ICT

At its core, return to office debate about redefining knowledge work

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Personal computing and communication devices and the Internet have decentralized knowledge work and made the daily trip to centralized commuter offices (CCOs) obsolete. Knowledge workers discovered its irrelevance and enjoyed recovering personal time spent commuting during the public health social distancing measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now as some organizations demand they return to the office (RTO) on a set number or designated days of the week, many are understandably rebelling.

But the real debate isn’t about showing up in person at the CCO on a prescribed number of specific weekdays. It’s about redefining knowledge work and specifically how it’s done and managed.

In his 2013 book 2013 eBook Four Dead Kings at Work: The Decentralization and Blending of Work in the 21st Century, author Dave Rolston predicted the imminent death of the four primary tenets or kings of knowledge work in the Industrial Age:

  1. Set job duties;
  2. Managed by a single manager;
  3. Performed at one place (the CCO);
  4. At the same time (8-5, Monday-Friday).

This definition worked well before 1990 when the tools for knowledge work were at the workplace and not portable like today’s personal devices, online databases, collaboration platforms and more recently, AI chatbots.

Now, organizations and knowledge workers must adjust to the post-Industrial Age environment. That entails determining when co-located work is beneficial and when it isn’t. It also requires assessing the communications culture.

When knowledge workers were regularly in the CCO, meetings — both scheduled and ad hoc — were frequent. Even too frequent for many knowledge workers. They express a real time, speaking-based communication culture.

To fully utilize today’s communication and collaboration tools, knowledge organizations must adopt a more written, asynchronous communication culture. They also must find the right balance between this and spoken communication and when knowledge workers must be assembled to discuss and sort through complex and difficult issues that benefit from synchronous, in person discussion. That is driven more by business needs to complete reports and projects and reach decisions rather than the daily calendar.

It’s also critical that knowledge organizations keep their missions clearly communicated to staff so they can see how their work makes a meaningful contribution as this article in today’s Wall Street Journal implies.

The Rise of the ‘Office-Savior’​ | LinkedIn

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Rather than having countries that having thriving individual cities at the expense of the collective whole, remote work enables a renaissance of smaller cities and towns which people desert, leaving behind friends and family, in search of opportunity. Unfortunately, what people often find is that opportunity comes at a far higher cost of living.

Source: The Rise of the ‘Office-Savior’​ | LinkedIn

This is an important point. Rather than the binary debate over workplace settings (home or centralized commute in office) the larger issue is really about community. Some argue the office is a community for many. Working outside of it erodes that sense of community and for some, even family.

But knowledge workers spend most of their lives in their residential communities and with their immediate families. Time and distance separates the two. That gap is growing bigger as knowledge workers must live in communities farther from the office where they can afford housing, spawning so called “super commutes.”

Information and communications technology (ICT) and most critically fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure bridges the gap and as the author notes, more broadly distributes knowledge work to smaller, less costly and crowded communities. That also comes with benefits of a better quality of life and more personal time freed up instead of commuting every day.

Another way the tyranny of time and distance between home and office is being addressed is bringing residential and work communities closer together. Which makes sense in in California’s Silicon Valley replete with large corporate campuses, making them akin to college towns. Google, for example, is proposing to build a residential community there.

State of California must overcome ingrained organizational culture, IT challenges to successfully navigate transition to virtual work

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Two factors have accelerated the State of California’s more than three decades in the making shift to virtual work:

  • The 2019 installation of a chief executive who unlike his predecessors has lived most of his life during the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution that brought about personal computing devices and Internet-based advanced telecommunications.
  • A global pandemic that made dense occupancy “cube farm” office environments decidedly risky for the spread of a novel communicable disease.

Without these factors, the state would have likely continued uninterrupted with its entrenched organizational culture where putting in hours at the office is regarded as both “work” and earning one’s future dollars in what’s become a rarity for most workers: a defined benefit pension plan with medical benefits. That culture has resisted virtual work for decades notwithstanding policy promulgated dating back to 1988 by both the Governor’s Office and the Legislature.

Management guru Peter Drucker is credited with the organizational behavior maxim that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It similarly makes a meal of public policy since culture is reinforced daily by group expectations and norms whereas policy merely exists in written form that’s meaningless without organizational buy in.

As The Sacramento Bee’s Wes Venteicher reports, Gov. Gavin Newsom has directed the 75 percent of state workers currently working outside of their state offices due to pandemic disease control measures put in place in March to continue to do so on either a full or part time basis as the state begins to reopen.

Going forward, Newsom’s revised budget summary for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2020 notes contagion control measures implemented by his administration “has forced a massive experiment in telework.” It directs state agencies to develop “expanded long-term telework strategies” and to “rethink business processes.”  

A 1990 report on a state telework pilot project begun in 1985 recommended managers and staff be trained to think in terms of work results rather than work processes. That’s a huge challenge for an organization where the key process metric is time spent in the office. Standing present for duty in the office is also a component of the state’s preferred command and control management style. That way managers are prepared with a team standing ready in case someone higher up or very high up in the chain of command wants something pronto.

