“The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.”
Jes Staley has been quoted in a Yahoo article inferring that as an industry we may finally be ready to embrace Location Independent Working (LIW) at scale.
I've spent the last few weeks, like most of us, embracing LIW. While I am lucky enough to have a home office where I can close the door, I have actually moved around the house! Working from the garage, the kitchen, the dining room, the kids' playroom, the lounge and the woods at the bottom of my garden. I've even done some calls sitting on the edge of the bed (not in PJs!) and will almost certainly move to the kids' treehouse at some point. Has anything broken? Nope. And I am hearing countless similar stories from all of you out there! Do I desperately want to get out of my house/property and experience social contact? YES! Would I like to see my team in person? YES!
So is LIW the panacea it's been made out to be? Maybe!
Will we spend the rest of our working lives on Zoom/Webex/Hangouts/Teams/Skype/FaceTime/WhatsApp? No!
For years large companies have really struggled to adopt 'Working from Home' (WFH) at scale and in some sectors/companies there has been a deep mistrust about not being able to see your staff/colleagues. 'How do I know they are working if I can't see them'? This reminds me of the old clock-watching mentality of the 80s/90s and the stereotypes in some cultures of never leaving before the boss.
Jes has always been a supporter of 'Dynamic Working' at Barclays but this goes to another level. One of the challenges about WFH has been the apparent need to implement a 'Group Standard Policy' or 'Guidelines' or an 'Acceptable Usage Policy' or 'Risk Acceptance Frameworks' ........ Large companies like to codify things to fit into scorecards. Some of this will be needed but some is a symptom of the old way of working.
On balance, this mindset change should be welcomed!
It should assist massively with retaining and attracting diverse talent.
It should provide a more inclusive working environment where everyone is now the same size box on a screen.
The organisation has built in Resilience! We would have, by design, a distributed operation. If we have a power issue in one building - who cares?
Performance reviews will have to be less subjective and more data driven which should lead to more transparency and a feeling of fairness.
It's not all glorious good news: there are pitfalls.
We need to ensure we are keeping an eye on the more vulnerable members of our teams (who aren't always obvious). While many have enjoyed kicking the commute and spending more time with their families and rediscovering hobbies, others are hating it. They may be alone and craving social contact or they may be driven mad by their kids or loved ones! Either way, this period of lockdown will leave a legacy of mental health issues for years to come. We need to treat these issues the same way we would treat any illness by identifying it and treating it. Mental Health issues have an unwarranted stigma. I am an anxiety sufferer. I have identified it and treated it and I am sensitive to others as well.
We need to ensure our teams maintain a sense of 'team' & 'company'. Our 'old way' response to this was big town halls, after work events, in person networking/etc. Actually we still need to do this! We still need to have somephysical events to ensure our teams know they are a team. While virtual collaboration tools have already changed the way we work and will continue to, humans need this physical contact. Maybe it's pheromones? Perhaps we need to smell other humans to really connect with them! Certainly shared experiences create a lasting bond. Interestingly one of the biggest killers to morale is gossip and water-cooler complaining. This has disappeared! People can literally disconnect from negative conversations!
My boss has taken to 'Skype Bombing' people to make sure they are still connected to the team! This highlights one of the benefits of technology. We can call anyone anytime and message anyone anytime. There is no assistant in the way. We are going straight to who we want to get to!
We can, to a certain extent, create online communities to try and replicate the physical team engagement. We can run more regular networking events! No need to be limited by facilities availability or budget for snacks! We can open source initiatives. Anyone can help in their spare time on whatever they want to. This reminds me of the earlier days of Java when everyone was learning. Online communities were a great enabler and accelerator!
Talking to a number of people the consensus is that productivity has settled down to around 90% (completely subjective measurement) with some software firms actually finding they are now over 100%! In fact, they are reminding staff to STOP WORKING and ensure they have a work life balance rather than making it worse! 90% productivity is good enough! Particularly when you strip out the normal waste in a day through commuting, desk 'drive-bys', hours of in person meetings in different buildings/floors.
