NAVIGATE.LEGAL
Why we shouldn't let the office define the course of remote working
Author: Dermot Knight 04.02.2021
So many things have been turned upside down in the last year, with COVID 19 rendering many things we used to do “undoable.” Although there is a temptation to reorganise to try to recreate what has been lost, now is the time to reimagine work and create new conventions that are better suited to the current and future working environment.
We should do this without being constrained by comparisons with what used to happen in an office. Even though we are no longer in offices, the office way of doing things remains the baseline for defining what work is in the virtual world. This impedes the ability of the agile environment to meet our needs by forcing it to play by office strengths instead of its own. Furthermore, if we only appreciate this new style of working through the lens of what used to happen in an office, its true potential is left unexplored.
A new set of conventions are needed to suit a virtual working environment – not office conventions trying to use virtual tools. A new work ethic, free from the constraints of office thinking, will enable teams to
(1) fix a great deal of the perceived “downsides” of current virtual practice;
(2) avoid many of the deficiencies associated with a traditional office and
(3) maximise their ability to recognise the new possibilities that an agile working style can create.
The office wasn’t best practice to begin with
The office was persuaded by tradition/convention more than it was by efficacy/value. Many working practices predated significant shifts in technology, but were maintained, even though there were better ways to get to the same outcome.
New tools kept arriving – email, laptops, smart phones. Yet it seemed we never really got their value because we still worked from the same desks, following the same routine, as our fore-bearers who enjoyed none of these tools we have at our finger tips.
Potential innovations were often evaluated from the side of the disruption they would cause, rather than the benefit they would bring. “How can we obtain as many benefits as possible while preventing disruption?” instead of “What is the maximum benefit and does this outweigh any associated disruption?” This path of least resistance meant the office was operating significantly behind where it could have been. The more it ignored innovation potential, the more it depended on effort intensive practices and therefore the more it considered these practices valuable. This engrained processes that didn’t need to be there and created demand for unnecessary work (often a root cause of overwork and the urgent crowding out the important.) The office, in both its perception of how work should be done and the type of work it rewarded, institutionalised process over outcome. It valued working harder over working smarter.
Furthermore, the office culture frequently enabled exclusionary practices and demanded a style of working that left a heavy carbon footprint. The workplace should be aspiring to become ever more inclusive, as well as shouldering greater responsibility for environmental protection.
The office conventions, however well established, weren't the best way to get to where we want to go – so we should be careful how much of its logic we choose to import.
Trying to be like the office at home is making work harder
Trying to do your office job at home both limits the upside and exaggerates the downsides of agile working.
A central feature of the office was that everyone was in the same place at the same time. We got used to this and almost every facet of office life was dictated by this physical proximity. It made interaction effortless: a knock at someone’s door and we could get support; seek out directly the people we needed to contact; or just grab a coffee with others to replenish focus. It also determined how work was allocated, monitored and assessed. It determined routines
and defined the norms of working life
Working remotely removes this commonality of place and even time. Instead of reshaping the very fundamentals of how work is done, it can seem both simpler and more familiar to try to copy and paste the office into the virtual world. Trying to do something physical in a dispersed workforce will only achieve limited results. Expecting teams to deliver office results with office tools in a virtual world places significant pressure people.
Ceasing comparisons with what used to happen in the office, and instead developing different roles with different objectives and different ways to perform them, will liberate many people from these stresses. Things have changed, work dynamics should change with them.
Does it make sense to compare?
An office vs remote comparison is not a balanced one. Firstly, we are judging an 8 month experience against decades of office experience. The virtual working environment is still new and all new things take some getting used to. Secondly, the move to remote working was a crisis response. In other words, the focus was on replicating office work at home, not making remote work successful.
This was the right focus for the time, but it means remote working hasn’t had a chance to be the best it can. These “teething” issues will get better as businesses adjust their focus and as their people get more accustomed to new ways of going about their work
So how do we create a new style of working? Some suggestions:
Do we know what has changed and what hasn't?
The response to COVID has changed everyone’s work – and not in the same ways.
