IT Essentials: If you want a buzzy office, you’re a decade late

Knowledge work is quiet work

It is this, not remote work, that makes building workplace culture tricky

The last couple of weeks have bought a wave of announcements on remote working, or more accurately, why people won’t be allowed to do that anymore.

The most famous employer ordering people back to the office in September was Amazon. Andy Jassy’s memo sold heavily the benefits of everyone being in the office – collaboration, innovation and cultural connection.

The brouhaha that the Amazon announcement caused meant that some other big-name mandates have flown under the radar. UK-based PwC employees were told in September that not only should they return to the office for the bulk of their working week but that their employer would be monitoring their locations from January.

A recently published survey by KPMG found that no less than 79% of US CEOs thought that corporate roles which were predominantly office-based before Covid would be back full-time in the office within three years.

Perhaps these CEOs are influenced by a media and often political view of workplaces as buzzing, noisy environments where phones constantly ring, keyboards clatter, banter flows with the coffee and relationships begin with lingering glances across banks of desks.

This office of the public imagination is about twenty years out of date. I started with a reference to photocopiers in the previous paragraph which proves how retrograde this concept is. Try thinking of ‘items typically found in a modern workplace’ – most have them have been obsolete for at least a decade.

The nature of office work has changed

The reality is that knowledge work is quiet work. Offices are quieter than they used to be, and not just because fewer people are present. Many people work with earbuds in and use messaging to communicate, share information and conduct meetings. Creative work and tasks like coding require deep concentration at times.

For many knowledge workers, the main reason they go into the office is to see people and just be around colleagues. This brings us to one of Andy Jassy’s more interesting observations which is the one about culture. He’s not wrong on this one. It is harder to build a strong workplace culture with high levels of remote working. New recruits might feel less bonded and loyal to their employer if they’re predominantly home-based because they haven’t yet experienced the feeling of being part of something bigger.

So, are all these RTO mandates going to help build more positive workplace cultures? Not if all the complaining on LinkedIn and angry Op-Eds are anything to go by. But the assertions that these mandates will backfire are also based on flimsy evidence.

Hybrid workers might well report higher levels of happiness and wellbeing but are they more productive? Lots of articles which say things like “the evidence is mounting that remote workers are as or more productive as their office colleagues” quote this study but interestingly, the section on productivity relied on remote workers assessing their own productivity levels.

The fact is there isn’t an abundance of evidence to bolster anyone’s argument either way. We’ve had four years of widespread remote and hybrid working compared to decades of the traditional model.

What employers, including Amazon, are likely to find out is that it’s the nature of knowledge work itself that creates the challenge – not remote working. Knowledge work is often best performed independently. It’s not a team sport. The fact that lots of tech workers worked remotely a couple of days a week before the pandemic adds weight to this argument and one made at the time – that Covid just pressed the accelerator on a trend that was already gathering momentum.

What I find deliciously ironic is the fact that it’s the very tech companies whose products and platforms enabled remote working in the first place, that are the ones leading the efforts to shove the genie back in the bottle.

Good luck with that one.