The war on “return to office” or RTO as some people call it is heating up. Everyone and their uncle; yours truly included has a view about the best way to work and build a company culture. To stretch the metaphor further, groups on each side of the debate have drawn their battle lines. From my own research, I know that 45% of knowledge workers want to work remotely all the time. On the other hand, if you look at managers and senior leaders, they live in their own echo chamber. 

• While most of them want to work remotely most of the time (i.e., 3 days or more); only 15% of these people want to work remotely all the time.

• These individuals also believe that they are far more proficient at remote work and asynchronous work than their teams. The more senior you are, the dimmer your view of your colleagues. 

And yet, these are also the people who face 28 instant messaging interruptions per day and have the least amount of time for deep work - 7 hours each week. They spend more than half their time in meetings each week - 22 hours on average and only two-thirds of these meetings are effective. While I attribute good intentions to each of these senior people, I think we can agree that their goalposts have shifted with each inflection point over the last few years.

• Before 2020, if you spoke about remote work, they’d dismiss it saying, “it won’t work for us” or “it won’t work in our industry”. This was despite the slew of evidence against open plan offices that have been all the rage since the turn of the century.

• When Covid forced us all to go remote, they saw evidence of the fact that remote work is effective and probably more so, than in-office work. So, the goalpost shifted to, “Oh, but people will want to be back in the office, once we’re done with the pandemic”.

• And then it became clear from research by Buffer and Nicholas Bloom, that most people want to work remotely most of the time. This time the goalpost shifted to, “That’s because we haven’t actually opened the offices. When people see offices open, they’ll behave differently.”

• Today, almost every traditional company has opened their offices, and might I say that people are voting with their feet if they can. The results I shared earlier on evidence this phenomenon. Even Apple isn’t immune to the pushback. Now that they’ve run out of goalposts to shift, bosses are issuing ultimatums to their people (see here and here) in the name of fuzzy concepts such as culture, serendipity, learning and knowledge sharing. 

Here’s the thing. When a certain group of people keep shifting the goalpost, it feels disingenuous. But I don’t think all senior managers are deliberately disingenuous. They’re victims of blind spots and corporate superstition. And just like in real life, superstition hurts at work as well. So, let’s examine some common superstitions we all face at work, with a critical lens. By the end of this post, we’ll know which of them hold up to logical scrutiny.

Superstition 1: creativity needs real-time, ideally in person, group collaboration

Try an experiment. Go to your favourite site for stock photography - Unsplash or Pexels will do just fine. Type in the word “collaboration” and see what results come up. Almost every result shows people working together, in-person, in a group setting. It’s no wonder then that such imagery fuels our notion of what collaboration really is. If you’re not in a synchronous group setting, are you really collaborating? Can you even be creative if you’re not collaborating this way?

 In her book Quiet, Susan Cain labels this superstition as “The new groupthink”. 

 “The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place.”

While there is value in getting people together, we need to acknowledge that collaboration and creativity have little correlation with synchrony. Dividing and conquering a problem is also collaboration. It’s also tough to think deeply about a problem if you’re in a highly chatty environment. You can go a mile wide and an inch deep in a group setting, but if you’d like to do the opposite, you either need to work alone or in a pair.

And while we’re at this let’s bust the myth about group brainstorming. We think of it as a silver bullet to generate several high-quality ideas. As it turns out, the way most people practise brainstorming, it’s a certified waste of time. Here’s what the research says.

1. Individual brainstorming trumps group brainstorming 95% of the time. (Dunette, Campbell, Jaastad).

2. The larger the group size, the poorer the quality of ideas. (Mongeau & Morr)

3. Electronic brainstorming produces more ideas than face-to-face exercises. (Mongeau & Morr)

4. A hybrid process where people brainstorm individually before sharing their ideas with colleagues, produces higher quality ideas than pure group brainstorming. (Girotra, Terwiesch & Ulrich)

5. There’s little evidence that team-brainstorming, hybrid or not, helps to select the best ideas. Organisations might be better off using asynchronous idea generation, over synchronous, group processes. (Girotra, Terwiesch & Ulrich)

Let’s also remember that diverse teams have both extroverts and introverts. 47% Indians are introverts as is half the world and I’m one of those people. Social stimulation isn’t really our thing. Depending on where you sit on the extraversion-introversion spectrum, there’s a “Goldilocks” amount of stimulation that you look for. Not too much, not too little. Just right. The best we can do is to not force stimulation on anyone. Instead let them seek out the stimulation they need.  

