Offices in the cloud are just a bad idea
I notice that some teams, organisations and products are attempting to recreate an office in the cloud. This is a counterproductive trend.
- The synchronous nature of these virtual offices undermines the benefits of remote and asynchronous work.
- Instead, leaders and managers need to reimagine the workplace while respecting what we've learned from decades of experience and research. I make five suggestions.
- Avoid the office in the cloud and adopt an anywhere, anytime model.
- Build a writing culture.
- Be intentional and don't leave things to chance.
- Build your own distributed working skills and stay alive to workforce trends.
- Foster a positive work environment that steers clear of toxicity.
Ever since the pandemic started, people have found their own ways to adapt to remote working. There was the status quo of the office model. And then there’s the brave new world of remote work. Sometimes status quo bias wins against the promise of remote work.
“Status quo bias is an emotional bias; a preference for the maintenance of one's current or previous state of affairs, or a preference to not undertake any action to change this current or previous state.”
What I mean is that many of us have just taken the status quo of the office model and tried to replicate that same way of working using digital tools. Take, for example, the following model.
Create an always-on Zoom meeting with breakout rooms.
Name the breakout rooms just like your office spaces.
Rooms for each team.
The same meeting rooms and spaces that you remember from the office.
People stay in their team breakout room with everyone else throughout the day.
When they need to get into a meeting, they just “shout” the name of the breakout meeting room they’re headed to.
Apparently people have had splendid success with this approach, because it’s “so similar to the office”. And there lies the rub. This is a classic case of paving a cow-path - automating a business process as is, without thinking if that process is efficient. I argue that the office is an inefficient place to work. Creating an office in the cloud propagates those inefficiencies at a rapid pace.
By the way, this isn’t an isolated trend. There’s a growing number of solutions for this kind of model. I think that belies the promise of remote and asynchronous work. So in this post I want to share my views about why an office in the cloud is a poor way of working. Since I’ve already written about many related topics in the past, I’ll steer clear of those details. You’ll find links to previous posts if you wish to dive deeper into my argument.
Don’t undermine the benefits of remote work
On this site, I’ve previously argued about why synchronous, office centric ways of working are ineffective when working remotely. You also know that I advocate for six key benefits of working in an async-first mode. Let me tell you how an office in the cloud undermines each of these benefits.
Work life balance
If you must be in a virtual office with other colleagues at a specific time, then you have neither location flexibility, nor time flexibility.
Yes, you’re at home now. But you now work in a culture of digital presenteeism where everyone’s policing each other on how long we’re visible. So when you slip away to attend to life, you’ve got to inform everyone. It’s not ok to just focus on outputs. Inputs become just as important.
Diversity and inclusion
People who can’t manage this synchrony because of their personal lives can’t be part of your team. Neurodiverse people have to suck it up, wear their headsets and be on Zoom for the whole day. Your entire culture is based on synchronous conversations and meetings. So extroverts, fluent English speakers and neurotypical people rule the roost.
Knowledge sharing
“Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” - Navy seals.
Asynchronous work slows things down so you can write things up thoughtfully and structure your ideas for everyone else. The side effect is that you now also have an artefact to share with your team. But a meeting and office-centric model, where you randomly pull people away from work, into off-the-cuff conversations doesn’t prioritise a reading and writing culture.
When you don’t write, most knowledge remains tacit and you’re doomed to have multiple meetings to share knowledge.
Optimising for scale
Following on from the previous problem, when you don’t write, Metcalfe’s law follows. If people are in each other’s gaze and in each other’s ears all day, there’s no immediate incentive to create audit trails, or to write a handbook, or to document how to navigate your code. The short termism of meetings trumps the long termism of artefacts. Temptation comms win over investment comms. We’ve already discussed how knowledge sharing suffers. Effective onboarding also becomes a casualty.
Deep work
You don’t need to go much further than Jason Fried’s TEDx talk to know why offices (or offices in the cloud) are such interruption factories. People can call a meeting on a whim. You have no control over your work environment. Noise is normal. Virtual shoulder taps are the default. In effect, collaboration superstitions and collaboration bad habits rule the show.
Defaulting to action
High-performing teams identify directly responsible individuals and pride themselves on decision velocity. I admit, this can happen in the office as well. In theory. What we know from our experience of working in offices and real-time cultures, is that meetings serve as a proxy for decision hygiene. In practice, most decisions are reversible. How about your company’s name, for example? If you’re running your office in the cloud because you want to interrupt your people for meetings with ease, you may see meetings become the substitute for real action.
Instead, embrace the possibilities of being async-first
Remote work offers more possibilities than just an office on the cloud. We can work anytime, anywhere and live a more balanced, fulfilling life. Colleagues from different backgrounds enrich our experience at work. There’s the opportunity to work and think deeply. To reap these benefits, we need to shift the way we think about work. The buck stops with leaders and decision makers in companies. I have a few suggestions for people in these roles.
Avoid an office in the cloud. Instead, lead and manage by outcomes, not inputs. Let people work anytime, anywhere. The best practices on this site are an easy starting point. I also recommend GitLab’s course on managing remote teams.
Write first, talk next. Writing is a superpower when working remotely. Meetings should be the last resort, not the first option.
Be intentional instead of leaving things to chance. Forget about the hallway conversations and coffee banter. You can’t leave success to chance. Be intentional about everything - be it people’s learning, or knowledge sharing or how you manage people or spend your money.
Build your own skills. This is not just for the little guys. Asynchronous work applies to you as well. Learn to communicate asynchronously. Watch out for emerging trends. Pick up remote-native skills for work, so you become a role model for people.
Create a positive work environment. This starts by creating a motivating work environment based on autonomy, mastery and trust. You must also avoid toxic behaviours like digital presenteeism. You can’t manage by walking around and looking anymore. So reimagine what “high-touch” leadership feels like in this new normal. Only then will you know what your people are really up to.
My intention in this post is not to cast a shade on the products that are out there, creating “virtual offices”. Maybe there’s a place for such products, as long as being in such a presence-heavy environment remains voluntary. But that’s the risk with most tools, isn’t it? You can’t control where you’ll end up with them.
I admit there are good intentions behind the office in the cloud model. However, the fundamental premise of such models is that the office itself was an effective place to work. There’s enough research to prove the contrary. By paving this corporate cow-path, we also risk paving the path to hell, albeit with good intentions. Now that’s not something any of us want, do we?