MATTSPLAINED [] MSP126 [] WFH: Our Secret Superpower
Photo by Unsplash. Glitching by Kulturpop.
TRANSCRIPT
The world is currently undergoing one of the biggest experiments in business methodology it has seen in decades. Terms like telework, Work From Home, mobile work and flexible workplaces have been buzzing around for the last 10 years, fueled by the growth in digital technologies. Today MSP looks at the WFH revolution that 2020 has required and wonders where the future of work lies.
You’re a bit of an old hand at this WFH game, aren’t you?
A little bit.
I’ve spent quite a lot of my working life as a freelancer.
As a freelance writer, editor, producer and event promoter.
So a lot of the time I would be working from home back when it wasn’t a cool thing to do.
And back when Internet speeds sometimes required that you spend half your day at Internet cafes because your Internet line was down or had slowed to an unusable crawl.
plus, I was a bit of an early adopter with cloud services, largely because I had an Apple account with cloud sync.
And it was bad. All kinds of glitches that meant you ended up with everything duplicated on your computer multiple times, to the point that you’d seen an exponential increase of your address book for example.
Because your multiple local copies would trigger multiple cloud copies that would swell your local copies etc etc.
I remember spending days going backwards and forwards with Apple’s tech services people in the mid, pre iphone noughties, and eventually they gave up, telling me they were sorry but they had no idea how to solve their own glitch.
To this day, I still have 10 versions of some people’s contact details.
Did that put you off the cloud?
Yes and no. If people go back over my 10 year-odd history on bfm they will find plenty of times where I knock the cloud.
But my advice is much the same now as it was then.
I would caution people against relying on cloud services.
Just the simple stuff: make sure you can access key files and programs offline.
Don’t rely on an Internet connection for basic stuff like your current email, or for access to basic software like word processing, spreadsheets or presenting.
If you’re a video or audio editor - you want that file where you can see it.
Non-destructive editing is fantastic, as long as it’s not non-destructive because it’s in a cloud you can’t access.
I can’t imagine the current WFH movement being possible without the cloud…
Not with the kind of speed we expect.
I could write out some text by hand, send it through the post and wait for hand-written comments and edits.
But who has the time to go to the post office, let alone the rest of it.
Can you even write by hand anymore?
That’s actually an interesting and valid question.
Even meeting notes I take on my computer and store - where else but - in the cloud.
In fact, many BFMmers have laughed at my shaky and skeletal attempts at writing on a whiteboard.
As though my thoughts weren’t hard enough to decipher.
But yes, let’s get back to WFH.
It’s fine if it works in the cloud, too but that hard copy should sit on your device in case of gremlins, Murphy’s Law or any of the other catastrophic physical proofs designed to prevent you from meeting deadlines.
Because, as much as I try to be as science and evidence based as possible, technology does always seem to go wrong at precisely the time you’re relying on it the most.
There’s probably something in chaos theory about it - but i’m not going to tempt fate by asking.
You’ve had years to craft your supposed expertise at WFH. What about the rest of us who have just been thrown into it?
Absolutely. It’s kind of second nature to me.
I’ve always appreciated flexible workplaces.
Back when I was looking at Kulturpop scaling to become a full service agency and I employed a small team of people, I wanted to keep our working arrangements loose.
Some of the team complained that our offices were not as nice as some other people’s.
But that environment literally come at a cost.
A lot of companies spend a lot on their ID because - they want to impress potential customers and also because they want it to be a comfortable place for staff to spend a lot of time.
And you didn’t? You wanted a sweatshop where they could toil in agony?
As we’ve covered before, the WHO and the International Court of Justice closed down my mining operations and an amicable solution was arranged.
And I sold Instagroom to a troll farm long before the FBI and CIA got on my trail.
i ran the agency side far more progressively.
I operate in a trend and culture based field.
So my staff had specific skillsets and interests.
For my business to succeed, I wanted my staff to finish their work and get out of the office.
Hopefully, they understood that my lack of investment in office decoration allowed me to pay them a little better.
I like to think I got better than average productivity and insight because they were able to do more than work for me 24 /7 and pass out exhausted every night.
Part of my Kulturpop’s value was in my staff having that external life.
It’s not entirely altruistic: that investment that gets returned to the company and its clients in terms of increased benefit and expertise.
Do you think that’s what we’re seeing now?
My model was a very idiosyncratic one.
It suited my business. And it was something I was able to control and tweak because it was a relatively small number of people.
I could immediately match requirements for cloud and efficiency solutions and experiment and swap things out without too much additional cost or disruption.
And since I reverted to my old solo consultancy model a few years ago, I really only have myself to take care of.
I recommend collaboration tools for clients who want them or want to evolve, but for the most part I work with their teams and with the systems they already have in place.
Which comes back to that flexibility?
Exactly. I had a Google Meet before recording this show.
I’ve got a Zoom meeting after. And I think a Microsoft Teams one in the morning.
I’ll possibly speak to some friends over Facetime or Whatsapp video this evening.