One key thing we need to remember as managers is the need to be clear on what we need people to do and if we already know what 'it' will look like we need to tell people. Either that or we need to replace the desk drive-bys to check on something with a Skype Bomb!
We need to re-evaluate urgency! I don't know about you but in the last couple of months the number of fire-drills has dropped. This is a good thing! We need to use the 'this is urgent card' only when we need to! The boy who cried wolf comes to mind....
We need to ensure they have the tools and technology needed to support this. This doesn't just mean laptops for everyone, we need to think about everything needed for a location independent worker. Barclays spends thousands of pounds a year to ensure I have a working environment at the right temperature, electricity, drinking water, toilet facilities, has food available on-site, that is safe in the event of an emergency, a desk at the right height (in fact mine goes up and down!), chair with the right support, screen(s) which are at the right level and the right resolution for my increasingly failing eyes, laptop and enterprise telephony with a suite of software that allow me to do my job and a bunch of other controls and software to keep me safe and secure in the office and remotely. I can check my emails and video conference from my personal devices anywhere on planet Earth and probably in space but the roaming charges would be crazy!
I don't think we can say the same for our home setups at the moment. Most people have a kitchen table & chair, mood lighting, a small laptop screen and a bunch of small and big people bustling past. Many of our team members, particularly the more junior members just starting their career, house share. Where are they going to put the work equivalent setup? What if all 4 of them in the house need two screens a keyboard, mouse, etc? So we need a level of flexibility based on the wants and needs in some situations. Also, who's paying for all this?
The romantic in me would love a return to community values and perhaps this 'new way of working' provides the ultimate balance between globalisation and community. We can all work for a global organisation doing a job we do, how we want to do it without leaving our village. We can order the latest gadget and it can be delivered to our cottage in the middle of a chocolate box village. We can support local and if we want, pop down to the local co-working space. If we need to we can make the exciting trip to head office to meet with people and check in with our teams in person!
We can lead a more healthy life! Cleaner air, fitness, more energy, less depression/anxiety! Utopia!
We can buy local. A friend of mine owns a small, specialist coffee shop and he is hoping for an increase in footfall of 40% vs pre-COVID19 as he is expecting lots more long-term working from home people to stretch their legs and grab a coffee/breakfast/lunch from his shop. So maybe the local economies will flourish but commuter fuelled regional economies will suffer.
At an individual level we can probably do this but while the financial legacy of the governments borrowing to bail out of individuals and businesses will likely top out in the ~£100bn mark through COVID19, the economic impact of the commercial property market, big-business service businesses such as premises management & catering and the transport firms (eg public transport/commuter coaches) will be much larger and more impactful. This is another reason why large scale behavioural change is a super tanker fighting against the tides! Could we really see large cities deserted?
But there are other things at play here. Global warming and the associated pollution. We have seen that pollution on busy London roads has dropped by nearly 50% in the early days of the Lockdown. We've all seen the satellite images of China and Europe showing the before and after. I can see the stars more clearly out in the country and people in London have been able to see the stars for the first time in years!
We've seen that there is a forecast 'carbon crash' this year as CO2 levels drop to probably 2010 levels.
Maybe what COVID19 social behaviour changes has actually been is a warm up (pun intended) to sustaining the behavioural changes needed to seriously tackle climate change!
But... That's an article for another time. This one seems to have gone on far longer than I had intended!
In summary....
Could I work from home and never go to an office? I could probably do my job effectively but it wouldn't do my mental health any good!
Is the new way of working the right thing for society and planet earth? IMHO (one for the kidz): YES!!
I'll sign-off with this amazing scene from the movie Network. Sidney Lumet is mad as hell. If we want to change anything for the better, compliancy/complacency isn't going to do it!
Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives.