A sunset glint off hot pavement shimmer off the workforce of the future could be a mirage or early indications of disruption. CEO’s asserting you won’t get New York wages if you aren’t working in New York and like a movie on bad parenting asserting they will be cross with you if you don’t comply. Overt blindness to change is the opposite of the innovation these CEOs feel they have lost. It’s like some predictive indicator of failure akin to having our sweatpants wearing posteriors sitting in their Herman Miller Aeron chairs.
CEO’s feel they have a sense of lost innovation because teams can’t get together and hard scramble towards some goal. There is no pressure cooker of intensity with whiteboards filled to flowing with archaic diagrams. Except… The teams were always spread across geographic regions in global organizations. Employees from their perspective would just quit than subject themselves to the CEO having tantrums. When talking about innovation rarely does that happen in the office. The teams were always using productivity tools and the innovation always happened in cells of excellence seeping into the DNA of companies like a virus because corporations who drive innovation usually do so only after heroes emerge.
That concept by some CEOs of lost productivity is also an arcane perception absent reality. None of the research is showing productivity losses. Not all CEOs even agree and are themselves embracing a work remote strategy. I myself have often worked remote during every vacation interrupted by “just one” phone call or “that hair on fire emergency” that my team can take care, but some boss wants to hear it from me. A dedicated and empowered workforce is going to become more productive when they aren’t punished by a mind-numbing commute. They are going to be healthier, not have an artificial constraint of traffic, bus or train schedules, and a work life balance can flourish. Commuting in most American cities with horrific public transport, crumbling infrastructure, built for automobiles and not people or bicycles is painful. Type “A” personalities driven to work by chauffeurs CEOs don’t have those constraints of survival in a city or they have some notional romanticism of hard work. Watch for the supercilious equivocation of CEOs to mention going to a restaurant randomly by choice to being required to numbly drudge to work every day giving up workdays of time for no pay in commute alone. If you can do one why not the other?
My favorite is the existential risk asserted by some leaders that with no office they have a lost sense of culture.The mentor relationship might be disturbed (or wasn’t what they thought already). I have this vision of a bunch of Boomer CEOs chasing one poor gen Z around an office yelling “I’m your mentor!” as the poor generation z yells “I was on my way to Starbucks! Leave me alone!”
Fluffy bald guy
One CEO said, “I’m a hugger I can’t wait to meet people by the elevator and give them a big hug.” I’m a fully growed up fluffy man and my hackles prickled. I don’t have to imagine what my wife or daughter would say. A friend seeing the article in her wise woman ways said, “I carry pepper spray for that kind of jerk.” Talking about out of touch and generally blind to culture. HR attorney needed for clean up at elevator 2.
Culture is not something bequeathed by some out of touch boomer like sprinkles on my ice cream. Culture is not something you can train, educate, or indoctrinate. Culture starts with the people you hire, the way they treat each other, and how leadership in a company empowers their leaders to act. If you have an oligarchy of c-suite leaders stomping on subordinate leaders in miniature autocracies your culture is going to suck juicy pond scum.
To make matters worse culture is the crux of the problem. Your multi-national corporate hubris spread across the planet required your workforce to think globally, act locally, and more importantly communicate, coordinate, and collaborate digitally. The differentiation between home, office, work and social evaporated a long time ago. While you were stalking young women and unsuspecting interns at the elevator the rest of us had to build huge skills sets that evaporated time zones and made office culture meaningless.
Moving from the humorous incidental specifics to the more meaningful generalized strategies is an important step in raising the bar on discourse. I would expect leaders and CEOs to do this but the language of leadership is being drowned out by the meandering CEO Gru’s who want their minions back. I have said that a pandemic winds the spring of society and though the disease is horrific the changes it creates are even more significant. Supply chain disruptions; housing and home ownership disruption; multi-generational households become the norm; education flexes and folds under the pressures of pandemics; people are forced to stop the scramble and evaluate their lives in the face of mortality; social justice issues jump on top of your desk demanding attention; economic disparity becomes obvious between lowest paid workers and CEOs; work life balance becomes why work for somebody else rather than myself questions; and autocratic prattling CEOs are uncovered as the shivering slaves to shareholder value with the power to swat flies and die of malaria. All of this in the possible shadow of emerging stakeholder capitalism.
It isn’t all bad. Some CEOs and leadership teams are embracing this new normal. They perhaps see something of a higher ground or perhaps a chance to have an employee market differentiator. Some obvious gains in a distributed work force is higher resiliency. You centralize for control and distribute for resiliency. If everybody is in one office a flu, a power outage, a freak storm, or even a national holiday empties that office. With a worldwide distributed workforce you alleviate all of that and if the workforce is virtualized that effect is magnified even more. One thing to think about is not all countries are great for a virtual workforce. Rural broadband, wireless costs, and general infrastructure for working remote in the United States sucks in comparison to many other countries. That said some countries the work-life and home-culture does not make for a good virtual workforce situation. It isn’t one size fits all.
To put it simply the CEOs and CIOs of the world have been pushing a virtual workforce strategy for quite some time and they may not even have realized it. The pandemic intersected with a diverse set of technology trends and social trends. The outsourcing of information technology to the cloud providers of email and other collaboration tools (SLACK, Confluence, etc.) along with implementation of clouds as infrastructure as a service meant general information technology people weren’t in the office either. The outsourcing of end point costs by making employees provide cell phones (then wrapping it all up in mobile device management) saved companies money. Significant back-office support was outsourced to a variety of cloud providers (Salesforce, Dynamics, Oracle, etc.) with single sign on being the glue of enterprises. Somebody somewhere must put hands on box and cable up boxes but is that society wide an 80% of workforce number or a 20% of workforce number? The number of hands-on works is shrinking outside of manufacturing.
