Work Futures Update | Questions, Not Answers
By: Stowe Boyd
Tags: Working From Home, Minimum Office, Parent Backlash, Update, Amazon

Work Futures Update | Questions, Not Answers

| Minimum Office: Work That Matters, Hub-and-Spoke Model, Parent Backlash, Dress for Zoom | Amazon’s Real Breakthrough |

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Beacon NY 2020–09–07 | The most important story in this issue is the top-most, based on research by Birkinshaw, Cohen, and Stach, immediately following the Quotes of the Moment.

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Is it really the end of summer, already?

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Quotes of the Moment

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

| Voltaire

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Tell me the question I should ask you that’s going to make me want to hire you.

| Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, cited by Lila MacLellan in Quartz at Work. MacLellan explains why this is the best interview question:

The meta question is brilliant because it not only tells the gatekeeper or manager which personal traits candidates value, but also whether they understand the workplace ethos and the interviewer’s mindset. Or at least one of the above, depending on how sincere or strategic one’s answer — or question, more accurately — is.

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Minimum Office

Research: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive from Home | Julian Birkinshaw , Jordan Cohen, and Pawel Stach reprised questions from a 2013 survey and found in 2020 that people are happier working from home. Their key findings:

Lockdown helps us focus on the work that really matters. We are spending 12% less time drawn into large meetings and 9% more time interacting with customers and external partners. Lockdown helps us take responsibility for our own schedules. We do 50% more activities through personal choice — because we see them as important — and half as many because someone else asked us to. During lockdown, we view our work as more worthwhile. We rate the things we do as valuable to our employer and to ourselves. The number of tasks rated as tiresome drops from 27% to 12%, and the number we could readily offload to others drops from 41% to 27%.

Most interesting to me are the downward shifts in managing across and managing up.

Also: the decrease in work sparked by coworker requests, and the increase in autonomously selected work: ‘found time — it was important’. The latter is likely the complement to the decrease in ‘managing across’ in the previous chart.

As the researchers put it:

What’s going on here? It seems we have been taking more direct charge of our time during lockdown. Working from home gives us a bit of breathing space: We don’t have colleagues or bosses badgering us, and we don’t get drawn into meetings by force of habit, just because we happen to be around. The result is a reassuring increase in us making time for work that matters most to us.

This is also shown in this chart, that demonstrates how people are finding more importance to their activities:

That’s all great but are there negatives?

The bigger areas of concern were around the things people couldn’t do well in a virtual environment. Take managing across first: It’s not so hard for an existing working group to stay on course when working remotely, but the challenges of getting started on something new (the forming/storming stages of team development) or resolving internal conflicts are enormous. Of course, these activities can be done over Zoom — just not as well. Few people are energized by informal online get-togethers. As one person said, “We are slowly losing the social glue that holds us together.”

I think we are getting by on swift trust, the hollywood movie crew effect where coworkers are pulled together for the making of a picture, and rely on the professionalism of the others to make the effort come together. But while that works in an emergency or for a single picture, it doesn’t apply when people believe they will be working with the others in the group over the long term.

We will need to create more consensus on the new rules — the new culture — emerging from our experience of minimum office.

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Deloitte and KPMG are exploring a hub-and-spoke model for offices | Nate Berg spoke with various folks about the hubification of businesses:

“Many corporate occupiers are saying let’s have a downtown hub, and suburban west, east and north spokes, so that people can have their office close to their home if and when they want to go to the office,” says Sheila Botting, president for the Americas at the commercial real estate company Avison Young. A smaller central office may still stay in the downtown core, but it will be augmented by several smaller offices or a coworking space near where their employees live. Instead of leasing a big office building, or a whole floor, companies may start renting out smaller chunks of real estate that are spread across a broader geography. […] Whether its employers or employees who want to make sure the office experience is part of the job, spokes in other locations can make it easier and cheaper for companies to provide office space. Compact spaces for fewer workers are less expensive than leasing a large space in a downtown — something Segal says few companies are likely to want to do at this point. “For a company to sign a lease right now, that’s a tough decision to make because there’s so much uncertainty,” he says. “Every company we’re talking to, and this is not anecdotal, we’re getting to 30, 40, 50 companies that are saying we want to reduce our size, what does that look like, and how can we be smart about the office.” Being smart about the office, Segal says, may mean shrinking it down to a core hub and using spokes when and where they’re needed.

Like REI’s plan, as I discussed in Work Futures Update | The World as Organization:

REI said it will move to a less centralized headquarters approach that spans multiple locations across the Seattle region. The company enacted a nearly 100% work-from-home policy for HQ staff in early March. “The dramatic events of 2020 have challenged us to reexamine and rethink every aspect of our business and many of the assumptions of the past. That includes where and how we work,” REI President and CEO Eric Artz told employees in a video call today. “As a result, our new experience of ‘headquarters’ will be very different than the one we imagined more than four years ago.”

This is the future: minimum office.

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Parents Got More Time Off. Then the Backlash Started. | Daisuke Wakabayashi and Sheera Frenkel report on controversy at Facebook: Facebook employees with children have benefits that others don’t, drawing accusations of unequal treatment.

The tension between parents and nonparents has been most vividly displayed at Facebook. In March, Facebook offered up to 10 weeks of paid time off for employees if they had to care for a child whose school or day care facility had closed or for an older relative whose nursing home was not open. Google and Microsoft extended similar paid leave to employees dealing with children at home or a sick relative. […] When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, hosted a companywide videoconference on Aug. 20, more than 2,000 employees voted to ask her what more Facebook could do to support nonparents, since its other policies had benefited parents. […] Ms. Sandberg said she “disagreed with the premise of the question” that the leave policy and freeze on performance ratings were primarily benefiting parents. She added that larger-than-normal bonuses had been given to all employees and that everyone had received a $1,000 stipend to buy equipment for working from home. The employees persisted. In a written comment, one said more than a thousand people agreed with the premise of the question and asked that Ms. Sandberg answer it again. She did, adding that Facebook has tried to design its leave policies to be “inclusive.”

This furor and others related in the piece at Twitter and Salesforce, underscore the inherent inequality stemming from employee benefits that are not uniform. Or, taking a few steps back from the problem, this is what arises when we rely on companies to provide benefits that should be built into government policies. The pandemic is simply an amplifier of the problem.

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Dress for the (Remote) Job You Want | Noah Zandan and Hallie Lynch have mistitled this HBR article, which should be called ‘how to dress and pick the background for video calls’:

In our survey of 465 men and women, fielded in March and April 2020, participants were asked questions about their video conferencing preferences, expectations, and experiences. Additionally, respondents were shown a person against three different backgrounds, another person wearing three different colors, and a third person dressed in three different types of attire. Participants were asked to choose which background, clothing color and clothing style helped the speaker appear the most authentic (genuine, actions are in line with beliefs), the most trustworthy (honest, truthful, reliable), the most innovative (original, creative in thinking, willing to depart from the norm), and the most like an expert (highly credible, an authority on the subject matter at hand).

Here’s the charts: