Author: Frederick Pilot

Despite Remote Work, Rush Hour Returned – Bloomberg

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Source: Despite Remote Work, Rush Hour Returned – Bloomberg

The upshot of this piece is the potential bifurcation of knowledge organizations. One group staffed by those who live close in to urban centers where commutes are relatively short and can be done by foot powered transportation and public transit. These organizations have established “downtown” urban identities and convening cultures based on face to face interaction among staff, clients and vendors. They’re deeply invested in gleaming steel and glass office towers by virtue of ownership or long term leases.

Staff who commuted from the outer suburbs and distant reaches of metro areas who worked at home during pandemic public health measures are not going to be inclined to give up the equivalent of another workday as commuting time. That could lead to a sorting of personnel, with only those who fit into the organization’s let’s meet downtown culture remaining and the rest departing.

For suburban office parks, it’s a different story. A Houston transportation planner quoted in the article notes they serve merely as workplaces and lack the cultural vibe of the downtown office-based organization. For staff and consultants of these organizations, daily work activity of “sitting 8 hours a day drafting something or tapping a keyboard and interacting minimally with people,” can easily be performed in a home office.

The Pandemic Blew Up the American Office — For Better and Worse | Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Rather than letting individual employees simply choose when they will come into the office, companies should implement an organized approach, Bloom argues. “If this is well managed, you can have the best of both worlds,” he says. “But my advice to firms is to decide this centrally. A mixed mode can be pretty terrible if some people are working from home and others are in the office.” Companies could, for example, cluster group activities, such as planning meetings and client presentations, on “in-office” days.

Source: The Pandemic Blew Up the American Office — For Better and Worse | Stanford Graduate School of Business

This is from Nicolas Bloom, a professor of economics with the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

While not directly, Bloom is essentially redefining the office from being a regular workplace used by set people at set times to an ad hoc meeting and presentation setting. It comes as knowledge organizations continue to struggle to determine which days a week it function as a regular workplace as social distancing measures are relaxed amid mass immunization against COVID-19.

As an ad hoc meeting location for group activities, former centralized, commute in offices can function on a downsized basis as meeting locations to provide opportunities for face to face collaboration that managers and many knowledge workers find useful to supplement working alone. Confabs and presentations could be multi-day functions. Staff who live far from the office could be lodged nearby and return home after the function has ended.

The experience of the past 15 months has shown workers no longer need to sit in a cube farm 8-5, Monday through Friday in order to do their work when they can accomplish it whenever and wherever work can get done.

Apple and Google want to force remote workers back into cubicles. That friction could lead to a job exodus

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But who has to come back to work — and when and where — is proving fraught as millions of workers face having a new way of living and working ripped away by managers requiring them to show up in person, or else. That tension could mean some workers leave for companies offering more flexibility and the ability to shed burdensome commutes in favor of time with family and friends.

McCracken said some people he interviewed said “it feels like they’re putting their hand in my pocket, that they’re taking two hours from me that I had learned to use for myself” that would now flip back to wasted commute time.

Source: Apple and Google want to force remote workers back into cubicles. That friction could lead to a job exodus

A great post pandemic sorting among knowledge workers and organizations at hand.

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More than a year into America’s great work-from-home experiment, many companies have hailed it largely as a success. So why do some bosses think remote workers aren’t as committed as office dwellers? Recent remarks of numerous chief executives suggest the culture of workplace face time remains alive and well. At The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit this month, JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon said remote work doesn’t work well “for those who want to hustle.” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has called it “an aberration that we are going to correct as soon as possible.”

Source: Bosses Still Aren’t Sure Remote Workers Have ‘Hustle’ – WSJ

These comments demonstrate that for some organizations, gathering daily at a centralized, commute-in office (CCO) is an integral part of their cultures that cannot be easily erased in a single year. But it should be borne in mind that while CEOs have a large degree of influence on their organizational culture, it’s not absolute. Cultures are defined by all their members.

Now that their staff members have been freed of the personal time burden of daily commuting, many are understandably reluctant to reassume it. Knowledge organizations are now having to redefine their cultures for the post pandemic world going forward. They’ll undergo a sorting process as some staff depart for more virtual organizations while others who prefer working in a CCO align with CCO-based organizations — most likely those who live close by.

Certainly working in a CCO has its advantages, such as the social contact and in person communication with colleagues. But as commutes grow longer as metro areas sprawl and housing costs rise, the daily trip to and from a distant CCO becomes impractical where it might not be in small towns and less congested areas where knowledge workers can commute to the office by foot and/or bicycle. These less populated locales have also proven popular as CCOs closed down over the past year and knowledge workers sought more affordable and less congested settings, some in other states and countries.

Some knowledge CCO-based organizations may become the office equivalent of teaching hospitals where senior staff and managers closely interact with and supervise more junior staff and inculcate them in the cultural ways of their organizations. Others such as boutique consulting shops won’t have CCOs and attract as they have in recent years experienced people who can work as location independent team members and don’t require close supervision.

Washingtonian staff goes on strike after CEO Cathy Merrill’s op-ed about remote work – The Washington Post

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In Thursday’s op-ed, Merrill wrote that she had discussed the downsides of remote work with fellow chief executives and estimated that unofficial office duties such as “helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture” made up 20 percent of their work.

Source: Washingtonian staff goes on strike after CEO Cathy Merrill’s op-ed about remote work – The Washington Post

The public health restrictions that shut down centralized commuter offices (CCO) shone a spotlight on the high cost of maintaining an office-based culture. There’s the direct cost to knowledge organizations to keep all that brick, mortar and glass that house cube farms occupiable.