Superstition 2: being in the office will drive up productivity

I had a first-hand taste of this superstition some weeks back when a senior project manager told me about the large team he was leading. His otherwise distributed team got into one location for a period of three weeks. Lo and behold, their velocity went up by 50% during that time. Doesn’t it mean then, that co-located teams will always be more productive than their distributed counterparts?

The short answer - no! First, let’s examine the anecdotal evidence that this project manager provided. Productivity has many variables associated with it. Co-location wasn’t the only variable that the team tweaked. For example, the team didn’t have the strongest onboarding mechanisms in place. They used co-location as a mechanism to speed up onboarding. Could a more thoughtful approach to onboarding have paid higher dividends? We don’t know. There are many other interventions the team made to their work processes, in addition to being co-located for three weeks. In India, many of our hospitals have places of worship in them as well. People admit their loved ones in the hospital to receive allopathic treatment and go pray on the side. Religious as we are, people then often credit the cure to prayers and not as much to allopathy. To credit colocation as the only thing that affected productivity, when the team tweaked other performance variables, feels a bit like that!

My irreverence for colocation aside, I remember from our own anecdotal experience at Thoughtworks, that when we went suddenly remote in 2020, our productivity went up across the board. In fact, 92% of the people I surveyed at the time reported that the quality of their work had either remained stable or gone up since they went all-remote. The studies I shared earlier in this post back up this observation.

When we portray the office as crucible for high performing teams, for which there’s no alternative, we only need to look at the open-source community and the OGs of async-first remote work - Automattic and GitLab - to bust the myth. This is no overnight phenomenon. From Linux to Kafka, from Kubernetes to Hadoop and from WordPress to GitLab - the web runs on software that people are building asynchronously and remotely. The corporate world needs to learn what open-source developers have always known.

Superstition 3: working from home is “not natural”

In a recent survey I conducted I noticed an interesting comment from a rather senior technologist. 

“People do need to realise WFH is not natural. This wasn't the case before the pandemic. We need to come back to the office!”

I couldn’t help smiling as I read this. Let’s zoom out for some perspective. Seth Godin makes an eloquent point about this in his book - Linchpin. 

Of course, Godin’s “new normal” predates the pandemic. Ever since, we’ve referred to location independent work as the “new normal”. If anything, that shift in what we consider the new normal, goes to show that change is the only constant for humankind. The idea of the office as “natural” just doesn’t compute! Working from a place that’s not an office, is a concept far more entrenched in history than some of us imagine. 

The point I want to make is less about the nuances of history, and more about the fact that everyone’s preferences are different. When I looked through the survey responses, I noticed that the technologist who labelled work-from-home as “not natural”, wants to work from the office for four days a week. It’s unsurprising that he finds working from home “not natural”. Someone else may find the office or a third place “not natural”. I know I’ll be very distracted and unproductive if I were to work out of an office. Does that mean I should prevent others from exercising their choice of where to work out of? I don’t think so. As we make the shift into a new era of post-pandemic remote work, we can all do well by showing empathy towards others’ preferences.

Superstition 4: people learn by observing others and through serendipity

In recent months, as more execs bat for RTO, I’ve heard senior managers lament about how back in the day, inexperienced people would learn just by virtue of sitting at the table with an experienced technologist and “observing” them. I’ve always found this hard to wrap my head around. My flippant response is to ask, “If inexperienced people were just observing others, when were they working?”  

