GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

One thing the pandemic made clear to everyone involved with the knowledge-work profession is that daily commuting was a ludicrously excessive tax on their time. The amount of work they were able to get done remotely clearly exceeded what they were getting done previously, and the reduction in stress was both welcome and productive. So, let’s be clear, there is no “going back to the office.” What is possible, on the other hand, is going forward to the office, and that is what we are going to discuss in this blog post.

The point is, we need to rethink the landscape of knowledge work—what work is best done where, and why. Let’s start with remote. Routine task work of the sort that a professional is expected to complete on their own is ideally suited to remote working. It requires no supervision to speak of and little engagement with others except at assigned checkpoints. Those checkpoints can be managed easily through video conferencing combined with collaboration-enabling software like Slack or Teams. Productivity commitments are monitored in terms of the quality and quantity of received work. This is game-changing for everyone involved, and we would be crazy to forsake these gains simply to comply with a return-to-the-office mandate.

That said, there are many good reasons still to want a return. Before we dig into them, however, let’s spend a moment on the bad reasons first. First among them is what we might call “boomer executive control needs”—a carry-over from the days of hierarchical management structures that to this day still run most of our bureaucracies. Implicit in this model is the notion that everyone needs supervision all the time. Let me just say that if that is the case in your knowledge-work organization, you are in big trouble, and mandating everyone to come back to the office is not going to fix it. The fix needed is workforce engagement, and that requires personal intervention, not systemic enforcement. Yes, you want to do this in person, and yes, the office is typically the right place to do so, but no, you don’t need everyone to be there all the time to do it.

This same caveat applies to other reasons why enterprises are mandating a return. Knowledge work benefits from social interactions with colleagues. You get to float ideas, hear about new developments, learn from observing others, and the like. It is all good, and you do need to be collocated to do it—just not every day. What is required instead is a new cadence. People need an established routine to know when they are expected to show up, one they can plan around far in advance. In short, we need the discipline of office attendance, we just want it to be more respectful of our remote work. In that light, a good place to start is a 60/40 split—your call as to which is which. But for the days that are in office, attendance is expected, not optional. To do anything else is to disrespect your colleagues and to put your personal convenience above the best interests of the enterprise that is funding you.

So much for coping with some of the bad reasons. Now let’s look into five good ones.

1. Customer-facing challenges. This includes sales, account management, and customer success (but not customer support or tech support). The point is, whenever things are up for grabs on the customer side, it takes a team to wrestle them down to earth, and the members of that team need to be in close communication to detect the signals, strategize the responses, and leverage each other’s relationships and expertise. You don’t get to say when this happens, so you have to show up every day ready to play (meaning 80/20 is probably a more effective in-office/out-of-office ratio).
2. Onboarding, team building, and M&A integration. Things can also be up for grabs inside your own organization, particularly when you are adding new people, building a new team (or turning around an old one), or integrating an acquisition. In these kinds of fluid situations, there is a ton of non-verbal communication, both to detect and to project, and there is simply no substitute for collocation. By contrast, career development, mentoring, and performance reviews are best conducted one-on-one, and here modern video conferencing with its high-definition visuals and zero-latency audio can actually induce a more focused conversation.
3. Mission-critical systems operations. This is just common sense—if the wheels start to come off, you do not want to lose time assembling the team. Cybersecurity attacks would be one good example. On the other hand, with proper IT infrastructure, routine system monitoring, and maintenance as well as standard end-user support can readily leverage remote expertise.
4. In-house incubations. It is possible to do a remote-only start-up if you have most of the team in place from the beginning, leveraging time in collocation at a prior company, especially if the talent you need is super-scarce and geographically dispersed.

   But for public enterprises leveraging the Incubation Zone, as well as lines of business conducting nested incubation inside their own organizations, a cadence surrounding collocation is critical. The reason is that incubations call for agile decision-making, coordinated course corrections, fast failures, and even faster responses to them. You don’t have to be together every day—there is still plenty of individual knowledge work to be done, but you do need to keep in close formation, and that requires frequent unscripted connections.

5. Cross-functional programs and projects. These are simply impossible to do on a remote basis. There are too many new relationships that must be established, too many informal negotiations to get resources assigned, too many group sessions to get people aligned, and too much lobbying to get the additional support you need. This is especially true when the team is led by a middle manager who has no direct authority over the team members, only their managers’ commitment and their own good will.

So, what’s the best in-office/remote ratio for your organization?

You might try doing a high-level inventory of all the work you do, calling out for each workload which mode of working is preferable, and totaling it up to get a first cut. You can be sure that whatever you come up with will be wrong, but that’s OK because your next step will be to socialize it. Once you get enough fingerprints on it, you will go live with it, only to confirm it is still wrong, but now with a coalition of the willing to make it right, if only to make themselves look better.

Ain’t management fun?

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Google Gemini

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