Tag: commuting

The economics of office presence

Posted on2 Comments

The virtualization and decentralization of knowledge work has greatly reduced the need for office attendance. But it nevertheless holds value for many knowledge organizations as shown by return to office policies mandating attendance for all or some of the work week.

That value is being assigned and weighed by both knowledge organizations and workers in terms of compensation and talent attraction and turnover.  

The math of the office attendance value equation works roughly inversely. Some organizations offer premium pay for office attendance. It’s also being valued insofar as spiffing up offices to make them “worth the commute.”

Conversely, some knowledge workers are willing to accept lower compensation for roles that don’t require much if any office attendance. A paper issued earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found on average, tech workers are willing to accept a 25 percent pay reduction for roles that don’t require full time office attendance.

This explicitly recognizes the personal cost in terms of time and money incurred by the commute whereas traditionally it was externalized onto staff and seen as part of the job. Now it’s being factored into the employment relationship. Higher compensation for roles requiring regular office presence can offset employees’ cost of commuting.

On the other hand, companies that do not demand office attendance and thus remove the cost of commuting from the employment bargain are being flooded with job applications per this recent Business Insider article, reflecting their high desirability among knowledge workers.

“It’s not about where we work, but how,” Melanie Rosenwasser, chief people officer at Dropbox, told Business Insider. “Flexibility and agency are the new currencies of work.”

The length of the commute and housing costs also factor in. The math there is well established and similarly inverse. Housing tends to cost more nearer to downtown business districts or office parks and campuses or with reliable and fast public transit. Conversely, housing costs tend to be lower in outlying edges of metro areas but come with longer and more time-consuming commutes that take away from employees’ personal time.

As for talent attraction and retention, the most skilled and knowledgeable staff know they are marketable and factor that into their calculations. Knowledge organizations that require office attendance run the risk of losing talent not inclined to work in a mandated organizational office setting.

Buildings and bureaus: RTO isn’t only about trust and control

Posted onLeave a comment

Return to office (RTO) isn’t only about control or trust or workplaces. It’s more fundamental. It’s essentially about organizational identity.

For decades, public and large private sector organizations have defined themselves largely by how they functioned, structured in the industrial age management model as vertical bureaucracies exercising command and control management. The hierarchy is represented in the building with the building as totem. Leadership sits in the upper floors of the building and corner offices. Staff in cubicles in the center and on lower floors.

The building is at the core of organizational self concept and sense of purpose. The org may have started humbly in a garage like Apple but now a large multi building campus represents it nearly as much as its branding. In Apple’s case, for example, the modernistic circular spaceship headquarters building.

Apple founder Steve Jobs described the personal computer as the “bicycle for our minds.” That untethers the mind from time, place and distance. But the spaceship houses the bodies containing the minds of Apple employees. It’s the mothership, the corporate edifice.

Decentralized, virtual knowledge work first made possible by Apple computers and later information and communications technology (ICT) advances is at odds with that. Hence, we see resistance expressed as RTO. It really means return to the organization — get back in the building.

Or as some orgs have framed it to staff, you don’t have a future with this org if you don’t regularly appear at the building that represents it and should find another role outside of the org.

ICT has disrupted that. knowledge work no longer requires the industrial age buildings and bureaus of the 20th century or daily commuting to and from them. It’s done wherever knowledge workers are and thinking. Rapidly processed, communicated and recorded on ICT tools like personal computing and communication devices and the cloud.

The essential questions knowledge organizations face in the 21 century:

How are they defined in the post-industrial age (or “smokestack era” as Alvin Toffler termed it in his 1990 outlook on the 21st century, Powershift)? If buildings and bureaus no longer essentially define them, what does?

Since knowledge work has been traditionally defined by Dave Rolston’s four dead kings of work:

  1. One job title
  2. Performed under one manager
  3. At one time
  4. At one place

How will it be optimally defined and organized going forward?

No assembly required

Posted onLeave a comment

As information and communications technology tools decentralize and virtualize knowledge work, it challenges knowledge organizations to reconceptualize working. In the pre information economy industrial age, work and education involved assembling: in schools, factories and offices.

Now the office is optional.

Making this conceptual shift has proven difficult for many knowledge organizations. That’s because their leaders often believe assembly is essential for collaboration and teamwork. Hence, they demand staff attendance at least some of the workweek in a centralized, commute in office.

Assembly is no longer needed is when information of all forms is easily shared virtually.

Forced assembly hasn’t gone over well for staff who find themselves going though the motions of assembling, swiping their badges to create a record of attendance. Or sitting in a cube farm and having Zoom or Teams meetings with colleagues in other nearby cubicles – something they could just as easily done without making the commute trip there.

Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for our minds” and the current standoff between office centralists and virtualists

Posted onLeave a comment

The microcomputer is the “bicycle for our minds” as it was termed  by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Internet the multi lane bike path over which we cruise along, steering with our keyboards, mice and monitors.

The world of knowledge work didn’t adjust well to Steve Jobs’ bicycle. The reason is it began the obsolescence of commuting Arthur C. Clarke predicted in his 1964 City of the Future video. A lot of orgs however chose to shun the bicycle and have staff trek to a centralized, commute in office (CCO) just as they did for decades before personal computing and later, personal communication devices.

They basically told their staffs, “You can ride a bicycle and should learn to do so. But only with company issued bicycles that must be ridden only on company premises.” That policy derives from the mainframe and minicomputers that preceded PCs that were located at company offices. And later, file servers. All kept in “computer rooms” in offices before they were chained together in server farms to power the cloud. The computer is in the office and therefore so must be the users.

That paradigm continues to play out today with the continuing expectation of knowledge organizations that the CCO is the only place where real knowledge work can be done. Hence, the tensions between the virtualists who see their home office as just suitable and the centralists, managers who expect staff to be in the office on designed days or number of days each work week. And return to the CCO starting in 2022 as the COVID-19 pandemic waned and social distancing protective measures ended.

These are very different views of the world of knowledge work roiled by rapid advances in information and communications technology. The latest being generative artificial intelligence that could make Steve Jobs’ microcomputer bicycle like a modern one with electronic gear shifting. Or into a fast motorbike that can even drive itself.

These advances will fuel a new debate, this one on AI’s role in knowledge work and how knowledge workers should best use it.

Knowledge workers saying no to the negative externality of commuting. Push back has implications for employment.

Posted onLeave a comment

As has been widely reported, tensions have erupted over the past two years or so between knowledge workers and their employers regarding expectations regarding office attendance. The tensions are largely economic over what economists call “negative externalities.”

Negative externalities are costs created by organizations as a consequence of their activities that are not directly borne by them but instead by external parties and society at large. A commonly cited example is environmental pollution by industrial activity. Or carbon emissions from commuting.

Post pandemic, knowledge workers have come to view the costs of personal time, transportation and other expenses of commuting to an office as a negative externality borne by them. Moreover, a negative externality that doesn’t make sense for them to incur in order to sit at a computer desk in a cube farm when they can just as easily do the same at home.

The push back has broader implications for employment since as traditionally defined, employers determine when, where and how work by employees is performed. For knowledge work, that has meant in a centralized, commute in office and mandatory attendance during specified hours.

Knowledge workers are effectively renegotiating the terms and conditions of employment. They are willing to do the work but are not as inclined to bear the costs of commuting to an office to accomplish it. For knowledge organizations, the situation may prompt them to reassess employment and question whether the industrial age model based on presence in a centralized office setting continues to make sense. They might instead rely more on contract work with agencies and individuals, seeing more value in paying for project deliverables and outcomes rather retaining large permanent staffs.

Toffler’s second and third waves colliding in U.S. federal government

Posted onLeave a comment

In his 1980 book The Third Wave, futurist Alvin Toffler depicted the long-term evolution of modern socio-economy as a series of three waves. The first was agrarian – the cultivation and sale of plant crops and animals. The second was the industrial era that began in the 18th century. According to Toffler, this wave reached its peak in the 1970s when services took on a more dominant role relative to manufacturing – the third wave.

The transitions between the waves play out over many decades and are fraught with tension between the receding and rising waves. Not surprisingly since in each, the scale of social and economic change is enormous with broad implications for how and where people work and live. The previous socio-economy and its industries and settlement patterns is remade into the next.

Toffler wrote of advances in information and communications technology and fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure that would fundamentally alter the second wave industrial era based on centralization of production in offices and factories in metro centers. The third wave, Toffler prognosticated, would instead bring about decentralization.

Second wave office work would migrate back to homes that Toffler termed “the electronic cottage.” Toffler’s prediction came just six years after fellow futurist Arthur C. Clarke issued a similar forecast, envisioning the end of commuting to urban downtown office buildings. “Men Will No Longer Commute, They Will Communicate.” And plenty of women too who have entered the workforce since Clarke’s 1964 prognostication.

Toffler’s and Clarke’s future has arrived – gradually since the mass market personal computer in the 1980s and Internet in the 1990s – and suddenly following the social distancing public health measures of the 2020 viral pandemic. Millions of office workers migrated to the electronic cottage, creating home offices and no longer regularly commuting.

The tension between the second industrial era and third information era waves is now starkly evident in the federal government and in two prominent figures of the current American administration: President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Trump is a product of the second wave and the 1980s in particular when he developed his identity as a real estate developer including office buildings. The younger Musk is more complex, a creature of both the second and third waves. He embraces technology but largely in the context of second wave transportation advances: automobiles (Tesla) and rocket ships (SpaceX).

Both men are essentially second wave industrialists. For them, Toffler’s postindustrial third wave electronic cottage doesn’t exist. It’s a dwelling, not a place to work. Working there instead of commuting to a distant office is even “immoral” as Musk put it. Consequently, the administration has ordered federal workers to report for duty at the office.

