Hey hey
Since it's past Jan 7th, I'll follow the Larry David rule and skip the seasons greetings.
We had an exceptional year-end break. We try to spend as much of it in India as possible as a way to physically and intellectually ground us. Lots of downtime, food time, family time and beach time. We also visited quite a few ancient (ranging from 9th to 11th century AD) temples and sites. For me, it was more of about culture, history and storytelling than about religion. Here's a quick sketch I made of one of these temples.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIER
What's been going on at snowbird
The first projects have kicked-off! I'm already noticing a trend in projects - almost all of them are about diving right in with the org and connecting two disparate views that they need an outsider's perspective on.
One looks at the external world from the broadest cultural, political & technological lens to identify significant shifts that should guide what a company's business strategy should be to win. The second calibrates the internal culture to shift in order to respond to these external shifts. The first demands cultural intelligence, where imagination is just as crucial as analysis. The second acknowledges that companies are not composed of rational robots, but messy, ego-driven groups prone to turf wars, and helps them find alignment.
THE FINDS
The past few months have been filled with loud proclamations by many (Amazon, JPMorgan, WPP) multinational companies that they are bringing(dragging?) their employees back to the office - "RETURN TO OFFICE" or RTO (and yes, I always imagine it to be shouty like that, in all caps). This has been met with a lot of bickering on one side and bluster on the other. No one is advocating for a remote approach. Team Hybrid calls out horrid commutes, more time to balance their duties at home and generally better well-being. Team 5-Days-Back extols virtues of team culture, "magical hallways" 🤮, and most importantly, productivity.
This week's finds unpack what's really going on here:
- PLEASE LEAVE It turns out a lot of return-to-office mandates were meant to make workers quit. Layoffs are problematic - they crush morale, they make future hires wary and they just make you look bad (except for a temporary bump for shareholders.) But RTO is a way to find similar effects while also posturing to stand for something noble: "company culture".
- WAR ON MUMS WFH means they’re happier. Less stressed. They get more sleep. And they’re less likely to quit. "Not all jobs can be done remotely, of course—in fact, two of the most commonly held jobs by women, nurse and teacher, are mostly in-person—but for white-collar working mothers who mostly sat in front of a computer all day, the ability to work from home gave them newfound freedom and flexibility, the likes of which they’d never experienced before." The article is about mothers, but this applies to all caregivers.
- CUE FROM JAPAN No other nation faces a demographic deadline the way Japan does - they are doing a lot to encourage couples to have kids and care for them. The Japanese parliament passed legislation on Friday that requires companies to offer flexible working options to employees with young children in order to help them balance work with child rearing.
- STUCK IN, BURNT OUT Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and his collaborators have been studying working-from-home habits and patterns of RTO closely. Their latest data shows that the most common burnout symptom is low energy – and fully remote workers are least likely to report it.
- CULTURE OF WORK I wrote this 3-part essay last year, and it gets into what's really happening here. It's a wide-ranging review of what is fundamentally shifting in our workplaces. Please grab a beverage of your choice and spend some time reading it - I'm quite proud of the ground I could cover in and how much of it still holds true.
This isn't a false dichotomy between RTO and WFH. This is about a larger fracture in people's (esp younger folks) relationship with work. Engagement with work (I'm primarily talking about white-collar desk-bound employees) is what makes us think about what we do as a "career" than "just a job". This engagement is crashing. Companies think mandatory RTO will fix this, but instead what will happen is that high performers who prefer their autonomy will have to walk away - and most of them will likely be women.
Companies are solving for presence when they should solve for engagement. One of my clients was wondering why their junior-most team members aren't putting in more of themselves into their jobs? I told them it's because post-pandemic companies have provided ample proof that these very employees are merely instrumental, so why expect them to act any different?
employees are just instrumental to employers
Are you seeing this at your workplace? Is everyone exhausted? I want to hear what you are seeing around you. Hit reply. Let it all out.