Is remote working working?

The grand experiment

The Covid pandemic triggered a spontaneous and global management experiment to explore the management implications of operating a largely remote workforce. How would it impact productivity? How would managers cope with not being able to hover over their subordinates?

What’s in it for me?

During the pandemic a new generation of people entered the workplace. They had never known what it was like to commute, be nice to people they didn’t necessarily like or be able to learn by watching the behaviours of more experienced people. They quite liked fitting work around their lifestyle. I am of course generalising. Not every young person wants to work from home, particularly if their home is a shoebox above a perma-rave.

Some of us more experienced workers saw benefits in terms of reclaimed travel costs and more time to think, and thus do better work. Nobody likes the feeling of being continually stared at by their manager as if they are a clear and present danger in respect of the organisation’s stationery supplies. An added bonus was that we became reacquainted with our families and discovering that they were actually ‘good people’.

Dressdown ‘every’day

Thanks to remote working we learnt new skills such as how to look presentable from the waist up and how to appear to be paying attention during Zoom meetings. It was truly liberating when we first witnessed our boss and clients wearing hoodies on Zoom. Now anything other than pyjamas was suitable ‘above the waist’ attire.

It wasn’t long before both young and old concluded that remote work was the way forward. Work needed to fit around our personal agendas. The power axis was tilting from the employer to the talent.

Where are you going?

Most organisations today are predicated on industrial era principles, in particular, the system comes first and the people second. Trust is a ‘nice to have’ byproduct. Anxious micromanagers soon discovered the power of new technology in respect of remote management. In turn the workers discovered the importance of keyclick productivity. The red light on your video camera now gave your home the feel of a neo-Stalinist work cubicle.

So remote working wasn’t a perfect arrangement for workers, but it was better than spending significant tranches of your life under someone else’s armpit on public transport or getting entangled in a pop-up carpark twice a day.

Playtime’s over

Up until recently there was a sense that the remote working war was over. Managers had given up on how to broach the subject without triggering a psychological distress contagion throughout the workforce.

However some of the biggest brands and employers such as Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Boeing and Tesla are now mandating a return to work. Some of the tech players like Microsoft, Google and Apple are being less hardline with a more hybrid policy. The broad sense is that work and workers are returning to the office.

Does AI know best?

So what is triggering this? Is it just another way for insecure and distrustful managers to remind the workers who is boss? Or is there more to it?

My perspective is that AI is driving the agenda. AI will steadily take over all the industrial era process jobs. This is not limited to assembly line work. It also relates to those that on the face of it appear to be knowledge workers, eg. they spend their day in a spreadsheet or handling customer related issues.

So AI is coming after us unless we can do something of value that it cannot do. AI is closing us down fast in respect of creativity, but we still have capabilities in:

• Linking concepts 
• Thinking in constructs
• Humour 
• Emotional intelligence
• Pattern matching
• Contextualising
• Picking up on weak signals in very small datasets.

AI is making inroad on all these fronts. But until it develops consciousness and intention, we still have a role to play.

The sum of all whiteboards

In essence our ability to apply our natural cognition will be seen as a valuable complement to the emerging artificial cognition. But surely this cognitive work requires us to be far from the madding crowd, making remote working the way forward?

That is true. But humanity’s superpower is in its ability to collaborate. Two people and a white board is more valuable than two rooms of one person and a whiteboard. Our sociality causes us to try to impress others. This creates an upward force. Everyone benefits from collaboration. BTW The more diverse the group is, the better.

Use your gym membership

So if you are currently holding the line and continuing to work from home, the question you need to ask is whether you are missing out, and even halting your own self development, by not regularly meeting up with your fellow cognitive athletes at the cognitive gym (formerly known as the office)?
Or does this arrangement suit your employer because having you out of the office and monitoring your computer usage is ideal for training up the AI to do your job? It would be a shame if the next time you go to the office it is to attend your leaving do.