In which I state the obvious, albeit uncomfortable, truth. Out loud. Again.
You might be surprised to hear that I am opposed to Return-to-Office mandates. After all, I am endlessly trumpeting the benefits of third spaces, community, and meeting in real life (IRL). So what gives?
If you’ve actually been inside an office building lately and you’ve spent just a little time observing employees, you know exactly what I’m talking about: cubicles as far as the eye can see, people loitering outside conference rooms waiting impatiently to join yet another zoom call, managers locked in their offices, habitually ten minutes late to their back-to-back-to back virtual meetings, and a way of working that divides the projects up into small individual tasks so that each of us is doing our own thing, completely disconnected from the rest of the humans crammed into the same giant, windowless, fluorescent-lighted room.
Would you want to spend your day in this environment? And half of your meager paycheck on the transportation, clothing, and fast food necessary to support it? And then would you also want to while away multiple precious hours of each day sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, all for the opportunity to be a part of this hellscape?
It turns out that many of our workplaces are not places designed to build products that delight our customers. They are places designed to sap our autonomy, to drain our energy, and to control our actions. Whether they are intentionally or accidentally designed this way depends on who’s in charge.
The 12 principles of the agile manifesto include one that says, “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation” and another one that states “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” These principles are the ones driving the advice you’ll receive from many Agile coaches to work together in the same, open space and toward the same, common goal.
The reasoning here, in general, is that people build stronger relationships and, in turn, solve difficult problems faster and with better solutions when they work together toward a common outcome and in the physical presence of one another. The data does support this idea. Research indicates that people who are strongly connected to one another work better together because they have built the foundation of trust necessary to be honest, open to new ideas, and to respect one another. Additionally, communication is more complete, more rapid, and more successful when we are physically in the same space where we can better hear the intricate details in someone’s voice and more easily interpret one another’s body language.
The problem with RTO mandates is that, in many instances, we’ve actually returned to office environments where the benefits of a shared working space have been stripped away, leaving us working in an isolated environment on individual tasks. Sure, you might be sitting in an open space, but if you’re not working on the same thing as your neighbor, and you are dialing in to calls with people elsewhere in the building or even the country or world, and blocking out the distractions around you with noise-cancelling headphones, you might as well be in your own home office where you can fully concentrate and have more control over your environment.
We’ve known for some time now that sentient beings benefit from community, from living, learning and growing together. We’ve also known that when we make space for this type of relationship, whether it’s through the third spaces in our neighborhoods, the workspaces in our office buildings, or the work cells on our shop floors, problems are solved more quickly and more effectively.
Why, then, would so many of the leaders of our companies intentionally build workplaces thats restrict the exact sort of environment needed for the success of their businesses? Sure, it could be lack of understanding. Or maybe these leaders are just so busy trying to keep the lights on that they’re not spending enough time thinking strategically.
Of course, it could also be that at least some of our leaders don’t care at all about the long-term success of their businesses. If your intention is to only hang around for 2-3 years, just long enough to soak up your cushy package and prop up the stock value, and then move on before the bottom drops out, I could see why you’d have little interest in building a workplace where human beings can do their best work and your business, and indirectly your community, can thrive.
In fact, if you were in that last camp, you might prefer to build a workplace where workers are at their breaking point, where they’re isolated, exhausted, stretched too thin, and ready to crack over the constant disruption and stress. Where they feel like cogs in a wheel or farm animals in a pen. Because in this case, they won’t have the time or energy to complain about low wages, poor working conditions, or to seek out something better.
It’s time we do better for each other. We need to bring business ownership back into our communities, where we all have a vested interest in the long term success of the enterprise. Where the stock price is not the main driver of our decisions, but where long term solvency of our businesses is. This is how we build communities and a society where we all contribute and we all benefit. It starts with treating our employees with dignity and respect. It’s not hard work. But is requires looking at the system around us with fresh and critical eyes and then choosing to diligently reshape it. We can do this, if we want to.
