Despite all the articles and analysis, there is a complete lack of consensus about the pros and cons of working from home. Innumerable polls like this one indicate vaguely that 28% of employees who worked from home during the pandemic want to return to the office at least four days a week while 29% never want to return…ever. The rest are in the middle. We can only conclude that both WFH and WFO work for some people, some of the time, depending on a lot of factors (e.g. age, sex, money, personality type, lifestyle, family and care responsibilities, distance between home and office, access to technology, corporate culture, and industry/type of work — to name the major ones.)
But what about productivity? Does it increase or decrease when one is WFH? On this topic there is also a complete lack of consensus. During the pandemic, some people languished under Zoom fatigue — and perhaps a little spousal fatigue as well — while others found they were far more productive not having to commute or wear socks. Some studies claim that WFH increases productivity dramatically, while others suggest the increase is only because we’re working longer hours, unable to build effective fortifications between our personal and work lives.
This lack of consensus around productivity and working from home is not at all surprising because the debate is overly focused on where the work happens. Productivity has a lot more to do with how robust your system is for determining what to work on, and how and when you work on it. A system, in this sense, is a set of rules that everyone agrees to follow. Think of a work system like a game of chess[1]. In chess, like in business, there are lots of permutations and variations in the game, and one must play the game in response to the other player’s moves and the dynamically changing conditions on the board, but there are nonetheless some basic rules that cannot be violated. Each piece, for instance, can only move in certain patterns. Players alternate turns. Both agree what “checkmate” means. Without both players willingly agreeing to follow these basic rules, the game becomes meaningless.
Unfortunately, most offices don’t have any defined system of rules for managing work. Productivity follows a haphazard cycle of stagnation and crisis. During a crisis the boss is angry; customers are upset; money is being lost; and an executive then tells everyone to focus on the one top-priority task. And everyone does. By dint of heroic efforts, stress, and overtime, the office becomes, suddenly, productive. Clarity of priorities and the ability to focus on getting that singular, “must-do, can’t fail” thing done creates great productivity every time.
The obvious problem with this haphazard model is that few employees like the stress and long hours of crisis-induced productivity. Although some enjoy being acknowledged as heroes, there is a quieter majority who resent them for taking all the credit. The far better option is to devise a system of work that allows everyone to have clarity and focus day in and day out — no crisis required.
How do you get more daily clarity and focus? As a start, ask yourself if your team has a system in place for the following:
1. Assessing relative urgency of incoming work, based on strategic priorities.
2. Estimating the work’s duration, based on its complexity.
3. Optimizing the priority sequence in which all work should be performed, based on its urgency and duration.
4. Defining strict criteria for when work is considered “complete” or “done”.
5. Signaling clearly and objectively (with measures, not opinions and feelings) when it has — or does nothave — capacity to receive new work from an upstream team.
6. Responding with speed and flexibility to changing conditions (e.g. peaks and valleys in the volume of incoming work, new priorities, unforeseen staffing shortages, varying complexity of jobs, technology downtime, etc.)
7. Reflecting routinely on what could be improved about its work system.
8. Solving problems in a structured, methodical way to continuously improve the system.
Why do most offices have few or none of these systems in place? I believe a big part of it is the fact that Western societies value individualism so much that it comes at the expense of teamwork. Highly educated knowledge workers want and expect a lot of personal autonomy at work. This is quite reasonable: no one likes to be micromanaged or to be told what to do. The word “rule” elicits memories of only bad experiences, where orders were imposed top-down and made the work much worse for everyone. The idea of “collective rules” smacks of really bad, highly centralized ways to govern and organize societies, such as monarchies or communist regimes.
Knowing that modern office workers want freedom from micromanagement, many managers have gone too far in the people-pleasing direction, adopting a laissez-faire, “do whatever you like” philosophy. They believe that by being hands-off “macromanagers” they are acting in their employees’ best interests. A statement I saw in a recent LinkedIn post from a co-founder of a small PR company to her employees is typical of the sentiment: “How and when you get your work done is entirely up to you”. The intention is 100% good, and most employees will instinctively applaud this stance (who doesn’t like autonomy and independence?). Unfortunately, how and when you do your work actually matters a lot to your team’s productivity. And when productivity suffers across multiple teams, sooner or later there is another crisis. Your seemingly nice “do whatever you like” boss transforms into the autocratic “do it my way” boss. Autonomy and niceness fly out the window.
Think about it: should how you get your work done be entirely up to you? What if someone on your team has a better way, say, to organize the shared files in your team? Should team members not share and learn from each other’s ideas? Should not the entire team try to adopt a commonly shared way of organizing files? Should not the manager enforce team adherence to the best-known way of organizing files until the team comes up with an even better way? Organizing shared files may seem trivial, but it’s not. The time people spend looking for information in offices is staggering. (No, saving everything you need to your desktop is notan effective solution: it begets a monster called “version control” that would make Dr. Frankenstein jealous). Having simple, commonly shared rules for organizing team information can go a long way to saving tons of time for everyone. And that means better productivity.
