Remote vs Office - The Productivity Debate is Moot

The pursuit of for- and non-profit businesses alike, is impactful outcomes. Whether the goal is to turn a dollar or change society, we all strive to leverage our capabilities for the most meaningful impact; we all experience the pressure of our operational constraints as we strive to maximise our productivity.

Productivity and performance underpin impact and outcome, both annoyingly hard to measure in the knowledge industry. Whether at the individual or team level, the complex dynamics of knowledge work will likely turn your attempts at quantifying productivity into educated guesswork at best.

I have invested heavily in thought, discussion, and debate on the impacts on remote vs collocated productivity over the past year. I've run the gamut of the cost of zoom fatigue and the benefits of random collisions and water-cooler chats. I have read how the Allen Curve holds and listened to Matt Mullenweg describe how WordPress, a remote-first company, operates.

I read reports such as Slack's "Remote work in the age of Covid-19" and Future Forum's "Findings from the Remote Employee Experience Index". I studied Distributed Work's Five Levels of Autonomy (Mullenweg again) and wracked my brain for ideas to maintain social cohesion and cultural momentum in a remote work environment.

I considered productivity at the individual level, likely improved when working remotely, vs productivity at the team level, likely diminished without close personal collaboration. I thought about the cost of miscommunication via asynchronous text and the benefits improved work-life balance has on engagement and productivity. I often found myself on the fence; the difficulties of managing teams remotely, on the one hand, the personal advantages of working from home on the other.

The pivotal moment for me was when I realised the entire conversation around productivity is moot. I'd been pursuing a local optimisation in a closed system, but there has been a societal (open system) shift in traditional office workers' attitudes to the office. Whether your workforce will be more or less productive from home or the office is irrelevant. Work flexibility has become a hygiene factor; it is certainly no longer considered a perk, it is assumed given. As an employer, you either need to match or beat your competitors in the work flexibility area or be confident that you pack some formidable punch in another aspect of your job offering.

Remote work, like COVID-19, has become endemic to our society, but it doesn't diminish the challenges around this new reality. If you weren't remote-first to start with, a hybrid approach is probably best. You cannot simply catapult people into a remote environment without the support of an office. Some might not do well with the isolation, and others might not have space for a desk in their living quarters. Whatever the case, assuming everyone will immediately adapt to a remote work environment will only cause undue suffering.

This begs the question then, which hybrid configuration will work best? One, two, three days in the office or complete flexibility? What percentage of your office space should be desks? How many breakout rooms or ideation spaces do you need? Do you need one office, or can you afford the hub-and-spoke model?

So far, my thoughts are heavily weighted towards collocating creativity and distributing engineering or, put another way, minimum in-office space for individual work, maximum space for collaboration.

If I get any further with this, I'll let you know.

Until next time.