Why We should Go Back to Offices?

The Office On a Monday Morning

Last week, I headed to the office on Monday morning and faced what I call the “new normal” in IT. As usual, I took the subway and the train was packed with commuters going to work. In contrast, the office was completely deserted.

I guess this is the new normal in many IT offices. Three years ago, this same building would be buzzing with people. I would grab a cup of coffee, have a conversation with a colleague and  kick off the day in the clamour of the office.

When years ago I started my career in IT, teams were already very distributed across different locations, and landline phones were the norm to coordinate with other teams. But in recent years, there has been an explosion in video communication and screen-sharing tools which made working from any place in the world even more possible.

The Stay-at-home Guidance

Before the pandemic, even though some of my IT team colleagues were based in other locations (i.e. US, Russia or India) I still had to go to the office almost daily. Working from home was occasionally tolerated but rarely encouraged or promoted. But after the pandemic struck in early 2020, what was tolerated became the rule: the stay at home guidance. In an attempt to bring the teams together and maintain a certain cohesion, a non-office culture emerged where face-to-face meetings were replaced with video calls and even social events took place on Zoom.

The Economist and other newspapers published numerous articles on increased productivity, and we started seeing the likes of Linkedin and Facebook allowing certain employees to always work from home.

Two years on, pandemic restrictions are relaxed (hopefully for good!) but working from home– at least for the IT crowd, remains and is even accelerating. According to ONS (Office for National Statistics), who surveyed companies in November 2020 and in April 2022, 53.6% of information and communication businesses planned to use a hybrid working model permanently when surveyed in April 2022, an increase of 23% when compared with November 2020.

But what are the benefits of this trend in the long-term for companies and employees?

Working From Home: A Win-win Deal?

There are three groups of people to consider here that benefit from working from home schemes:

Company Board: Directors, founders and high-level people in the company. These people are focused on revenues, sales and cutting costs. From their angle, the benefits of working from home are clear:

• Cost reduction in office spaces (According to the Economist, on average companies spend $10k per employee per year in office space).
• More leverage when it comes to pay rise negotiation. Working from the office represents a big cost for employees. A daily commute from zone five to the office in central London can set you back around £500 per month, this is equivalent to £16k pay rise before tax for a senior manager. So, by allowing employees to work from home, employers can skip pay rises that given year(s).
• More available workforce from across the world, and at a cheaper price. UK-based companies can now hire workers across Europe for much less.

Senior managers: These are the senior people who have been working for more than 10 years. They are more likely to have families and to live outside city centres, and therefore find the remote work trend very accommodating. This allows them to save on commute costs and spend more time with their families and kids.

Entry level and young employees: Mainly people in their 20s. More likely to be single and without kids at home and usually live close to the city centre. Working from home gives them more freedom to manage their time, allows them to save on commute costs and to work from everywhere. These people are less likely to have a mortgage and feel relatively free to move. Some of them emigrated to other countries during the pandemic (Italy, Greece or even Thailand).

So far so good but, is there a flip side to the coin?

This Idea of a Tribe with a Defined Culture

Simon Sinek, who wrote many books on leadership and how companies can be successful with good leadership initiatives, compares companies to tribes with leaders to protect them: The best companies are the ones where employees feel safe and develop a sense of belonging to the tribe as they would do with their tribes at home (their families).

A company is also a place where you grow, make acquaintances, share goals and socialise. Whether you like coffee or not (and sometimes a pint after work), working from the office gave us this opportunity to sit down with people, have a coffee break, and learn about each other’s lives. It’s really about that spontaneous human sharing experience that kickstarts the day. Try to exercise the same spontaneity behind a screen and you will definitely fail: A Zoom call titled “Lunch meeting” sitting behind your camera, waiting for someone to say something while you are eating your pasta. It just doesn’t work the same way.

Working from the office used to create a culture in the company where people knew each other and felt they belonged to the same tribe. This shared culture, in return, motivated them to thrive at work.

Besides, for any company to thrive, people need to be able to collaborate in order to produce a piece of work while having a good work-life balance. Let’s analyse each of these elements separately:

Impact on Collaboration

We collaborate when team members are willing to work together to come up with different ideas and produce something as a result, beyond their differences, moods or ways of thinking. Without collaboration, team members can find themselves working in silos toward different goals and taking different directions which can lead to chaos.

Working from home had a huge impact on collaboration: While IT teams who have been working together for years and know each other well enough can still collaborate, the new joiners can find it very difficult. We are humans driven by ever changing emotions, and for us to be able to collaborate and listen, we need to know and understand each other.

In recent years, we heard a lot about the importance of Emotional intelligence in the workplace: The awareness of your emotions and the emotions of people around you to successfully manage a team and collaborate. In my view, since we started working from home, managers and “managees” alike all lack this emotional intelligence: If it’s already challenging in an office space to adapt your communication to peoples’ emotions and manage successfully, how challenging is it to manage from your web camera? For example, I worked for a distributed company where most people didn’t switch on the camera. As a result I could spend days on Zoom calls speaking with SK, JF, DI (acronyms) trying to get a sense of their emotions by the sound of the acronym.

Impact on Productivity

Are we more productive since we started working from home? The short answer is yes and everyone in IT will agree with this one: We are more focused, less interrupted and therefore more productive. As a Product Owner, being able to sit down alone and analyse data, write requirements or prioritise features is much easier when you are not interrupted. However, when I need to gather requirements, speak to people or ask a “quick question”, I find it more challenging now than before. Your question needs to be asked via email, Slack or even Zoom call, which is time-consuming. In the end, your calendar is full of Zoom meetings intended to answer simple questions.

You get the idea, your productivity is a function of how dependent you are on the other team members.

Work-life balance

In the past two years, I was able to go to the gym more often, read more, cook more. However, there is a big caveat. Before, switching off the laptop at the office meant a clear separation between work and personal life. Instead, now the separation is very blurry: The laptop is always nearby at home to check emails and answer questions. And since our teams are ever more distributed, when I’m ready to go to sleep, the office in San Francisco has just opened and my phone starts buzzing with slack messages.

So the answer to the question: is working from home beneficial? My answer is:

Without a solid company culture that is nurtured in office energy, and without a strong feeling of belonging, IT people will simply don’t know each other enough to collaborate and remain productive. And this gives them another reason to leave companies.

What Can We Do About It Now?

Don’t get me wrong, working from home still has its benefits and its place in our working habits but it’s crucial that we calibrate it properly, for the company to keep its culture, create a sense of belonging and remain productive. We have to go back to the office, but not every day. So my rule of thumb is:

• For employees: To establish a habit of working from the office x days per week and stick to it.
• For employers: To make the office more attractive and request employees to come x number of days to the office (and please, please stop Yoga webinars on ZOOM, it just doesn’t work!).