Paradise Lost
Originally published June 3 2020 on LinkedIn
A deep groove has been worn into the zeitgeist. How many articles cry, ‘we’ll never be the same’ or ‘history is accelerating’. It has taken over all channels like a traffic announcement in a tunnel. Obstruction ahead! We’re suffused by it. The simple proof is you know exactly what I’m talking about and I haven’t had to mention it.
Just as our market recovery doesn’t appear to be v-shaped, nor will our work practices simply spring back. Major companies are already talking about permanent work from home positions, and The Australian Institute of Company Directors has issued a ‘No Action’ position on remote AGMs, effectively allowing them. How do you walk that one back? Companies like Caltex are already taking virtual AGMs in their stride. We should expect some pragmatic changes to the Corporations Act to follow the long-form hypothesis we are in the middle of proving - that businesses can continue remotely.
Even the most skeptical of CEOs have been forced to continue operations under remote conditions. Those in the technology sector who had always leant into flexible working found it to be a trust fall with a cushy landing - slipping into quarantine without a hitch. We simply went home one day and didn’t go back. amaysim did this better than most - even teams unaccustomed to remote working, like our Finance Team, could now give any island-hopping laptop-balancing forex-trader a run for their money (and beat them on the spread, of course).
But as our collective attention turns to a return, and the spectre of illness recedes, what did we learn? We know we can work from home - great! For many this was nothing more than a gratifying confirmation of something we always knew.
The latest LinkedIn #WorkforceConfidenceIndex would have you believe some industries are poised to work from home forever. For the knowledge worker it all feels possible. Yet we may look back as an arborist noting a narrowing of the tree rings after a long winter. Deep connections, conversational ideation, the inscribing of company culture on new recruits, social cohesion and good quality banter is all too effortlessly meted out face to face. It doesn’t fit neatly down the wire as much as our Ugg Boot wearing selves wish it could. Not yet. The world isn’t ready for an entirely distributed workforce, though it will be one day. There are futurists who are stood ready to disagree with me even now, and that’s a good thing.
Professional organiser Marie Kondo famously prescribes all manner of de-cluttering rituals - my favourite being ‘take all the clothes from your wardrobe and put them in a pile on your bed’. Why does this work so well? It is a focus-ring. Once the chaos is in one spot it is easier to see it for what it is. In our Zoom-world, our wardrobe has been emptied onto the bed for us. If you have been working from home the past few months, everything you do at work now comes through a screen in front of you. We must take this opportunity to look at everything we do critically and wonder, what does it give us in return? So far I’ve already noticed more documentation, meetings with agendas, strategic thinking that is written down, analysed and debated - we must not lose this.
Something we may take back to the office is a sharp understanding of what an office is good for and what it isn’t. I’m a deep work hard-core and yet I don’t begrudge the opportunity to run into a coworker I may otherwise have no cause to work with. The apocryphal story of the invention of the transistor by Bardeen, Shockley and Brattain at Bell Labs, is at its core a fable about balancing deep work and collaboration. Collision by design: a small office at the end of a long hallway (packed with physicists, in this case).
The technology sector will race to offer permanent work from home positions wherever possible. Seek has a new category ready for fresh deliveries of JDs. That magic mix will change for employers looking to get the best talent, who fought so hard to reach the table with flexible work in the first place just to see the stakes raised. Regardless of perks, it will be the company culture that keeps people hanging around and performing at their best. This is one of the few things we know for sure about culture - the most ephemeral yet impactful of the management arts.
And no matter how many games of Codenames you play over Zoom, it is a lot easier to ‘do’ culture in person. Authenticity is a precondition to culture, which is de-facto face-to-face but imperfect and interruptible online. Can you hear me? I can hear you. You’re on mute. It’s the best we have right now and I don’t bemoan it.
We will be back in our offices before long. This is a one-off opportunity to reindex our work practices, understand why physical presence is important - and where we are fine to forego it, remember the value of deep work, and throw out some old clothes from the towering mound of hand-me-downs.
In medias res