Returning to office… kind of
First published in Shortlist’s monthly newsletter…
We’re returning to office! (With a big asterisk…) For us, RTO looks like a try-out lease at Nairobi Garage, a barrage of daypasses across Mumbai WeWorks, and holding pattern for now in Hyderabad. We’re not too confident about the future — the curveballs keep coming — and so we aren’t finalizing new policies just yet. No one is required to come in; all strictly optional. We hope the draw of exciting colleagues, social hours, and spontaneous coffees will bring people back as they feel safe, and let us shape together how best to work together going forward.
And to be honest, I’m excited. I miss my team! Much has been made of the generational divide between out-of-touch leaders pushing an unwilling workforce to return to office and the majority of the workforce that’s happier at home. The rift is framed as bosses who want surveillance and supervision vs. workers who want freedom and flexibility. I don’t think it’s that simple, and it’s not an argument about “productivity.”
Good teams are usually defined by a good culture, and good culture is much easier to build face to face. Culture is what people do when no one is looking, a set of values and behaviors usually learned through direct experience of “how people do things around here.” And that’s a hard thing to set, shape, and reinforce when informal interaction is rare and no one really sees how anyone does anything “IRL.”
But it’s more than that. No doubt we can get work done just fine from our living rooms and kitchens. In fact, studies point to significant productivity gains with work from home in many contexts. But there are other critical parts of work that have become much harder in the last 19 months: creatively collaborating, forming social connections, asking silly questions, learning by osmosis, connecting with higher purpose, and having fun.
If WFH is bad, why does it sometimes feel so good? First, there are lots of practical benefits: greater focus, more flexible days, zero commute, money savings. And I think it’s a case of perceptual salience: these advantages are immediate and obvious, whereas the costs are slow and subtle — the loss of connection, deceleration of learning, and descent into languishing. I hope with time we all can see the merits of both sides and meet in the middle. We’re never going back to working like “before”, but I do hope we can see a lot more of each other than we do now.
So long live the office! Or at least working together, sometimes.
Happy hiring,
Paul