“Should we go back to the office or stay remote?” is the wrong question

Photo by Kristin Wilson on Unsplash.

Over the last few weeks, the following events unfolded:

Andrea, a friend of mine holding a leadership role at a med-tech company, quit her job because she was asked to return to the office. Over the last few years, she had shaped her entire life based on the assumption that she could work remotely, more often than not. Her face reddened, and her thoughts fizzled when that RTO (return-to-office) mandate recently came in. 

Another acquaintance, Alex, an entrepreneur, decided to allow remote work forever within his team. They are granting budgets for coworking spaces for those employees who want to work from somewhere resembling an office and yearly budgets for teams to meet in person.

A third friend, Maria, who has two small children at home, told me she is now back to the office more often than required by the company (which is 3 days a week) and is absolutely thrilled about it. In her words, she loves the fact that it’s quiet, clean, that she gets an 8h break from scraping food off the floor, and no one calls her name every 2 minutes.

So what’s going on? 

(are you, too, just a tad confused?)

People ask: “Is the future remote or back to the office?”

My answer is “neither”. 

Because that’s the wrong question.

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The age of antagonism

In the year of our Lord twenty-twenty-three, if something isn’t contrarian and polarizing, it might as well not exist. No one does nuance anymore.

You’re either a liberal or a conservative (and God forbid you hold a collection of personal, curated views that fall under both ideologies).

You’re either a conspiracy theorist or you’re a sheep following what the evil governments tell you.

You’re either a climate change denier or a tree hugger. 

Nothing in between. It’s like modern-day humans are addicted to polarity. It’s no surprise that once the pandemic was officially over, we ended up in the midst of yet another fierce public debate.

One I happen to have some expertise in. And the truth is, I see both sides. So, let's look at the whole picture here and bring back some nuance.

I've worked remotely in various capacities for as long as I can remember (over 15 years now). My team, my partner, and I have built several remote-first projects, companies and teams, some wildly successful. On the other hand, amongst other things, we also run a physical coworking/shared-office hub in Bali, which is centred around human interaction. 

In our teams, we have team members spanning the full remote vs. office spectrum: working fully remotely (some we’ve never ever met in real life even if we’ve worked together for years), some hybrid, some prefer to or have to be at a physical location some or most days. We are one of the Best Places To Work across the entire Asian continent, and rank in the 2% most engaged teams in the world according to OfficeVibe.

Yet, where our team works from has never felt pivotal or particularly relevant to our employee-employer relationship.

Let’s dive in.

The truth is, what seems so critical to many decisions right now is a mere detail.

In the grand scheme of things - and the transformations work and our world will experience in the next few years, figuring out if we should work mainly from the office or mostly from wherever is, frankly speaking, a blip.

But, Lavinia, if that’s a detail, what exactly should people focus on instead?

One of my core beliefs is that work is something people will do even when everything is automated, taken care of by algorithms, AIs, and robots, and countries pay out Universal Base Income to their citizens. Because we humans have an innate need for things like meaning, purpose, belonging, expressing ourselves, and often that takes the shape of what we call work.

But work (or how we traditionally thought of it) is broken. 

To name but a few aspects pointing to that:

• Modern offices (and many remote or hybrid team environments, as well) tend to be distraction-central; urgent requests make it impossible to focus on your priorities.

• You need to “look busy” and fill those 8 hours to justify your salary – as if we’re still all working in factories, back in the ’60s. 

• So much about office work is meta-work, work about work. Meetings, status updates, planning, reports. There’s very little time left for actual work.

• There’s a need for middle managers, whose job is simply to “parent” office workers and fill their days with chunks of meta-work. Otherwise, workers aren’t engaged, or intrinsically motivated to do the work. So we bring in the stick and carrots.

It seems obvious to me that what we should focus on is fixing work, making processes and collaboration better, irrespective of where people physically sit or work from. Once we do that, where employees ‘‘sit’’ does become a detail.

If I had to point to the three things most companies can improve, I would pick these 3:

1. Enabling asynchronous work or the ability to do focused work, uninterrupted, for at least a few hours a day. To make this happen, teams generally need fewer meetings and better documentation. This also requires flexibility/agency, empowering people to behave like adults at work, and treating them as such.

2. Meaningful work - studies estimate that up to 95% of work time in some teams is spent on reports, meetings, looking for documents, internal communication and other bits we generally refer to as “meta-work”. Help your team shift from spending most of their day on metawork, from tapping shoulders and interrupting each other every 5 minutes, to a version of the world where we have clarity on what's meaningful, and you’re aligned on purpose and direction.

3. Clarity on goals and alignment in measuring performance and delivery on goals. If you know what needs to be done, by whom, and you can measure it, when or where teams work from is irrelevant.

I recently caught up with an acquaintance at Running Remote (the world’s largest conference for distributed teams) who works for Deloitte. She shared with me privately and then gave a speech on stage on how she and her team all work from the office, but she attends events and training on remote work to simply learn better ways of working. 

Because the truth is, the principles that make intentional, high-performance, remote-first (not remote forced) work… work, improve all work, no matter where it’s done from.

So my answer to "Is the future remote or back to the office?" is:

The future is all about fixing work, about improving, bettering, reinventing the way we work.

The future is also about choice and agency. It's working from where you're most inspired and productive, and allowing your team to do the same.

Conclusion

So, let’s take another look at my friends from the opening paragraph.

Andrea should work from wherever she wants, now that she’s moved to the countryside, away from the office. Her results on OKRs and KPIs she owns and the initiatives she drives are what should matter. 

Maria should be at the office (or at a coworking space if her company decides to no longer lease an office) as often as she wants to get a break from the chaos at home. 

And Alex has got it all right: he’s making sure his teams can switch and/or pick between the work environments that work best for them.

If you nurture an engaging, meaningful culture that goes three layers deeper than forced ice-breakers and ping-pong tables, you'll win the long game.

But you’ve got to ask the right questions and focus on priorities.

Having built several high-performing, engaged, award-winning, location-agnostic teams to me, “Should we go back to the office or stay remote?” isn’t one of those.