thursday, capping a week of threats that they would shutter their services in California if the courts compelled them to reclassify their workers. Lyft posted an announcement on its website Thursday morning saying it would halt its business there as of midnight. Uber put up what appeared to be a placeholder post on its site, with the heading, “Important Information About California Ridesharing Shutdown,’’ which it later removed.

Lyft confirmed it no longer plans to halt ride-hailing service in the state.

A state judge last week gave Uber and Lyft until Friday to reclassify their drivers as employees, after California sued the companies in May alleging they were violating a new state law.

California’s so-called gig-worker law that went into effect on Jan. 1 requires companies to treat workers as employees rather than independent contractors if they are controlled by their employer and contribute to its usual course of business, among other things. As employees, drivers would be eligible for sick days and other benefits, issues that have become more pressing during the coronavirus pandemic.

What’s next?

Why Uber’s business model is doomed | Aaron Benanav deconstructs ride-hailing as a huge VC gamble on autonomous vehicles and their eventual disruption of taxi and delivery vehicles.

One might assume that misclassifying drivers as independent contractors enables rideshare companies such as Uber to make exorbitant profits. The reality is far weirder. In fact, Uber and Lyft are not making any profits at all. On the contrary, the companies have been haemorrhaging cash for years, undercharging users for rides in a bid to aggressively expand their market shares worldwide. Squeezing drivers’ salaries is not their main strategy for becoming profitable. Doing so merely slows the speed at which they burn through money.

The truth is that Uber and Lyft exist largely as the embodiments of Wall Street-funded bets on automation, which have failed to come to fruition. These companies are trying to survive legal challenges to their illegal hiring practices, while waiting for driverless-car technologies to improve. The advent of the autonomous car would allow Uber and Lyft to fire their drivers. Having already acquired a position of dominance with the rideshare market, these companies would then reap major monopoly profits. There is simply no world in which paying drivers a living wage would become part of Uber and Lyft’s long-term business plans.

We need businesses to commit to creating well-paying jobs to stop the precarity that the gig economy feeds on.

People need security that is not tied to their job. The pandemic has revealed this imperative more than ever before. In a world that is as wealthy as ours, and given the technologies we have already produced — even without the realisation of the dreams of automation — everyone should have access to food, energy, housing and healthcare. If people had that security, why would they choose to work in terrible jobs where they are paid low wages? The owners of Uber and Lyft know that their business is predicated on a world in which they get to make the key decisions that shape our futures, without our input. The world of work is going to have to be democratised. They are just delaying what should be inevitable.

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Elsewhere

Weak Ties and Brainstorming | What we miss when we don’t organically share space

Work Week | Infrastructure and Ultrastructure | Funding: Mural, Asana | Slack: The Netscape of Work Chat? | Tech Resistance |