My notes for this show were done in Apple’s pages app and synced to the cloud via Dropbox, because that’s the combination that works best for my personal projects.
That’s still quite a privileged position. Most people haven’t had 15 years to figure out their WFH methodology. They were simply thrown into 3 months ago?
Which is where we come back to the idea of this being a grand social experiment.
We’ve covered this a little bit on some recent editions of MSP.
The question people are asking right now is: will this continue?
Am I going to be working from home forever?
So, today, we’ll look at some of the pluses and minuses and try and squint through my quantum crystal ball to try and get a picture of the future.
Well, the first question most people want to ask is: how much longer am I going to be working from this cupboard in the hallway?
The long and short of that one is: I don’t know. no one does.
It depends on the company you work for, what country and even area of that country you live and work in, and what directions your local and national governments are giving you.
As much as I’ve tried to get them all to sign up to my Mattopia app whereby they adhere to my pronouncements via the administration of social nudges and blunt threats.
Most have decided to stick with democracy and self-determination.
But I can tell you what some companies have found.
That is: WFH has had a positive effect.
Productivity has increased.
Why?
Short question - long answer.
The website Upwork, which is a global hub that connects freelancers to potential clients and conducts freelance and remote work surveys every year and publishes an annual Future Workforce Report.
Fortuitously they started their most recent survey back in November - which meant that when the pandemic hit, they were able to go back to some of the same firms they approached and check how their WFH experience had altered in the intervening months.
The findings are pretty cool.
32% of the managers they contacted have said that productivity has increased.
And while most teams are currently lean - taking into account retrenched or furloughed staff - most companies do expect to rehire those workers.
After the break we’ll look into some of the whys you mention: those productivity gains, what this means for the operating systems and structures of our employers and whether working from home is something more of us should be doing long term.
BREAK
Before the break we were talking about a new survey from the company Upwork which is one of the few comprehensive glimpses into the effect of this year’s pandemic on the workplace.
I should add that we expect to see a lot more research in the near and longer term.
This survey is great because Upwork looks at trends in remote and freelancing working every year and, as i said, their survey this year dove-tailed with the start of the pandemic.
Some of the more obvious things they uncovered include gains from commuting. Or rather the lack of it.
I put up a post earlier this week alleging that I’ve spent more on soap powder than petrol over the past 3 months.
A small lie of course, but I’m now filling my car up about once a month instead of twice a week.
So that’s two, two and a half hours traveling I’m not doing.
I’m not turning up at work tired and frustrated by traffic and other driver’s stupidity.
I’m not tiring other drivers out with my own stupidity.
Upwork’s next couple of findings might be a bit more debatable though, right?
Yes. They mention the gains from not being pulled into so many unproductive meetings.
My own research is a little more anecdotal - certainly at the start of the WFH wave in March / April, people were being pulled into more meetings.
Probably because a lot of people were learning how to work with offsite teams.
Figure out ways to collaborate. In my own experience, I’m still seeing a lot of meetings but the number of people in them is decreasing.
Seeing more and smaller groups.
We seem to have developed some microphone etiquette. People are giving a little more ground to each other rather than rolling over each other.
They’re less freaked out by the weird pauses?
Yeah - I’ve had a few mic drop moments where I’ve said something or finished commenting and there’s just silence and a pause that seems to go on forever
and you die a little bit, thinking, did my connection fail and I have to do that all over again or is what I’ve said so awful that everyone is speechless.
I’m guessing it’s the second one...
Yup, you get the prize. Speechless for the wrong reason as usual.
Which brings us to the next point: that people seem to have fewer distractions at home than in the office.
What’s your experience on the weeks you work from home? Are you more or less distracted?
[Jeff Replies]
[Back to Matt]
In my experience, for most freelancers it takes quite a while to adjust to WFH.
Because you have to build up that sense of self-discipline.
No one is looking over your shoulder - unless you work at one of those inhuman places that puts you on webcam and monitors your keystrokes.
So there’s always that temptation to watch another episode of Bojack Horseman.
And I find I have to be very careful what I stock the fridge with.
Is inactivity a problem?
I think it’s too early to tell whether people are less active at the office or WFH.
I’m guessing that it might be more active - they may have more time to exercise.
WFH isn’t ideal for everyone beacuse A lot of people miss out on the social aspect - simple things like having lunch with friends and coalleagues.
Then there’s collaboration - it feels much harder to bounce ideas off one another over Zoom or text chat.
Especially when teams were very tight knit until recently.
It can also be a problem with new hires. I’ve been working with a team that recently brought in a new senior manager who has only met some of the team in person once.
Which makes it hard to forge those relationships that go beyond the professional; chatting in the break room, sharing a coffee.
The relationships that help to make work a little easier and faster.
That’s without including tech and domestic considerations...
Yeah. One of the things I’ve been shopping for of late is a webcam with switchable angles so I can control what people on the other end see.
And I’m permanently set up for home working.
I have an office upstairs, a second big screen downstairs that lets me work on the dining table on afternoons when King Jaff R decides he wants to sleep in the garden and needs protecting from the local strays.