Thought work doesn’t require a centralized commute-in office

Posted onLeave a comment

As knowledge or thought work as it’s called becomes virtual and is done outside of centralized commuter offices, some knowledge organizations nevertheless believe it must be performed co-located, factory style. According to Roger L. Martin, knowledge organizations are indeed factories – “decision factories” as he termed them in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article.

The process of reaching decisions involves a lot of thought work and analysis that by definition is not tied to a physical location in time and space. That’s because it occurs in the brains of thought workers. In teams and project work groups, they share information and exchange ideas and insights as they move toward decisions.

Sometimes that involves in person brainstorming sessions with Kanban and white boards in smart conference rooms. But in most organizations, that’s not a daily activity that requires knowledge workers to commute to an office daily and incur the personal expense of the commute. They can do their work from their homes or other nearby location without the need for them to climb into a vehicle and travel to an office, often distant from their homes.

Tipping point: Virtualization and decentralization of knowledge work disrupting traditional concept of employment

Posted onLeave a comment

Under the traditional concept of employment, an employer sets the conditions of employment: When, where and how the work is to be done by employees. That is colliding with the virtualization and decentralization of knowledge work. Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over the past five decades have rendered time and place far less relevant. Knowledge work can now be done most anywhere and at any time.

This shift didn’t happen overnight but over the past five decades. Its sudden acceleration since the 2020 pandemic follows a pattern where meta change grows slowly and then reaches a tipping point. That tipping point is now at hand. Some knowledge organizations are navigating it without much trouble while others are struggling to adapt as the former centralized office-based model gives way.

Employment in knowledge work as it has been understood will likely be reformed. That understanding included an expectation that because knowledge work was confined to a particular time and place, knowledge workers must expend their own time and resources in order to physically occupy that designated space and time.

That expectation is naturally now being questioned. Knowledge workers owe a duty to perform their work to the best of their ability for the organizations that retain them. Nothing more can be reasonably expected of them. And that includes a school/classroom like attendance policy that does nothing to further their efforts or the missions of the organizations they serve.

The knowledge work diaspora

Posted onLeave a comment

Knowledge work — also referred to as thought work — aims to develop information into actionable plans and reach decisions about them. For private sector organizations, that includes product or service development, marketing strategy and planning logistics and access to resources. For governments, it’s how to implement public policy and develop programs and budgets to support them.

None of these functions necessarily require knowledge workers to gather regularly in dedicated office space though they might find it beneficial to gather on occasion, perhaps in a day or week-long intensive Kanban or brainstorming session as well as to strengthen social bonding among team members. With communication and collaboration possible from most anywhere to perform these functions, a physical space now must demonstrate that benefit since the traditional office it is no longer the default setting for knowledge work. Nor is it practical or cost effective for large numbers of knowledge workers to regularly commute to one.

This fundamental shift in knowledge work has produced a knowledge work diaspora out centralized commuter offices. It’s upending our concept of knowledge work. Some knowledge organizations that have traditionally viewed their workforces like factory parts inventories are physically inventorying them in office spaces. They have done so by ordering their staff members to report to offices – referred to as “return to office” for what is effectively a census of commitment. If they are not there, they’re not counted, discounted for promotions and even dismissed. They are reassessing the size of their staffs and future office space needs since both of these have been traditionally measured by staff office presence.

The rapid emergence of AI in knowledge work adds a new wrinkle. It requires sizable space for its servers, but unlike humans doesn’t need office space. It too will hasten the diaspora of knowledge work as it was known before ICT began to change it decades ago.

This is a time of great change among knowledge workers and organizations that will require rethinking and adjustment. Or what futurist Alvin Toffler described as developing a form of postmodern literacy when he said “The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Knowledge work has been slowly decentralizing for decades. But since COVID pandemic, it seems like just the past few years.

Posted onLeave a comment

Many knowledge organizations have been blindsided by the rapid decentralization of knowledge work. It is disrupting the usual manner of knowledge work as it has been done for decades: commuting daily to a centralized office location. That commute is no longer necessary. Knowledge work no longer requires the physical transportation of knowledge workers to an office building. Thanks to information and communications technology advances of the past five decades, the centralized, commute in office has become obsolete.

Knowledge organizations are struggling to adapt to this change. It’s been building since it was first predicted in the mid-1960s by futurist Arthur C. Clarke and as high speed highways began to exceed design capacity the following decade. But from the perspective of many knowledge organizations, it arrived with suddenness and surprise amid public health measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. That has left many knowledge organizations unprepared and facing future shock from too much change at once. This has led to negative consequences including:

  • Staff surveillance and “coffee badging;”
  • Lowered morale and engagement;
  • Loss of top performers and future leaders;
  • Negative social and news media accounts;
  • Difficulty planning staffing and space requirements.

The good news is knowledge organizations don’t have to navigate the shift alone. They can adapt and do so in a manner consistent with their values and mission and thrive in today’s decentralized, virtualized world of knowledge work.

Help is available.