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The most important work-related debate of our time is stuck on repeat. Many senior executives continue to believe that working from home is tantamount to pretending to work, with Elon Musk saying out loud what his more restrained colleagues say in private, while many remote-work enthusiasts continue to believe that they have an absolute right to work where they want to, the organization be damned. The result: a never-ending cycle of get-back-to-work memos, not-on-your-nelly responses and accumulating problems.
It’s time to recognize that a new world is here to stay: We are at an early stage of a revolution in the distribution of work, driven by the miniaturization of smart machines and the ubiquity of the internet, that is as fundamental as the one that occurred with the industrial revolution in the 19th century and the office revolution of the early 20th century. (Perhaps Musk will be remembered as the Ned Ludd of the flexibility revolution rather than the Henry Ford of the electric car.)
It’s also time to recognize that both sides in the debate have a claim to be heard. Workers are right to want to work wherever they can be most productive. Forcing someone to endure a morale-sapping (and sometimes dangerous) commute just to keep a row of office desks filled is counterproductive. But employers are also right to worry that flexible work brings new problems. We need to shift the focus of the debate from the ideological to the practical — from the desirability of a change that is probably inevitable to the question of how to manage a distributed organization.
The new flexible model is still in its early days. Julia Hobsbawm, the author of “The Nowhere Office,†points out that the flexible work movement has not yet found its Patagonia, the sportswear company that epitomized the shift to a socially conscious capitalism. Hybrid working covers a multitude of forms, from traditional companies that want all employees to come in for three days a week to more experimental companies that are embracing “remote first†work. Lynda Gratton, the author of another new book on the subject, “Redesigning Work,†points out that we are still in “series 2, episode 3†of a series that will run for decades. That said, some generic problems from the new flexible world are already becoming apparent, along with a set of passable solutions.
The most obvious problem with flexible working is the multitude of demands it imposes on managers. Even before the flexible-work revolution, management was in danger of becoming an impossible profession, given the range of problems managers face from digitalization to hyper-entitled workers. Flexible work supersized all this. The simple job of organizing work is much more complicated: Right now, for instance, managers must deal with the traditional problem of summer schedules.
—Bloomberg