What about when you do your work? Should that be entirely up to you as well? What if you like to work late at night and your colleague likes to work early in the morning? Your colleague works on a document from 7:00 to 8:00 AM and then tags your name to it because he needs you to review it. But because of your nocturnal work schedule (which your macromanaging boss fully supports) you don’t get to it until 9:00 PM that night. Your colleague, in turn, does not see your suggested revisions until 7:00 AM the next day — and that’s the best-case scenario. There is now close to 24 hours of delay injected into a process that might benefit from more coordination and synchronization, especially if it is time sensitive. It’s not like everyone has to keep exactly the same work hours, but why not ask your early-bird colleague to work on the document near the end of the morning and you could start on it in the early afternoon to reduce the time the half-finished work sits around idle? Work hours should be aligned, first and foremost, to customer needs and expectations, and only secondarily to employee preferences. Customers, after all, are the reason employees exist.
The fact of the matter is that organizations, including public sector institutions, are not just a bunch of isolated individuals. They are large, interconnected, interdependent systems — networks of many people and activities from which are produced goods, services, and experiences for customers. When it comes to boosting productivity, management’s focus should be on enhancing the connectivity between teams, not the performance of individuals within them. Employees are an important component — but not the only component — of a larger agglomeration of stakeholders, technology and information that needs to be managed. Productivity is largely about optimizing systems, not people.
Managing a system, far from being laissez-faire, requires managers to actively engage with team members to set up and maintain some common rules. Rule-setting cannot be optional, but it doesn’t have to be autocratic and inflexible. Rules about how and when to do the work should be developed by the team. If the team owns the rules, they will follow them. And improve them. The rules of the system can and should evolve and change over time, in synch with changes in customer needs and business conditions.
Individual employees often balk initially at the idea of rules, but, when implemented bottom-up, they are actually very good for team morale. Employees like being productive. Research at Google has shown that teams perform better when there is clarity about rules, goals and structure. Rules around balanced workloads, for instance, can increase fairness. The “do what you like” approach, in contrast, invites some people to become free riders, causing others to carry more weight than they should have to, increasing the probability of employee burnout and turnover.
Rules also help people get their work done. Rules remove the stress of uncertainty. Rules organize priorities, and create singular focus on that one, most important thing. Rules “automate” the dull, routine, administrative tasks and free-up more time and mental energy for the “real” work that people actually enjoy doing.
Brainpower, the fuel of productivity, is a resource that’s always in short supply. It should be used as efficiently as possible, allocated to only the tasks where it is most needed. Spending brainpower on cracking the case of the mysterious spreadsheets that wouldn’t reconcile adds no value to customers and only increases the team’s backlog. So, it pays off greatly for managers to burn up some of that fuel on devising with their teams a system of rules that will help the work get done productively in the context of a large, complex, interconnected network of people, information and technology.
And this comes back to the issue of where the work is done. In office work, the digital interconnectivity exists whether you’re sitting right next to your co-worker or you’re thirteen time zones apart. If I’m sitting next to Bob, I can turn to him and say, “hey, Bob, I’m sending you that report for you to look at” but I’m still sending the work to him by email or, more likely, sharing it through some sort of shared document server in the cloud. If Bob’s sitting in Sydney, Singapore, or Seoul, I can alert him by text or instant message, but, ideally, I would not need to notify him at all because we have a shared system that will tell him when and how to work on my report. Sure, it would be really wonderful if I could meet with him face-to-face periodically (say, once or twice a year) to build a deeper and more trusting relationship with him. But how and when the work gets prioritized and accomplished day-to-day can be entirely driven by our shared work system. The better the system, the better the flow of our work. Physical distance is not a factor since the transfer of the work between us is electronic and instantaneous.
So, should people be allowed to work from home (or wherever) permanently? This decision is best made when we ask not how or when to do the work, but why. In the most generic sense, the goal — the why — of the work system is to make employees’ work easier, faster, and better so that they can serve all customers faster, with higher quality, and at less cost. Given this goal, individuals can contemplate how and when they need to do their work so that they can best meet the goal of their work system. The best option, then, given the wide diversity of employee circumstances and preferences, is to respect employees enough to let them choose, as individuals, from where to work and how often. Allowing them this choice will be a small but meaningful step towards building the kind of respectful culture that is necessary but entirely insufficient, on its own, to increase productivity. The rest will be up to the effectiveness of the work systems that they develop collectively with their colleagues.
[1] Thanks to Mark DeLuzio for this analogy.