You can check my Instagram account @kulturmatt if you want to see a photo of him perching in a tudung saji like kuih.
I think that may be the largest number of Malay words I’ve ever heard you say in a sentence...
And people call me thick.
Yes, so it’s very hard to convince family members that you are actually working.
But some experts expect that some of these difficulties may shake out in the long run.
For example, many people are struggling to manage kids who are learning online while they are trying to work.
That may lessen as schools reopen.
You think that requirements to WFH may last longer than, say, reopening economies?
As I said, and as I think they mention in the Upwork report, some or even many companies may find the WFH model preferable.
If your employees are more productive working from home, why would you bring them back to the office full-time.
Sure, there are quite a few technology gap type hitches right now, but that’s largely because most companies were only a little way along the remote working curve.
They’ve had to radically alter the way they store information.
Make it accessible and secure for people working offsite.
Implement all sorts of virtual and collaborative systems that may not have existed.
New reporting and monitoring practices.
Build an online presence...
That too, although we’re more concerned with the employee aspects today than the actual revenue components.
So, again, that technology gap should close over time as companies consolidate and move from experimental to tried and trusted remote working strategies.
That still doesn’t explain why the employees won’t come back to work...
There are quite a few factors at play here.
First and foremost - business operation. The coronavirus pandemic has cost companies billions of dollars in lost revenue.
We’ve mentioned on previous shows, we’re very likely to see increased and more rapid automation of production facilities and logistics chains.
In the parts of a company’s business that remain human dependent.
Like sales and marketing or R&D.
They’re not going to let themselves get caught like this again.
So it’s a profit decision?
More of a business continuity decision: because there is a human aspect.
Not every country protects workers equally.
Look at countries where workers have been furloughed.
Essentially, the company keeps them on the books, they are still employed but they aren’t working or receiving a wage.
That can make it hard to claim unemployment insurance for example.
The company doesn’t want to retrench - because they have to pay severance packages and they want those workers back.
The workers don’t want to resign because there are often penalties built into unemployment insurance systems that prevent them from claiming if the unemployment is voluntary.
So I’d say this goes beyond a simple profit-cost decision.
Protecting their operations protects the income of the people that work for them?
You can argue that for big companies and the profits they make, supporting workers for a few months is almost irrelevant.
Just a couple of CEO bonuses.
But the truth is that most people work for small and medium sized businesses that don’t have Fortune 500 pockets.
And those companies often have a much more personal relationship with the people they employ, the families they support and the communities they’re embedded in.
So remote working will be critical to future planning for companies from now on.
What about the physical costs?
This is where it gets interesting. Something we have mentioned on previous shows.
Companies can reduce their overheads. Smaller office and operating facilities and the bills that go with them.
Hopefully they will pass on some of those reductions to their staff in the form of allowances for office furniture, internet costs, electricity and so on.
It also allows them more flexibility in hiring.
In what sense?
Currently, most companies tend to hire people who are either in proximity to an office or are willing to relocate themselves.
When you look at our cities they’re largely configured around this need.
Central business districts surrounded by industrial belts and suburbs.
In the long term we may be able to break that model of urban dependence.
If we’re all meeting on Zoom, it doesn’t matter if I’m in KL, a colleague is in Jakarta and someone else is in the US, as long as we can make the time zones work.
Let’s take the US as an example...
Any reason?
Because it’s a huge country that has developed inequalities that are easy to identify.
When you look at development over the last 20 years, cities like NY, LA and SF have attracted outsized lumps of that development.
It’s not a uniform trend, cities like Houston and Seattle have also experienced massive growth.
But as this capital has flocked to the East and West coasts, it has also flown from the more central lands due to deindustrialisation, automation of mining and steel working and a lot of the more traditional 20th century industries.
So we see a lot of human capital moving towards those economic centres.
And as those cities expand, rents and other living costs rise?
We’ve all heard the stories of people with full-time jobs living in their cars in SV because rents are so high.
If larger percentages of your workforce are remote, then people don’t need to flock to these centres.
They can stay in Detroit or Boise and telecommute with companies that are largely virtual.
Their wages go into those local economies and provide economic opportunities for other businesses or entrepreneurs.
Companies can employ foreign talent without the need for expensive visas and relocation costs.
What about the structure of our current cities?
Well, we mentioned the gym near where you work.
How about a gym or park near where you live?
A life without commuting and pouring into CBDs.
If this happens, I think we’ll start to see real change in cities and big towns.
CBD may shrink in size and scale.
Businesses that currently serve other businesses - whether they’re restaurants or malls or courier services - will probably move out of these areas.
A white collar deindustrialisation?
It’s far too early to tell or even estimate the extent to which that might be the case.
But it’s definitely an interesting scenario.
Many of our cities are ringed by so-called brown sites, relics from earlier industrial periods in our history.
Perhaps the same will happen to city centres and CBDs.
We’ll see more residential redevelopment, and hopefully falling living costs to accompany them.
And create cleaner, more liveable towns and cities in the process.
We’ve got a long away to go, but it could turn out that WFH is a secret superpower.