Return to work

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you today, Dave?

Excellent. I am I am never talking to you about how much you run before we have a talk again. You've obviously it's full of energy, ready to go. Yes, let's go. What are we talking about? In fact, we're talking about running back to work today, aren't we?

Yes, yes. And then isn't that a fun topic? It's all over the place. There's so many blog posts, so many, so much information, and uh felt it might be interesting to get our perspective on it and what we're seeing.

What I find in I mean, obviously, we're we it's been a couple of years. We're all ready for a change. Let me put it that way. What I find interesting is uh so many organizations are beginning to tackle this return to work sort of as as if the last two years hadn't happened. Right. So when I think back to it, two years ago or or multiple years before that, organizations really struggled to let people work from home. It was a special circumstances where you could work from home. There was a lot of concern about how many people would be working from home and what that would mean for productivity. And then when the reality hit and everybody had to work from home, all of a sudden the tone changed. First of all, we're happy for you to work from home. In fact, we're going to insist on it because that's the only way we're going to be able to move forward. But secondly, the realization that productivity didn't collapse, at least in many industries, not going to say everywhere, right?

Well, maybe not. It didn't collapse. Um, I mean it slowed down, but the fact that we managed to get anything done and it wasn't just a complete shit show is quite impressive. That uh that organizations and people are very adaptable and they adapted, and they the uh the the shift to work from home wasn't the devastating uh uh effect that a lot of organizations had been thinking up until that point. I mean, a lot of a lot of what was actually done had been talked about for decades. I mean, this is and the technologies in place have been around for a very long time. Uh they have evolved rapidly over the last couple of years, but uh it's that it's not like we suddenly had to invent a whole new way of uh of working.

And and uh and again, we're working in digital space, so perhaps it it it has impacted other industries in different ways. But one of the realities was that productivity actually went up in many cases. Many of the studies, many of the announcements from corporations, from studies and surveys was that productivity went up. So now we rolled kind of forward a couple of years, and we're now in a situation where people are beginning to feel that tug of going back into the office, into the workspace. And perhaps the first thing to recognise, I mean, Peter, do you think people should work in the, you know, what's the benefit of working in an office space where your colleagues are around you? Does that make sense?

I think uh that there are certain types of work and certain work activities that are much more conducive to being in the presence of the people you are working with. They work much better. If we're collaborating on deep thinking type work where you're working very short iterations on and to be creative and and to put things together, that works very, very well when everybody is together and collaborating in the same space. You can read each other's body language, you can communicate in so many other ways other than just the uh the impressions you get through a 2D interface on a computer screen. So it's there's definitely benefits for certain types of work which I can see would bring people back together.

I I mean, fundamentally, there's a there's a um we're gregarious animals. We like hanging around other human beings. And a screen and some Zoom or whatever the you know conference tool of choices is not hanging around other human beings. It doesn't work in the same way at all. So I think I mean I always uh whenever I'm looking at something like this, I do recognize there's a huge value in just being around other people, communicating, socializing. I call it the social capital side of things, the water cooler conversations. That social capital uh allows us to develop a connection and ownership of the group of people that we're working with. I think many people have gone through the experience of starting a new role in an organization where you literally don't change from wherever it is that you're working. The only thing that's changed is the computer you're accessing it with, the work with, and the you know, and it's really difficult to build those that loyalty, that connection with an organization if you're not able to get um in person. So that social capital is critical. Um what are one of the other reasons that I always uh point out is career growth again, and one or two years we can all kind of sit there on hold for a bit. But one of the drivers, if you like, around this great resignation or realignment, whatever we want to think of it, is career growth is really, really difficult. In you know, a Zoom virtual world. The career growth is you hear about opportunities, you bump into people and build relationships, you network in an organization. And that sort of serendipity of matching opportunity and network and relationships to be able to grow your career in an organization is definitely significantly, significantly curtailed in virtual environments.

I uh and uh and I think that the the shift to virtual world, of course, is uh it erodes the the tribal nature of the of the interrelationships you have with the other people that you're used to working with. If you're not there with them day in, day out, it's much easier to step away from it. It becomes much easier to uh say, hey, actually, maybe I will go try something else. Maybe there is something uh different out there that might be a a better fit for me because I'm now not so tied to that environment that I was in. Uh and of course that that's though is the kind of thinking that uh leads to uh mandated returns to work where it's like where organizations are now scared of the fact that uh may if I may I've got to bring people back together, I've got to uh because otherwise they might all run away on me. And uh the great resignation is uh as it's uh been called, is uh I think one of the outcomes of that.

