Return to Office Theater

I’ve been working from home full time since the pandemic started. It was chaotic at first. My kids and I piled into my wife’s art studio and we started doing remote work and remote school all in the same place, effectively ruining her studio and making it so that she had no place to operate within the house anymore. Admittedly, it wasn’t ideal lol. I was basically in meetings where I was talking from the time my day started until the minute it ended. The kids zoom school was chaos incarnate (kindergarten and second grade done via zoom is… not the best lol). And overall it was a huge shift.

Then we converted a garden shed into an office, made a school area in our living room, and suddenly we had a whole pattern that we could repeat and give my wife back her studio. We adjusted more as time went on, the kids went back to school, I needed even more space so I moved to the garage, and the wife got to take over the shed as her art studio, and we’ve adjusted very well to a full time work from home lifestyle.

In that time, I’ve made numerous work friends from all over the country, people who leave work and stay friends, who if they were in town I’d try and meet up with them and even offer time to stay in my house (if I had space). Like these are people I consider to be very close friends.

And I have had incredible work success since then, leading a global team in rewriting a full on white label mobile solution, running innovation teams, creating not just cool technological innovations, but also creating cool engagement and organizational innovations that allowed teams to work better together while taking advantage of our global scale.

So as I’ve been seeing the siren’s song of RTO coming from all these leaders and CEO’s across the spectrum… my initial reaction is “these people are idiots”. Then you hear their logic… and it’s always focused on “productivity” or “innovation” or “collaboration”… and I really want to know what they think is happening in their orgs today!

Because they’re implying that there’s a lack of productivity or innovation or collaboration… but… you don’t really see them giving any data out supporting their claims do they? Instead, they rely on their own confidence that THIS WILL SOLVE THE PROBLEMS before they even define the problems or even confirm that there ARE problems. They don’t need that evidence because they can FEEL that they’re right. Because to them, this is just “logic”.

And in the end… it all comes back to the competence paradox - they don’t need to see the data, they know that this is the right move… because it would work for them!

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So let’s be a little generous and try to see it from their point of view. Why not right?

These are people who are used to sitting in big corner offices, jetting around the country and sometimes the world, seeing people in offices and stalking around talking to people and making everyone uncomfortable just because of their presence. They’re using to being “in charge”. But once the pandemic happened, once people were in their houses instead of offices, it shifted the dynamic.

Leadership became less about seeing people doing work and ensuring that people were given clear direction, opportunity, and space to show up and be successful. It was back to leadership principles when it came to organizational leadership, but it also revealed a truth that had always been there… the leaders don’t have as much control as they thought they did.

Now amid all the change that was happening with the revamp of work being from home during the pandemic, we were also experiencing a ton of issues from an economic perspective; it was supply chain disruption, or just people spending less because they weren’t going out (subsequently killing off some parts of industries that were critical in supplying jobs like local restaurants), or global inflation.

And suddenly, the CEO’s are seeing their bottom lines fall apart and of course the natural reaction is… let’s stick it to the workers and bring them back into the office.

ASIDE - I think there’s more to that which is more to do with real estate and all the bullshit that goes along with it, and I know that is a factor, it’s just not the one I want to talk about today, so just recognize… I know I’m only tackling one part of this problem and there’s PLENTY of other reasons that these people are trying to make RTO happen… don’t yell at me please. lol.

So what’s actually happening here. Why are they doing it?

I think we can tackle it using the most consistent excuse they use…

Productivity

Leaders don’t know how to quantify productivity and use it as a crutch instead of leaning into what they’re actually having a problem with. So they can see or sense that there are problems, and instead of looking at themselves or at the truly hard problems, the problem MUST be something simple like productivity! And who WOULDN’T be more productive in the office! I am! Why wouldn’t they?!

But that’s all because they don’t have the knowledge base to understand what their employees are actually going through. They don’t understand why it’d be nice to be at home so the employee can make a healthy lunch instead of spending $18 on something that’s not going to make them feel great, but is quick so they can get back to work. They don’t understand that being able to flip laundry during the day is a huge win! They don’t get that it allows you to walk your dog when you have a 30 minute break. They don’t get all the regular life things that work from home enables. Instead they see those as “lowered productivity”.

And it’s obviously bullshit on its face to anyone who works for a living from home. We’re more productive because we’re not spending time commuting or worrying about our pets. We’re not worried about when we’ll find time to do the 4 loads of laundry that need to get done, or how to handle a sick kiddo, or any of the other things that just come up from being alive.

Part of that is just a different lived experience — if you’re making 8-10 million a year, you don’t care about spending $20 on lunch, that’s not even something you think about. You get the $50 healthy and delicious lunch instead, so who cares? Why would I spend time cooking when someone can just bring it to me? Laundry? I have people for that! Pets? Someone walks my dog every day, why can’t you do that?

The other part, is productivity isn’t just about the time you spend with your hands on a keyboard or on a zoom call. It’s about the way your work gets done and the quality of it for the time you’re spending. And for a CEO the work is being present, it’s not heads down doing work. So they see being available as the measure rather than the outputs or value. It’s a problem we have generally with selling value based solutions, because value is typically measured in business by the time spent on it, not on the value that it creates. Making it obvious for CEO’s that “less time spent specifically working” would mean “less productive” despite any underlying metrics that may prove otherwise.