It’s unlikely more than three decades of fraught history with telework can be changed overnight, even by a global pandemic and the worst budget shortfall in the state’s history. Another challenge for the state is to put in place a robust and secure cloud-based IT infrastructure that can support virtual work on an ongoing basis given IT modernization has not been its historical strong suit.

One of the most favorable factors in this transition is the promotion of millennials into management roles. Unlike generations before them, they grew up with information and communications technologies. They know from experience they enable knowledge work and setting policy – the mainstay of government work – possible outside of the centralized, commute-in offices of their parents’ generation. As well as the traffic congestion and air pollution they generate that kicked off the state’s 1980s telework pilot project to help reduce it.

Zillow survey suggests housing preferences could be upended in a post-pandemic America, leading to major questions about the future of dense metro cores

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SEATTLE, May 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Where people choose to live has traditionally been tied to where they work, a dynamic that through the past decade spurred extreme home value growth and an affordability crisis in coastal job centers. But the post-pandemic recovery could mitigate or even produce the opposite effect and drive a boom in secondary cities and exurbs, prompted not by a fear of density but by a seismic shift toward remote work.

Source: http://zillow.mediaroom.com/2020-05-13-A-Rise-in-Remote-Work-Could-Lead-to-a-New-Suburban-Boom#Closed

This is consistent with a long tern trend I discuss in my recently published eBook Last Rush Hour: The Decentralization of Knowledge Work in the Twenty-First Century. Before the maturation of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) that enables knowledge workers to work from most anywhere with good Internet connectivity, the length of the commute to the office was a paramount consideration in terms of where people chose to live. ICT has reduced its importance since it shrinks time and distance. The personal computer is the automobile of the information economy and the Internet is the highway.

The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and social distancing out of centralized commuter offices (CCOs) demonstrated to knowledge workers and their their organizations it’s no longer necessary to commute every workday to a CCO.

We’ll see varying degrees of migration out of CCOs in the coming years. Some will continue to be used part of the week or as meeting spaces for larger gatherings. Other organizations will opt to go fully virtual and shut down their offices.

Pandemic may resolve SF Bay Area paradox

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At some point during this period, the economy will open back up. But that doesn’t mean people need to go back to the office, said Steve Heminger, a board director at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.“Are we returning to an old normal after this is over, or are we advancing to a new normal?” Heminger mused. “My vote is probably the latter.” Some companies have allowed remote work for years, but it’s never been enough to make a dent in rush hour crowds on BART, or thin congestion on the Bay Bridge. That all changed when the coronavirus shifted much of the tech-fueled Bay Area into bedrooms and home offices. If the trend sticks, it would reduce demand for office space downtown and lift strain off the transportation system, Heminger said.

Source: Cars, trains and uncertainty: How coronavirus will change Bay Area transit – SFChronicle.com

As I’ve blogged repeatedly in this space, the San Francisco Bay Area and neighboring Silicon Valley represents a profound paradox, clinging to mid 20th commute-in offices. While at the same time, the region is recognized globally as a powerhouse of innovation in information and communications technologies (ICT) that makes possible doing knowledge work from most anywhere with good Internet connectivity, effectively obsoleting the daily commute. Yet in recent years, the region gained the dubious distinction as having some of the worst traffic congestion and longest commutes on the planet.

A paradox embodies a natural tension that like a stretched rubber band eventually reaches a breaking point and snaps. The current viral pandemic may have brought it there.

Solutions for Sacramento area commute congestion

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In recent years, the traffic on this route, and on similar country thoroughfares throughout the Capital Region, has included folks who’ve moved from Sacramento into the surrounding countryside and still do daily business in the city. Transportation experts agree that while there are no studies confirming this, anecdotal evidence suggests urban expats, scattered to the countryside by high housing prices, empty-nest syndrome or a desire for a pastoral lifestyle, are helping clog local roads.

Source: Making Connections | Comstock’s magazine

Like many metros, the Sacramento suffers from time and quality of life sucks caused by too many commuters relative to limited transportation system capacity. Especially as this article notes, GPS systems route commuters onto and clog secondary roads never intended to function as commute routes. The traditional remedies of building more highway lanes and mass transit take many years and dollars to bring on line. And the public and personal economics to support that don’t scale as well in smaller metros like Sacramento where many commuters live in the region’s less densely populated exurban and quasi-rural areas where housing is more affordable.

Clearly alternative solutions are needed. Given the many state government workers in the metro, the first would be to substitute information and communications technology for transportation. Get state and other knowledge workers out of their cars and create opportunities for them to work in their residential communities in telework centers or if they can, in their homes. The second is beefing up the region’s telecommunications infrastructure which is perhaps the worst in the state, replacing decades old aged copper telephone cable with fiber optic lines.