You want to contain cost and make more money with less going out? Get rid of the buildings and associated infrastructure of housing a huge contingent of people for less than 20% of a year. There are 8760 hours in a year and 2080 work hours minus holidays, vacation, travel, and so much more. That means you as a CEO/Exec are paying for real estate that has an efficiency of less than 20% for most of your workers. The real estate executives and investment trusts are terrified of this reality. However, the work remote is part of a much larger silent strategy to outsource enterprise costs to the employee. Long before the pandemic by requiring college the company education costs were passed to the employee as company education systems dried up. Long before the pandemic the switch from annuity retirements to employee paid 401Ks passed retirement costs to the employee (with fees, holding costs, and more lining execs pockets). This is a trend that has been happening for decades.
My advice is embrace the change and make bank. While some CEOs are decrying cultural rifts there is the evidence of the hollowness of the argument all around us. Cultural shifts are legion. People find each other on dating apps, do their banking through mobile apps, find their medical care online, and have their medicines delivered by Amazon. Then some banker CEO trots out how there is no shared worker experience completely missing all the collaboration going on. In the vary applications they likely banned within the traditional office. The employees are LinkedIn, Facebooked, Tweetering, and Rediting the job experience while Slacked out and sewing Discord. There is more shared employee experience and cultural understanding outside of the corporate edge than there is within the company buildings. The general CEO consensus is “Stop it, stop it now!” which becomes meme worthy while eroding trust.
Now is your chance to get the best people. As a CEO or senior executive, you have a reasoned global access to a talent pool. Not everybody is going to be “work from home” which completely misses the point of “Work Remote”. I want to be able to work from the coffee shop, my bedroom, a van down by the river, or looking out of my chalet in Colorado. Maybe even from the deli down the street in NYC. If I’m creative, knowledge working, value by producing ideas then I can do that from anywhere. Likely I can do it for anybody. The hit parade of outsourcing to India, China, or name your favorite location is the chirping of a tiny dog in a big world. We know you can do that. You’ve been doing it for decades, so the global workforce has adapted. There is a reason Austin is still weird and a hot zone for innovation. Why Miami is becoming a tech hub. Some of it is big companies and much of it is small disruptive companies who lean on each other and not on the big corporate houses. Like a corporate hedge shot, “hedge shot, corporate disruption spree!”
You have a chance to get the best workforce or choose to feed your ego. A corporate finance big shot said many moons ago during a recruiting event he wanted the Yale, Harvard, Stanford business students because some kid from a state University wouldn’t be driven to move to New York and be exceptional. Then silly valley sprung up and was infested by east coast money only to go bust. Like an evergreen tree after a fire, it came back stronger, faster, smarter and well-funded by new tech money. The big shot specifically said, “You can’t expect some kid from a state university to be hungry like an Ivy League graduate any more than you can expect a mom in Topeka to understand finance.” That always typified all that is wrong with NYC to me.
Key: Work from home (WFH) equals bad used as key phrase to denote negatives. Work remote (WR) equals good and is used to positively to show a new paradigm.
People are a lot smarter than I think are the expectations by corporate leaders. The news stories about hybrid workplaces are just seen as way stops to removing remote work completely from the option list. Sure, we’ll do remote 2 days a week until we have you suckered in and then take that away. The future is bleary. My all-seeing glass eye sees a series of very disappointed senior executives in the future. Retention is shrinking, people are optioning themselves out of jobs, and hostility towards workers is rising. Declining US manufacturing, outsourcing, and corporate profiteers eroded worker allegiance long ago. I see lots of news stories about worker shortages and specific skill sets are hiring at higher wages than before the pandemic. One thing I notice in lots of the job advertisements is higher money and promise of working remote forever. Destination employers where the work is remote, and the company is supportive could be a key market differentiator for talent. If you want the best you have to meet what the best want.
To be sure I think some workers live near their offices (they planned for office work) and I think many employees look forward to going back to an office. I think the cultural changes from what I’ve seen have altered that dynamic forever but some don’t believe it. I think some of that is a call for normalcy but like living through any natural disaster that normalcy is forever modified by those people lost, the property damaged, and the altered landscape. We haven’t reached the new normal yet and it may be a decade or more until that is achieved. I fully admit that there is a place for some office work, but we’ll have to see what that looks like and the changes that have already happened are impacting that expectation.
Anybody that has a chauffeur or car service on call is likely not going to understand this at the base level. Remote workers are better for the environment. The number of employees who sold their car, downsized their home, planned on a child, and changed their location to better their life during the pandemic is amazing. When you suddenly change your entire spending requirement and stop eating out along with a bunch of other frivolous things. Your cash requirements radically change. All of this is the emerging environment for the employee but may be missed by the CEO. Is this a blip on the path of spending oblivion? With a chip shortage, used car prices increasing, and supply demand issues for shipping capability impacting the vehicle market. There is a significant disruption in the ability to even buy a car. Now you ask is the transportation tax (total cost of ownership of a vehicle to get to work) worth the hassle?
Where do we go for now? If the media is to be believed we’re all looking for new jobs. As an executive it is my job to get the most out of my people while keeping the vision of what we’re trying to accomplish in mind. I want to motivate my people, strengthen the bonds so when we’re stressed, we turn to each other, and create a trusting and positive experience for my employees. We’ve all led through a pandemic and that is about as historical an experience as you can achieve. Now I must lead through a future that isn’t charted, and history books will be written about. I want my employees to be safe, happy, and productive. That means doing the right thing not always the easy thing.