What you get out of this is that leaders aren’t focused on their teams and what’s best for them. They’re focused on their own bottom line. This hits a number of my sweet spots:

Leaders don’t trust their teams to do the right things without their constant oversight
Leaders aren’t optimizing for the best outcomes
Leaders are protecting themselves and their investments over their people

Leadership is a fucking hard job. And for the most part, it’s thankless. If things goes well, great company win! Things go poorly? Leadership must be failing. I get it. But that’s why you build good teams that you can trust. And clearly, leaders around the globe aren’t trusting that they have the right people to execute the goals of their companies. Otherwise, they’d let them do their job instead of wanting them in the office to micromanage them!

I worked for a company for a VERY short time that was insistent that I be in the office sitting at my desk from 8-5. But my boss was never in the office. And there wasn’t any WORK that they needed me to do during that duration. It was just that they wanted me to be sitting there (never mind that we negotiated a 3 days at home 2 in the office structure, or an hours mix that was more like 6-2 or 3 to deal with traffic patterns… that’s a different story though). And it was mind numbingly boring. I would go on hour long walks for lunch just to get the hell out of the office. But it’s because my boss didn’t understand that my value isn’t to the desk that I’m sitting in. It’s to the work that I can accomplish.

Which is why you know that leaders aren’t optimizing for the best outcomes! Because if they did, they’d have plans that were outcome based instead of activity based. We do a ton at work that is just about creating activity for activities sake. Meetings that are to discuss something that doesn’t need a discussion it just needs a plan. Email threads where people argue over minutiae that doesn’t matter to the outcome. Channels upon channels of people talking about things that have nothing to do with the work but everything to do with exerting some level of control over an out of control process.

If the leaders demanding RTO were focused on outcomes, I honestly don’t think RTO would even approach the top 10 of the biggest problems they need to solve (or if we’re WSJF’ing it, it’d never come up to the backlog because the costs are high, the implementation is uncertain, and the outcomes are undefined!).

Which is how you know their focus is on protecting something they find to be valuable or important. Whether that’s control in some cases, or justifying the expensive new office they just finished building, or protecting their fragile ego from realizing that they’re not as necessary, or just because everyone else is doing it so it must be a good idea - regardless of the specifics, it’s an attempt to protect themselves.

I’m not saying the this is inherently evil or malicious. I’m sure it is for some, and isn’t for others, and I honestly don’t care either way. Because in the end, it’s not about the specifics of the motives - it’s about the statement it’s making for workplaces overall.

Workplaces aren’t for workers, they’re for bosses.

And I’ve been that boss. I’ve made people do things that I thought were expeditious even though I knew they were wrong. We once spent an entire Program Increment building out “proofs of concept” that we could use angular ionic to build mobile apps. Like… we didn’t need that at all. We all knew it would work. We didn’t know what we were “proving” but the business wanted it. And they weren’t going to fund our initiatives without it so we just did it. It was dumb. It was a waste of time. It probably set us back more than the 3 months we spent doing it, because now we were untangling dumb POC code instead of just building things correctly the first time.

So I’m not sitting here saying that I don’t understand. Or that I’d behave differently (though let’s be real. I would.).

What I’m saying is, the problems here are not about whether or not we should return to the office. The problem is leaders focusing on the wrong shit because it’s easier. It’s easy to make an RTO mandate. Here “You all must return to the office Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays”. Look how easy that was! Now I’ll delegate to someone to make a report every week of everyone who doesn’t show up on those days and harass them or let them go or hope that we get a free RIF out of the deal from people who don’t want to come back! Tada! Look how great I am at bossing.

The problem is that instead of taking a values based approach, they are taking the easy way out. If you feel something is wrong in your gut, or you’re seeing it in the EBITDA, or you’re just hearing rumblings of things not working as they should, it’s easy to just take an action and hope for the best. It’s hard to take a step back and say, “what’s causing this, and what would lead to a different outcome.”

But that’s the hard work we’re here to do as leaders, and as people in general. We do it in our daily lives too. We see something not working and take the easy route - oh if I do Keto I’ll lose weight! If I do hypnotherapy I will sleep better! If I eat an apple a day I’ll keep the doctor away! But we all know that doesn’t work long term. And the same thing goes in business.

Man how do you end this thing. I could talk about it forever. But that’d get boring quick for all ya’ll. So instead, let me leave you with this.

If this type of managerial malpractice bothers you, or if you think that you could do better… start acting like it now. Don’t just take actions and hope that it’ll solve your problems. Think systemically. Think like a scientist. Come up with your hypothesis. Make it measurable. Test your hypothesis. Learn from the results.

In the end, the RTO mandates are just like every other get rich quick scheme or lose weight fast scheme — a bunch of bullshit to try and make money for a few people off the backs of everyone else. Don’t let them get away with it. Fight their schemes with the scientific method and above all else… empathy.