21st century solution to curb California mega commutes: Leveraging ICT for knowledge jobs

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The conference also included a short talk by Lenny Mendonca, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s chief economic and business adviser. Asked about Newsom’s efforts to promote regional responses to the state’s affordable housing shortage and Marin’s reluctance to surrender local control, Mendonca said, “There are 85,000 people a day who commute from the northern part of San Joaquin Valley and Sacramento into the Bay Area.“Those are often people who are commuting and an hour and a half and two hours each way in their car for economic opportunity,” Mendonca said. “That creates all kinds of challenges from housing costs to traffic to air quality to quality of life and community degradation.” Mendonca said one way to address this problem is to build more housing in places where the jobs are, including the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Source: Economist: Marin recession unlikely before 2021

That’s one way — a 20th century approach. But it takes a long time for new housing to come online, particularly in the already built out Bay Area and Los Angeles. Additionally, proposed land use reforms to reshape suburban development with high density housing near mass transit encounters strong political resistance. A far faster, cheaper 21st century solution is to take a different approach to working, particularly knowledge work. Nowadays, people don’t need a commute-in office in some far off location to get it done. They can leverage information and communications technology to work in the communities where they live so the work can come to them instead of having to drive for hours each day to work.

Indeed, Mendonca recognized the need for more widely deployed advanced telecommunications infrastructure to enable virtual working in a recent interview. “We have large portions in every geographic area, especially rural California, that don’t have access,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “You need access to current technologies at the speed the world is moving.”

New generation of policymakers, planners needed to solve metro area traffic congestion

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Liccardo, who also sits on the commission board, said reducing traffic congestion in the South Bay will require cities to add more housing units instead of simply focusing on job growth, and it might require regional incentives and penalties on cities.“We need to get people living closer to where they work,” Liccardo said.

Source: Highways to hell: Bay Area’s worst commutes ranked by MTC – SFChronicle.com

True for those who must be on site for their work. Not true for most knowledge workers who thanks to today’s information and communications technology — much of it innovated in the Bay Area. A new generation of policymakers and planners is needed that recognizes the potential of ICT to reduce the need for daily commute trips that substantially contribute to the enormous transportation demand that’s choking the Bay Area and other metros.

ICT to reduce commute trips and associated vehicle emissions takes on greater urgency as U.N. report calls for “aggressive action” to cool global climate

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Not long after the first Earth Day in April 1970, a Los Angeles aerospace engineer as engineers are wont to do saw a problem and came up with a solution to fix it. The problem Jack Nilles saw in his daily drive to the office was bumper to bumper traffic and bad air quality. His solution: substituting telecommunications for commute induced transportation demand by establishing satellite offices in “bedroom communities” where people lived to avoid the trip to centralized commuter offices. The environmental benefit of the solution Nilles proposed nearly five decades ago takes on increased urgency with the publication of a report issued today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning of rapidly accelerating global warming.

Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only several decades in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows. “It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report.

To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050.

Turning the global economy on a dime is challenging to say the least. Cutting motor vehicle emissions associated with commuting is one measure that could be implemented relatively quickly, especially considering today’s information and communications technology is far more advanced than when Nilles first came up with his idea in the early 1970s, thanks to the proliferation of Internet protocol-based telecommunications.

Peter Thiel: ICT offers low cost, green solution to metro area transportation, housing challenges

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Venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel was recently interviewed on the Fox Business Network on the city of the future. Thiel talked about the two major shortcomings of today’s city as a situs for knowledge work concentrated in centralized metro commute-in offices: transportation and housing. Transportation systems – roads, highways and public transit – are “badly inadequate” in most metros, Thiel said, and housing costs are exorbitant. Both leave knowledge workers with two bad choices. “People need to have super long commutes or live in small apartments near the city centers where they have to spend all of their salaries on the apartments,” Thiel explained.

That’s where information and communications technology (ICT) can provide a workaround by allowing knowledge work to be dispersed outside of urban centers, according to Thiel. ICT solves the housing problem since it provides access to more affordable housing while at the same time eliminating the need for daily commute trips.

The idea isn’t new and has spawned years of debate despite the strong benefit in solving the housing and transportation challenge ever since Jack Nilles coined the term “telecommuting” in the 1970s. That debate continues to play out nearly two decades into the new century among organizations – ironically including ICT innovators like Yahoo, HP, Apple and IBM – that resist substituting ICT for transportation, fearing a geographically dispersed workforce won’t be as productive or collaborative as one co-located in a centralized, commute-in office setting. Thiel explains:

The ICT version (of transportation) people have talked about for decades is telecommuting. And so would there be some way so that you won’t need transportation at all, you could just do your work remotely. For a variety of reasons this has not worked over the last 30, 40 years people have been talking about it. The [perceived] problem generally is that people who work from their homes, they don’t work as hard. A lot of the value of work comes from talking to people in various ways.

However, Thiel notes management practices are changing to overcome those concerns that concentrate on managing the production and delivery of the work product. That focus necessarily forces a degree of diligence and collaboration to get the work done, he implies.

I think we’re starting to see more and more of this telecommuting in Silicon Valley and elsewhere where people are finding small teams of developers outside of Silicon Valley, there are ways to sort of bundle, put the work in certain packages that you allocate to different people. So I think maybe one of the end runs around the transportation system will be telecommuting. That’s a trend that’s underrated that’s worth exploring a lot more.