Working in the office isn't an either / or choice
It gives greater flexibility and can be more productive but zoom fatigue, burnout and work life balance are all WFH challenges
Ironically, more trips to the office has led to a brief hiatus for this newsletter. Life imitating art, or something.
Onwards
Remote work is here to stay but business and policy makers are still playing catch-up
If there's a dominant trend in social media in 2022, it's that everything can be some form of culture war. And LinkedIn's culture war is the office. A short scroll through the platform usually includes remote work thought leadership on remote working (offices = bad) combined with a handful of people who view remote working = bad.
Working from anywhere, anytime is a simple, easy-to-understand message. And having had an enforced taste of freedom from the office during the pandemic, lack of flexibility over a return to in-person work has been cited as part of the reason for The Great Resignation.
It's a lot harder to make a good case for office work when the alternative is easy to visualise and is more attractive than commuting.
It took a pandemic to highlight that much of the modern white-collar working world was still modelled on notions of time and productivity that still have their roots in the Victorian era. The tools to go fully remote were already available before the pandemic, but many companies were unable or unwilling to make that shift.
But it's one thing to enable fully remote working. It's another thing entirely to make a business that runs on an in-office culture and face-to-face contact immediately successfully pivot to being fully remote.
Airbnb may have attracted 800,000 hits on their career pages after announcing employees can work remotely anywhere forever, but most companies - even ones with good culture - aren't Airbnb. Company DNA is hard to alter. Intentions to offer more flexibility don't always make it to reality.
Anywhere, anytime, anyhow
Possibly the biggest mistake many 'work anywhere, anytime' advocates make is assuming everybody wants to be fully remote.
The Australian Productivity Commission estimates working from home isn't feasible for around 65% of businesses. Shelves need stacking, roads need digging, doctors still need to physically examine patients. Having the option to make staff remote is a privilege a minority have access to. A sizable, reasonably well-paid minority, but still a minority.
Even within that minority, not every person wants to be fully remote. Extroverts may crave the buzz of an office. People in projects that require close collaboration with co-workers may find it easier to do some working sessions face-to-face. Agencies and clients may build better relationships in person.
Those in cramped house shares or with small children at home may simply enjoy working from a better environment (disclaimer: I am one of these people. Thursdays, when my daughter isn't in pre-school, are a necessity to be in the office. I'm very easily distracted).
Work anywhere shouldn't necessarily be conflated with flexibility at work. The two may be close relations, but there's a difference between taking days at home to maximise time with children and working by yourself 100% of the time.
Much depends on lifestyle, life stage, and life needs. No two people are quite the same. Research from everywhere from McKinsey to Slack channel straw polls seems to consistently return a preference for hybrid working rather than opting to be fully remote or back to the office full time.
There's also a bigger economic question if a large number of companies opt to cancel their leases and go fully remote (pragmatic economics around real estate are just as likely to influence remote work as the desire to do right by employees).
Assuming office footprints reduce significantly, who or what replaces them? Can cafes, pubs and retailers who depend on office workers to make their business viable? What happens in towns or localities where a major employer opts to go fully remote? What happens to a city centre with substantially reduced footfall? This is as much a town planning issue as it is a business question.
The effects aren't just felt on town or city centres. Like minded people tend to gravitate towards each other. Will this change the makeup or value around selected suburbs or attractive remote work locations? Will white collar suburbs have working pods? Office workers may relish the opportunity to move to the area around Byron Bay to work remotely and estate agents would be happy with a new well-off demographic, but local residents may think differently.
More positively, an influx of a different demographic may spark a revitalisation or regeneration of towns that previously were just that little too far for a five day commute but is infinitely more manageable for a 2 or three day commute. Counties such as Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire that are on the periphery of London, for example, may find new opportunities and / or new problems.
Opting for remote or hybrid working is business decision, but the principle and practise of remote or hybrid working is not a tech or business question. Local politics are probably the right place to try and answer these questions, although local politicians aren't always the right people to put in charge of coming up with an answer.
In defence of the office
If the office has its downsides, so does working from home. Microsoft research identified a "triple peak" in work hours post-pandemic (see graph below), as more employees logged on from 8pm - 10pm. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some people may opt for family time or exercise during the day and make up hours later.
Remote work also makes it more likely that coworkers are in different time zones, requiring different working hours for collaboration, although this in itself can be problematic if it means one locality is forced to work longer hours by virtue of meetings scheduled to cater for both remote and local colleagues.
Microsoft's same research noted that the number of work meetings in 2022 has hit an all time high. That also suggests that the third peak is being used to catch up on work that would normally be done in non-meeting time.
