You’ve had two years - Part 2

Last week, in Part 1 , we digressed ('Events, dear boy, events’) to discuss the impact the horrific events in Ukraine are certain to have on commodity costs and the push towards renewable energy production. This week let’s return to the title - ‘You’ve had two years’.

It’s now two years since ‘The Calamitous 3rd Week of March 2020’, where the world had a collective heart attack as Covid erupted. In a post at the time, for the British Property Federation, I wrote:

‘The lack of technological infrastructure in so many companies is leading to a mistaken belief that remote work will be jettisoned as soon as we can all return to the office. True, working with young children around, or in homes with insufficient space is no long term solution, but the answer to this is by no means a return to commuting one to three hours a day to an office. More importantly, though, bad decisions are going to be made because we are doing the equivalent of asking people who cannot drive what the future of the car is. Your company may not be comfortable with, or capable of, allowing work to become more flexible, but your strongest competitors will be. 

Furthermore, your strongest competitors will be acutely aware that the purpose of an office has changed. Much of what we do today is being automated away. Leaving us humans with a need to become better at what humans are good at: design, imagination, empathy, abstract & critical thinking, judgement and innovation. The only point of an office will be as places that catalyse these human skills, in collaboration with our peers. Not only will such places take a different form factor, we will only need them 50-60% of the time. The rest will be taken up with solitary, focused tasks.’

The only point to change about this today is to amend the line ‘bad decisions are going to be made because we are doing the equivalent of asking people who cannot drive what the future of the car is.’ Because now they have ‘had two years’ driving experience and we all now know that, broadly speaking, remote working works. With caveats of course but across the board it is accepted that, contrary to expectations, people have adapted and life has gone on. In many cases, rather successfully. The Gordian knot connecting work to an office has been cut. By the sword of technology this time around.

Or so you would have thought. But no, we are now hearing more and more tales of companies demanding their employees prepare to return the office, often accompanied by lengthy debates about whether it should be for 2,3 4 or 5 days a week. Usually accompanied by wittering blather about culture, community and innovation. The three words of the corporate apocalypse.

How have so many learnt so little - ‘you’ve had two years’.

We can set aside the demands the likes of Goldman Sachs are making for a 5 day a week return to office because they were famed before Covid for having a ‘toxic culture’ (Google it) and because one enters that world knowing the bargain between selling your soul and making huge amounts of money. But elsewhere, amongst less famed companies, it is depressing to see and hear so much ill thought through management thinking.

In March 2021, in ‘This isn’t an acceleration, it’s a revolution’, I wrote about how ‘If we go hybrid post pandemic we need to rethink everything about how our companies work and operate’. And why what we are experiencing is a revolution, not an acceleration, exactly because what we are seeing today is companies cutting themselves off at the knees because they are not thinking hard enough about how the pandemic has changed the world. Any manager (let alone self identified ‘Leader’) approaching returning to the office who thinks prescribing the number of days everyone has to be in the office is, frankly, unfit for purpose. Their business is going to implode (in some cases rapidly, in others slowly) if they approach the issue in a binary way, applicable across the board. 

We ‘have had two years’ to see and understand that productivity is cultivated at an individual level, based on circumstances, needs and objectives. Each of us, working individually, with our team or teams, and with the aims of our companies to mind, has workplace needs that are distinct, particular and definable. To enable each of us to be as productive as possible, we need a range of spaces and places to work, together with products and services tailored to our ‘jobs to be done’. 

The most screamingly clear conclusion to be learnt from the last two years is that every workforce is made up of individuals with their own wants, needs and desires. Each of us has responded to working under Covid conditions in our own way, and each of us wants to work, post Covid, in our own way. To try to put the genie back in the bottle and treat everyone as a homogenous ‘blob’, subject to blanket mandates is truly stupid. And will have bad consequences.

What is less obvious, though equally true, is that the world is changing even faster for the top 20% of talented people than for the populace at large. The digital transformation of business and society is giving the most talented optionality like never before. It is becoming easier to discern who can ‘make a difference’ because digital tools enable them to contribute from anywhere, at anytime. And because digital tools enable talent matching in an increasingly precise way. But mostly because the most talented become more and more visible in a digital world. Their thoughts and abilities become more visible because of the power of digital channels to surface best in class content. 

Put together dumb blanket mandates and the optionality of talent and you’ll hear a great sucking noise. As your best people leave the building. The bottom line is that those who can most easily leave are the ones you’d rather did not. If you don’t grasp that you’ve got a nasty surprise coming your way.

You’ve had two years!