Will People Stop Working Next To Each Other?
By Karen and Erica
We read that one of the results of this horrible pandemic will be that knowledge workers will work from home from now on, and that will be the end of office buildings in Manhattan and other big cities. Back to the suburbs. Down with density.
We would find that surprising.
We are both products of large global enterprises that had offices in Manhattan and other major cities around the globe. We grew up in the knowledge industry in an era when working from home was not even a glimmer in anybody’s eye. Being home meant being sick or otherwise off the radar.
Over the course of our working lives things changed. The information superhighway was constructed. It turned into the internet. Now, vast troves of information are at our fingertips, wherever we are. And we can communicate wherever we are, too. We started with beepers. Then came cell phones, then personal devices, and now Zoom.
So yes, there is no need now for a knowledge worker to venture outside of her home if she needs to write a brief, or have a team meeting, or advise a board, or do some research. (Until now, she did have to be physically present in court, but the pandemic has changed that as well.)
But is it really right that most knowledge workers don’t need to be with other humans, ever? Or don’t want to?
We don’t think so.
First of all, what is knowledge? One definition: the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association. Knowledge, as here defined, cannot be achieved only by Zooming at your kitchen table. Experience cannot be fully realized remotely. Even as babies we learn from each other—we are not one dimensional AI robots. We need contact with other people, in person.
In particular, people who work for an organization need to buy into its mission, and become a part of its ecosystem. The culture of the organization is part of the reason to work there. So are the people—both the people who are your colleagues and the people you serve.
And you can’t work at the top of your form if you are working remotely. You can’t read people on FaceTime the way you can in person. You can’t see nuances of expression. You can’t share unexpected moments of hilarity or sobriety. You can’t gather a team to bat around ideas and come up with a better one for an intractable problem, and then celebrate over a drink.
We suspect women in particular would not benefit by being expected to work from home. A thoughtful Fast Company article argues to the contrary that working from home gives women more time with children; removes the bias toward tall people (a goal we can totally identify with); reduces male interruptions because of less human contact; and creates better opportunities for finding or keeping jobs if their husbands move.
That strikes us as rather defeatist. It suggests we cannot, or do not want to, make it in what is still a man’s world. That if we are allowed to work quietly at the kitchen table we can continue to shoulder domestic obligations singlehandedly while we follow our husbands around and hold full time jobs. That’s no advance
It was our experience that women have huge strengths in the business world. Women derive power, and pleasure, from person-to-person interaction. Women are very good at reading the room, and reading a person, and devising solutions to complex problems once they understand what is going on. They are also just as good as men at everything else—except being tall. And they have the benefit of much more amusing clothes. The idea that a woman should retreat from the field, rather than change the way the game is played, cannot be the right conclusion.
So we agree—the pandemic has given us the opportunity to learn that we can work from home—in an emergency. But if working from home becomes the new norm, working will have been redefined to become a pretty one-dimensional activity. For knowledge professionals, that would undermine the whole premise that what they are selling is experience.
What we do like is flexibility. We would be glad if the knowledge that we can work from home translated into flexibility for those occasions—or maybe even years—when everything would be simpler if we did work from home. We love the idea of a less than five day work week. (That would not have worked for our jobs, where we were responsive to the demands of others, but would for many.) If you can do your job in four days, working twelve hours a day, why not?
We have always been puzzled by the increased workload that has come with the internet. One reason, we expect, is that there is no boundary between the work day and the rest of your life when everything is remote. If workers were generally expected to accomplish their jobs in their offices within a four day period, we suspect productivity would rise, as well as worker satisfaction.
Organizations may use the pandemic as an opportunity get rid of real estate obligations. We predict that would be short-sighted and counterproductive. People like people. And human interaction, of the interpersonal kind, is critical to knowledge. A forward thinking organization will be ready to bring its people together to get back to work, with the help of tests and remedies that we are sure will be available before too long. To eliminate the serendipity that happens when people are working alongside each other in the same space will ultimately cost more than any real estate obligation.
Working is part of life, and knowledge workers work with other people. We can surely figure out how to do that, even in our new, pandemic-prone world.