The announcements from Yahoo, Best Buy and more recently from Hewlett Packard summoning the faithful back to the office must be taken in context.
What do we know about all three companies? Oh, that's right, they're all in desperate trouble! Did too many people working from home cause these problems? Not even close.
No, the issue is that many companies originally embarked on the work from home theory without even so much as a policy. Some harbored semi-utopian visions of technology enabling warmer, more productive lifestyles. Some were simply looking to save a few bucks on commercial real estate expense. Most were unified by the realization that they had no work from home strategy whatsoever.
So in the stand-and-deliver era of serious economic performance, everything that could be looked at, is getting a once-over. And what enterprise's are finding is that technological convergence must be accompanied by organizational convergence or the only outcome will be underperformance. This goes double for those institutions whose very existence is being questioned, as has been the case with Yahoo, Best Buy and hp. So the encouragement to return to the office is not some draconian rejection of the libertarian imperative. It is a sensible re-evaluation of who can and should be working remotely; what additional training and support they may require; and how their performance and compensation should be assessed. In other words, working from home is being treated like the management option it is, and not like the lifestyle perk some believe it to be.
As in many such situations - eg, when a policy is reconsidered - some changes will likely emerge: some people will find that working in the newly reconfigured office now suits them better; some will find that hybrid models - some days in, some days out - works best; and some may find that having now been brought up to date on the latest in office and corporate re-org, absolutely nothing has changed for them. The point is not that working from home no longer suffices, but that it is now being given serious attention which portends even more freedom and support when the impact is optimized. JL
Ryan Tate reports in Wired:
The tech world doesn’t want people working from home. Or so it seems.
Hewlett Packard, which had previously encouraged many employees to work from home, is now nudging them back into the office. And after Yahoo and Best Buy made moves to discourage working from home, the tech press and pundits are convinced they’ve spotted a bona fide trend.
But what’s going on here is far more nuanced than a full-scale retreat from remote work — and much more encouraging for home workers. Ubiquitous broadband and cloud computing helped usher in the euphoric first wave of 21st century work-from-home arrangements, in which employers salivated over real estate cost savings and workers fantasized about nuking commutes and pointless meetings. Now, we’re in the second wave, a reckoning with the realities of telecommuting that could make the practice more productive for companies and more satisfying for employees, and thus more popular and available.
Take HP. Yes, the company is encouraging a return to the office, writing in a memo obtained by All Things D that “HP needs all hands on deck…to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration.”
But consider the context: Just a few years ago, the company was all but shoving some employees out of the offices — by HP’s own admission. To cut HP’s real estate holdings and reduce costs, former CEO Mark Hurd cut back on physical space, installed flexible office technology and encouraged telecommuting. Expecting a 70-year-old company with a longstanding office culture to maintain its collaborative strengths as its workers were suddenly sent home and set adrift amid spending cuts was not a viable strategy. So HP is, as it explained to the New York Times, making space for people who want to come back into the office, while leaving the old work-from-home policies firmly in place.
Yahoo and Best Buy have also bent over backwards to make it clear that their own moves to get people back into the office are attempts to create work arrangements that function better over the long term. Under a series of short-term, underperfoming CEOs, Yahoo had reportedly seen its work-from-home system devolve into an escape from dysfunction at the office, with some employees avoiding doing any work at all or even launching their own startups.
CEO Marrissa Mayer has said that by the time she arrived on the scene, employees complained that work-from-home arrangements kept teams from gelling, so workers were recalled to headquarters. But she left the door open for bringing back remote work once the company is back on its feet, saying remote work is “not right for us — right now.”
It’s possible to build a culture of remote work that allows employees to be more focused, commute hours to be made productive, and managers to clearly shape and see the results. But that requires a healthfully focused company and certain degrees of savvy, engagement, and practice on the part of both managers and workers. Too often, the potential of working from home is spoiled by broader dysfunction, under-engaged managers or employees who lose their motivation, perhaps out of habit, once they’re outside the walls of headquarters. For all its potential benefits, telecommuting is a tough problem involving technical, cultural, and tactical challenges. What’s surprising isn’t how often it fails, but that people are still trying — hard — to make it work.
1 comments:
I spent a year working remote for a large non profit organization. The job required 100% travel and there were twelve members on my team. Each of us had a three to six state territory in the US. I have never felt a stronger connection to a team than this one, and the interesting part is I only saw my team members once a quarter. There are two reasons our team had such strong cohesion. One was the training and two shared values. Our team spent an entire summer living together and training together. It was this environment of group immersion and collaboration that galvanized our team. From day one of training we were taught that its not about what or how you do it but "why" you do it. In our roles this translated to incredible autonomy which gave us the incentive to use our own unique strengths all the while focusing on shared goals. This experience taught me if you bring like minded individuals together, train then in an environment that strengthens shared values and awards autonomy, the result will be a winning team. At the end our of our summer of training we were told "You are ambassadors for our brand. Everything you do, every conversation you have, every meeting you run remember our values." Whether you work on a team that is remote or in an office, remember that successful teams share a vision and share values.
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