Let’s be honest about this. This superstition usually exists amongst people who haven’t done hands-on work in a long while. As technologists, we produce stuff - code, design documents, requirements specifications, user stories and designs. You can’t sit around, resting your chin on your palms “observing people”. You learn from your colleagues, on the job, either by observing the process they employ to do their creative work or by examining the stuff they produce. The only reliable way to do this is by pairing with them or collaborating with them in an intentional setup. Both the teacher and the learner have to roll up their sleeves and get dirt under their fingernails. This has nothing to do with being remote or not. And it surely doesn’t involve watching someone from across a table all day.

If as a leader you want to foster peer-to-peer learning, you can’t leave this to chance. Even if you decide to get every single employee back into the office for five days each week, accidents and chance encounters will get you nowhere. Intentionality is the key to learning. We’ve discussed several aspects of intentionality earlier on this blog. Let me list a few.

• Instituting a writing culture.

• Creating a team handbook.

• Pair programming.

• Being diligent with audit trails and design documentation.

• Implementing knowledge sharing systems.

• Caring, involved people management.

• Investing in people’s learning.

Lest I make it seem that we only learn from co-workers, allow me to make one last point. Solitude, as Susan Cain says, allows for deliberate practice - a term Anders Ericsson coined. As you may have read earlier on this blog, mastery is a key ingredient for a motivating culture. People want to get better at what they do. Working asynchronously, in your own time, allows you to do this.

So, yes, organise your team and implement systems to foster serendipity, but don’t lose sight of the power of solitude and deliberate practice. 

Superstition 5: “enjoying” work-from anywhere, is at odds with building organisations

Between advocates of remote work, the naysayers, and the fence sitters, there’s an argument that doesn’t seem to end. It pits the employee against the organisation. The argument has an implicit assumption - that anything that makes employees disproportionately happier is most likely at odds with the company’s best interests. For example, if employees “enjoy” working-from-anywhere, this must be at the cost of building the organisation. When you quiz those who hold this belief, as to what “building the organisation” means, they speak of attracting talent, maintaining culture and the like. 

The trouble is, that this is classic zero-sum thinking. For someone to win, the other must lose. A mindset such as this will only create adversarial relationships between employers and employees. But first up, is it a zero-sum game at all? If so, why does 3M, the company that makes Post-it® notes, allow its employees to “work your way”? What are Atlassian, Dropbox, Spotify, Clevertech, EPAM and several other respected companies missing, as they take a remote-first approach? When employees had to come into the office every day, no one complained about it being at odds with “family building”, did they? Remote work is, in fact, a win-win for everyone. As results from experiments like Tulsa Remote will tell you, work-from-anywhere doesn’t just help the employees and employers, it’s a net positive for people’s personal lives and the communities they live in. Talk about pro-social impact!

And I don’t need data to tell you how remote work opens you up to new talent pools and new employment arrangements. Take for example, Sora Union - a company that actively hires people from conflict zones or those displaced by climate change. Or for that matter the trend that HBR is labelling as flexible, or open talent - which collectively refers to freelancing, contracting and innovation sourcing through tournaments and contests. There are plenty of examples of companies that are embracing a new approach to building their organisations, now that they’ve also embraced a work-from-anywhere culture. 

Of course, the practice of paying employees for 40 hours and expecting them to be in the office indefinitely, in the name of culture and community building will die an inevitable death. But that’s not what we’re arguing about, are we? I hope not. In fact, I hope that if companies expect their employees to help build their organisation and their culture, they lay out clear expectations and give people the time to engage in such activities. This also means that leaders need to make the culture “visible”. 

While most proponents of asynchronous, remote work will scoff at some of these superstitions, I want to acknowledge once again that each of these beliefs comes with positive intent. Most of the time. One effective way to have a nuanced conversation about these beliefs, is to lean on research and data. That’s what I’ve tried to do here. It also helps to acknowledge the goals that one wishes to achieve for which they hold these superstitions dear. Recognising those goals is a way to find common ground between the sceptics and advocates of async-first remote work.