Video meetings are also exhausting. Stamford University's study into the effects of video meetings found them to be more draining, requiring more cognitive brain power, less enjoyable than face-to-face and less effective at holding people's attention.
Working from home can make us more productive, but productive doesn't necessarily mean effective if the majority of time is spent in additional meetings. It also blurs the barriers between work and home life.
The commute may not be universally loved, but it does force you to physically disconnect from work in a way that moving from the study to the kitchen doesn't (as a side note, the Australian Productivity Commission also noted that an increase in working from home correlated with a decrease in hours spent exercising).
But perhaps one of the benefits of the office is something that is less tangible but important. Working from an office means you have more time, access and interaction with senior team members or teams you wouldn't encounter during your day-to-day work.
Learning by osmosis is harder remotely. Senior colleagues have more meetings and less time, and it's harder to grab five minutes with them at the end of a meeting. That learning goes both ways. Seniors can learn from juniors and vice versa.
Bouncing ideas off co-workers only tangentially related to a project is nearly impossible without scheduling a meeting. For more creative industries such as advertising or PR, that's a lot of knowledge that's far less available and far harder to actively put into your day (an informal chat can be squirreled away in a timesheet code, a more formal meeting suddenly becomes billable hours).
I've worked on several strategies that have benefitted from a colleague's input but often only started with "can I make you a cup of tea, you look busy, what are you working on?"
Culture is hard
Offices and office culture have played their part in The Great Resignation. The alternative may be better for some people, it may be less pleasant for others. It requires more imaginative thinking from business leaders, especially senior professionals who have people and culture within their remit.
The pandemic didn't necessarily change the world of work forever, but it did accelerate trends and working practices that may have taken several more years to implement. And just because companies suddenly found that their employees could do the same work at home, it doesn't necessarily follow that the business or employees were properly set up to go remote full time.
Not every company or individual will suit going fully remote but it does open up opportunities to expand the talent pool into other locations. The office, like TV, and bricks and mortar retail, isn’t dead. It will probably remain part of a working life in some way, shape or form. How big a part is another question where it’s a lot harder to predict an answer.
Recommended reading
EA and FIFA split
Gaming has a lot of very valuable rights. The FIFA series is one of the most valuable. That may soon change. The game’s developer, Electronic Arts, and governing body FIFA have split, with FIFA wanting more money. This is a gamble on both sides and a fascinating case study in brand equity. FIFA the business and FIFA the computer game aren’t necessarily viewed as one and the same, with EA having closer ties to the equity from the game. EA comes up regularly as a favoured Gen Z brand. FIFA (the business) is nowhere near this. Roberto Kusabbi thinks FIFA have been naive. I’m inclined to agree. LINK.
Grocery deliveries are not the next gold rush
SEND and Quicko, two rapid grocery delivery businesses in Australia, recently shut down. This appears to be another case of a business that made sense in a pandemic not having a plan once the pandemic was over. Grocery delivery is a very low margin near-commodity business. Uber was able to disrupt taxis and takeaway delivery as neither of these sectors had a large unified competitor. In grocery delivery, there’s a lot of deep-pocketed large players who could offer this service if they really wanted to. LINK.
Brand building v activation
Excellent Twitter thread from the godfather of marketing effectiveness, Les Binet. LINK.
The attention economy is making us stupid
Scott Galloway on fine form. We’re essentially the product in a social media world. LINK.
Everyone’s a copywriter
Good grammar doesn’t necessarily make good copy. 10 minutes well spend. Especially if you work with copywriters. LINK.
WTF is dunning?
I’d never heard of the phrase “dunning” until I’d read this article. Essentially, it’s a form of passive churn, such as subscription service trying to take a payment from an expired credit card. Digiday estimates anywhere between 20% - 60% of subscription churn can be attributed to dunning. I’ve read a lot of articles detailing how brand loyalty reduces churn, but precious few about tackling customer laziness. Sometimes the biggest impact isn’t the biggest execution. LINK.
Peak podcast?
Rephonic notes that average podcast ratings on Apple Podcasts have been steadily dropping. At the same time, Ofcom’s latest data suggests people are struggling to find podcasts that interest them. There were 650,000 new podcasts added to Apple Podcasts in 2021. That suggests either there’s a lot of dross, people are more discerning about their time, or discoverability is poor. Rephonic LINK. Ofcom LINK.
Thanks for reading this far. Hopefully you’ve found it mildly diverting. Like what you’ve read? Forward it onto somebody and ask them to subscribe.
Playing us out this week: Foals - 2am. Somehow they’ve evolved from indie math rock into something Nile Rodgers would be proud of. This is a very good thing.