Well, and and I think that there's there's also a recognition, and it's been quite interesting. I've been following this quite closely for the last couple of years, and was it's a passion of mine that happened beforehand as well, which is innovation. And there's a there's a there's a couple of things. There's the if all of us now in the last few months have probably had the opportunity to workshop in person, and boy, does that feel different and better than workshopping digitally, quite frankly. It's a lot more engaging and so on. But when I think of innovation in terms of the loss organizations are struggling with because of lower levels of innovation, it's less to do with those workshops where everyone gets together and you innovate, but it's more to do with the what I call the sensing side of innovation. When you look at innovation, innovation is about bringing diverse ideas and opinions and experiences together in new ways. And that diversity you often pick up by conversations over coffee about the challenges people in different departments or different branches are struggling with, or listening into or reading the whiteboarding pieces of worked out stuff that is on the wall. These are where these seeds of ideas come from. And one of the big challenges of virtual work is you don't see those seeds, you don't overhear the conversations. And the the most strongly innovative teams often have a lot of diversity in a crammed up space. And you can see that both from social cities, how cities are mega innovative compared to the rural communities, because of the density of ideas and interactions and diversity. And the same as you scale that down, the same is true for the most diverse companies as well, and innovative companies.

Yeah, and uh I I think that talks a lot to why there's a need to for people to get back together. I mean, that's uh uh because people want to, and for certain types of work it there definitely it's beneficial. And again, as you mentioned earlier, we are we are largely talking about the digital space here, where if we look at other spaces, there's obviously a lot more complexity and other concerns there. The when we think about um sort of some of the other reasons and the way that it's being done, though, we can see that uh different organizations are handling this in different ways. And some of them are definitely doing a better job than others in thinking about um how can we do this in a way that doesn't uh make people feel threatened or uh feel like they're not being treated fairly, or uh anything else along those lines, which might be uh causing them to say, Yeah, maybe I I don't like this anymore. You're not uh treating me the way I want to be treated, so I'm gonna go elsewhere.

So, what have you seen that works really well?

The uh the ones that I've seen work well are by leaving it up to people to make their own decision, providing them uh the with the spaces where they can come together to to work on things and allowing them to uh to plan that for themselves, uh not mandating it um from the top in a in a blanket sweeping thou must do it this way. Um those those seem to be the ones that are catching on the most, I would say.

You you w when you say the ones that are catching on the most, the mandates appear to be the way that organizations are trying. It's interesting. I've heard a number of organizations go through that process and they and they're on their second or third or fourth mandate because they keep trying it and it doesn't quite work, and they try it again and it doesn't quite work. And and what I think is much more, and you you touched on it, which is we've we've gone through a few years now of saying you know, we need you to work remotely, we need you to kind of figure out what that work is. And I in some ways we're going into the same piece now of we need to leverage the fact that we have office space that we have leases on or we've built and are going to be sitting around and we want to get people into that space. But then how do we do it in a way that makes sense? Can we maybe it's department up by department and have conversations about what the goals are, enable, make it fun to not fun is perhaps the wrong word, but attracting people to doing it rather than mandating people to do it and fundamentally recognizing that you know what, some people may never do that, and and some people may rarely do it, and that can still work really, really well.

Yeah, uh and there's a number of attempts at trying to find uh technical solutions to a hybrid space, but I've I've yet to see any of these work particularly well. Um, have noticed that when going back into uh a situation where um you're you've got a group of people in a room in an office and a number of people remote, uh people pay a lot more attention to the fact that there are people remote at the moment. If uh whether time will tell whether or not that uh continues to be the case. And uh or if uh over time people will um slowly forget that the people are on the phone again, which is uh thinking of going back a few years. That's typically how that uh situation would play out.

Yeah, yeah, that's very true. Maybe just in closing, um what uh thoughts do you have as to or advice would you have for any of our listeners around how to encourage people back into the office?

So I I think some of the main pieces to pull out of what we were just talking about, uh I think one really concrete piece is don't don't mandate exactly what people need to do. Allow people to have the freedom to to choose what they need to do. Um help them work out which types of work might be better suited to coming together in person and so that they can learn from that and help provide the the facilities or the capabilities for them to be able to do that as they need to. Um make sure you're being um I think a third one might be like make sure you're being transparent about the reasons that things are occurring and how they're occurring, and that you're as with any kind of change, it's communicate, communicate, communicate, make sure that uh people uh um are aware of what's happening and uh and the reasons for it. Um is there anything you would add to that?

I I I agree with everything, and I I think the only thing I would add is make it attractive because fundamentally I think people do want to be in the same place and working in a shared space. I think that's something where all of us are ready for a bit more human interaction. So making it attractive, and I think we're gonna find that many people will shift back uh on terms that they are comfortable with and that work for their um, you know, for what they're up to.

Well, well, awesome. I I enjoy the conversation as always, Dave. If uh anybody'd like to reach out, they can get us at uh feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. And I look forward till next time.

Excellent. Thanks again. Always a pleasure, Peter. Until next time.

You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.