Some things will be needed more, some things will be needed less. The demand for all of our work will be affected. Understanding how this affects the volume, frequency and type of demand for your work is a crucial precondition for working out how to do your work.
Listening to your people
Creating an agile/remote structure is less about tech and more about people. This is frequently understood but it is also frequently forgotten in the rush to “operationalise” the plan. It is more important than ever to offer genuine opportunity for your people to shape the environment in which they work:
(1) Understanding how the crisis has affected your people
Remote work hasn’t just affected how a business works, it has significantly impacted personal lives as well. It is important to listen to your people and understand how remote work has affected them. How has it affected their work? How has it affected their personal lives? There will be both positive and negative effects. Personal and professional life should be able to co-exist. A successful agile structure enhances, rather than competes with, home life. This will not happen by accident and will need an informed and well balanced understanding of personal challenges/needs.
(2) Your people possess the most valuable inputs to a future design
Engaging people in shaping the foundations of an agile structure is one of the most important factors to finding a successful outcome. (1) They hold the most valuable insight as the people closest to the “front lines” of operation. (2) They hold the keys when it comes to determining whether the strategy on paper can actually work in practice – where they buy in to the idea it becomes functional, where they don’t then exceptions/workarounds begin to creep in and it will not be embedded
sufficiently enough to return the benefits.
3) Getting the most from your people in the agile world
The office was a “one size fits all” approach to work. In the name of easy administration everyone was expected to operate the same. In this sense it disregarded perhaps the most important thing about people: we are all different. Conformity hid hardship and stifled individual potential. The virtual workspace, and all its technological advancement, gives businesses the ability to offer bespoke working experiences for their people. They should consider regulating the outcome of work more than the process of it – and as such provide a more enriching environment for both the person and the business.
The move to agile working shouldn’t be an invitation to work longer or be available 24/7. A new sensitivity should develop about when to call someone or how to use other office tools like messaging. Planning is the ingredient necessary to balance effective work delivery with respect for home life. It places a greater responsibility on each person to consider how their work fits into the wider objectives, and how to organise the inputs/dependencies they require from others. This ensures countless inputs can be combined seamlessly while without intruding on personal life.
Being prepared to break convention
There is a need to challenge both our presumptions of how work is done and what we consider important. Remote working has less to do with where work is done and more to do with what it delivers.
A virtual culture should care less about process and more about outcome. It should be a move away from “presenteeism” and toward tangible delivery.
Crucially, it should engrain a common understanding of what is valuable work and have the courage to dispense with practices that merely use up time and deliver little more than marginal impact.
It should encourage a discussion on the parameters that govern work. Should work continue to be defined by time even though location is no longer a factor? Are people required to be “working” between specified times regardless of whether it is busy or quiet? Does it matter if people aren’t at their desks all day? Can they go to exercise/grocery shop/school run at optimal times for them, if they are delivering a valuable/quality output in the right timeframes? We should value the outcome over the processes we enforce upon our people to get there. This will require genuine open-mindedness, underpinned by accurate metrics and a willingness to follow the data. It should include the reconfiguring roles, establishing new norms, and the development of a style that speaks to all components of a workplace (interaction, collaboration, progression etc.)
Adjusting processes without adjusting mindsets will only lead to half measures – creating working practices that are neither virtual nor office based with the hardships of both and the benefits of none.
Concluding thoughts
One of the leading reasons for discomfort is trying to make the remote environment work like an office. It feels harder because we aren’t using it in the optimal way. Where the virtual world can only be imagined through the office world, its capacity will be limited and its ability to deliver doubted. Constant comparison with the office way of doing things will mislead businesses into making the wrong decisions for remote working, fuelling the fatigue of an overburdened workforce that will increasingly struggle to rationalise its purpose.
An agile working strategy developed on its own merits is an opportunity to both fix the shortcomings of the office and open up new avenues of opportunity with all the potential afforded by the ever advancing technology.
Dermot Knight is a long time legal transformation advocate and
a Director at the legal transformation consultancy, NAVIGATE LEGAL