Then there’s the indirect commuting cost that has historically been externalized onto workers. The predominant management mindset pre-pandemic was staff chooses where they want to live. How far away that is from the office or how long it takes for them to get here Monday through Friday is not our problem.

But housing choice isn’t fully within the control of knowledge workers. High housing costs in metro cores have forced knowledge workers farther from them in search of affordable housing. That leads to longer commutes — borne directly by knowledge workers who sacrifice time that could otherwise be spent on health promoting activities such as exercise, sufficient sleep, and home prepared meals as well as in their communities and with their families.

Now that so many knowledge workers have been freed of these personal costs during the pandemic, their value has become very clear. They’re understandably reluctant to surrender the personal time they recovered. Particularly since their organizations have gone on functioning largely without the CCO for more than a year, thanks to advances in information and communications technology.

Work from home still reigns as offices plan to reopen – Los Angeles Times

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Human beings have not been fundamentally changed by the coronavirus, Dezzutti said, and will again seek one another’s company in busy metropolises.

“In history, there has been no pandemic or plague or natural disaster that’s killed off the city,” he said. “Our need to live and work in urban clusters, and the concentration of people and economic activity that occurs there, is just too strong.”

Source: Work from home still reigns as offices plan to reopen – Los Angeles Times

This analysis overlooks a powerful trend over the past two decades of information and communications technology decentralizing knowledge work out of urban centers. Also, high housing costs in urban areas and hours wasted commuting from more affordable outlying portions of metros that come with too high a cost for daily gathering in a centralized, commute-in office. True, humans are social beings and like to gather. But they most naturally do so in close proximity to where they live.

Rebalancing Irish residential settlement for information economy

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Like other countries across Europe, the hollowing out of once vibrant villages and small towns has contributed to wider social divisions, and scholars and public policy experts have warned that the split could become a major source of tension in Western democracies. Ireland’s proposal, “Our Rural Future,” is one of the most ambitious efforts announced in Europe to address the issue, prompted by the changes brought about by the pandemic. Among other things, it proposes legislation that would give employees the right to request to work from home, the establishment of a network of 400 remote-working hubs, and funding for better internet connectivity nationally.

Source: Covid-19 News: Live Updates – The New York Times

Pandemic hastens end of the centralized commuter office, heralds “Distributed Age.”

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A year after the coronavirus sparked an extraordinary exodus of workers from office buildings, what had seemed like a short-term inconvenience is now clearly becoming a permanent and tectonic shift in how and where people work. Employers and employees have both embraced the advantages of remote work, including lower office costs and greater flexibility for employees, especially those with families. Beyond New York, some of the country’s largest cities have yet to see a substantial return of employees, even where there have been less stringent government-imposed lockdowns, and some companies have announced that they are not going to have all workers come back all the time.

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“We believe that we’re on top of the next change, which is the Distributed Age, where people can be more valuable in how they work, which doesn’t really matter where you spend your time,” said Alexander Westerdahl, the vice president of human resources at Spotify, the Stockholm-based streaming music giant that has 6,500 employees worldwide.

Source: Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Manhattan May Never Be the Same. – The New York Times

Pandemic showed work can get done without centralized commuter offices

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Work, too, has been transformed. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of people around the world had to figure out how to get things done without going into the office. It turns out that for many white-collar jobs, this is not just possible; it comes with a variety of upsides. Commutes, to take one example, are unhealthy—they waste time and potentially increase our sedentary time, which is associated with many adverse health outcomes, and perhaps worst of all, driving is among the most dangerous activities we undertake each day. The competition to try to avoid long commutes distorts property values and can worsen inequality, as those with money pay extra to live near centers of work, while other residents can no longer afford to live there.

Source: Three Ways the Pandemic Has Made the World Better – The Atlantic

Pandemic forced organizational change, shattered Industrial Age boundaries defining knowledge work

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Pandemic social distancing restrictions served as an organizational change intervention, forcing knowledge industry organizations to reassess their cultures and beliefs about how work gets done. Pandemic restrictions virtually overnight switched off the gravity that pulls knowledge workers into a centralized, commute-in office workspace. As those restrictions are lifted amid mass immunization campaigns, knowledge organizations continue to confront these fundamental questions.

For most knowledge organizations, their cultures are strongly rooted in the belief work is being definitively performed when people are present in the office, reinforced by social connections made there and functions such as group lunches and celebrations. The organizational hierarchy is visually represented and reinforced in the office layout, with managers assigned corner and window offices and the rank and file in cubicles on the inside of the floor. A knowledge worker’s manager is clearly identified on the organizational chart. Clocks on the wall define when work is expected to be done.

A decade before the pandemic, author Dave Rolston in his 2013 book Four Dead Kings at Work predicted the death of these anchors that traditionally defined the boundaries of knowledge work in the Industrial Age: 1) One centralized workplace; 2) A single manager; 3) Performing a single defined job and pay grade; 4) At the same time each week.

The pandemic hastened their death requiring organizations to flex or abandon them. The elimination of the centralized office workplace and the erosion of the 8-5, Monday through Friday work time diminished the first and last of the kings, bookended by the daily commute. After more than year of foregoing commuting, knowledge workers have realized the enormous personal time burden it imposes, taking time away family, community, and health promoting behaviors such as adequate sleep, exercise and home cooked versus takeout and restaurant meals. Not to mention clothing and transportation costs.

This realization within knowledge organization has major implications for where knowledge workers will live in the coming decades and for traditional urban planning predicted on centralized settlement and development patterns forming sprawling metro areas requiring ever longer commutes.