How Does Knowledge Work Work?
In which we take a look at how the pandemic has given us an opportunity to be intentional about physical co-presence
I started my software development career with open source software. I learned how people worked while geographically distributed before I learned how they worked while physically co-present.
This served me well because it allowed me to work for institutions and organizations independently of their location. Of the 27 years I have been writing software with other people, for only 2 of them my manager worked in the same physical space as me.
It wasn’t all roses tho: institutions like MIT or Google have a strong and often implicit expectation of how knowledge work works. They managed to tolerate my geographical outlying as an additional cost of employing my talents, but they were never curious enough to wonder about the value or the reasons for my choice.
At this stage, the world of knowledge work had established that “working from home” (WFH) basically meant “I’m going to not be in the office today and I will pretend to work while instead I’m going to do other personal errands and will be available only for emergencies”. With this connotation firmly established, the idea that we would allow people to work permanently from home translated in the minds of managers as waste. My situation was tolerated because my managers didn’t care about time but cared about results: as long as I was able to deliver the desired results without impacting the results of others, they were willing to tolerate my weird geographical preferences.
This was the state of things when the COVID pandemic hit.
While very few CEOs believed it was possible to maintain knowledge work for their company without physical co-location, the mandated lockdowns gave them no choice. What was supposed to be a couple of weeks of temporary setback, turned into two full years, which is enough time for people to establish their home setup and routine. And for their family routine to morph around their own and for habits to form.
If the pandemic has somewhat neutralized the negative connotations of WFH, RTO (return to office) is now starting to assume positive connotations of “a post-pandemic new normal” in which geographical distribution is uniformly tolerated and not just granted exceptionally.
This is better than before, but I fear it is not nearly as good as the positive connotations we ascribe to it. Principally, it risks squandering the opportunity to understand how knowledge work works and when physical co-presence is necessary vs. simply expected out of inertia, habit or external forces.
The external forces are significant, especially for giant corporations: without a return to the office, there are significant financial risk of diluting the value of previous and ongoing real estate investments. Google has been spending lavishly on real estate as a way to use some of its cash at hand. The new “dragon scale” buildings are going to come online soon.
Apple did the same with its giant spaceship circle. Amazon with his downtown Seattle expansion. Many companies in the financial sector in NYC, etc.
Also, there are lots of people employed in running these buildings and the services they contain. “We’re letting go thousands of employees in lower paying jobs because we gave flexibility to our highest paid employees and now we don’t need as many people to run our buildings” is not a message that any BigTech CEO wishes to have to sugar coat in a press release or be questioned about in a congress hearing.
The current shape of RTO (at least at Google) feels to me like a short-term compromise between two forces at play: one in the desire to return to the same dynamic as before, the other the desire to retain as many of the benefits obtained by more distributed work freedom.
The compromise RTO promises (“tue/wed/thu” as “co-present work days”, “sat/sun” as “no work days” and “mon/fri” as “work from anywhere days”) feels balanced on the surface between these two forces but it may turn out to be a very expensive and unstable middle ground. Knowledge workers will receive a reminder every 3 days of how much it costs them to get their brain to the office. A reminder every day of how much easier it would be to concentrate in their own silent space at home instead of their current noisy and chaotic open office space. A regular reminder of how much easier it is to “jump on a quick VC” when you don’t have to hunt down a meeting room and you don’t have to worry about disturbing your open space neighbors if you can’t find one. On the other hand, some people will not wish to spend their own precious real estate at home to dedicate to an office that the company can provide for them for free. They might also prefer to routinely have a reason to get away from their home or benefit by being surrounded by people either for companionship or peer pressure to keep their focus on work.
Unfortunately, it is common for me to have these conversations and be perceived as a distributed work absolutist, so let me spell it out: despite a personal preference to work from home, I 100% believe physical co-presence is helpful, meaningful and at times absolutely necessary.
But I also believe we don’t really know when that is the case.
In fact, I don’t fully believe we even know how knowledge work works.
The pandemic has given us the opportunity to be intentional about this, but I worry that we’re simply too tired, exhausted and defeated by the continued high level of worldwide uncertainty to fully take this RTO reset as an opportunity to improve the way we work together.
My wish is that we don’t just push to going back to whatever it was that we thought worked before, or strike superficial compromises between opposing forces without really understanding the drivers behind those forces. I wish we are able to keep asking ourselves what it is that we need to work together optimally, instead of defaulting to believe that what we need is simply what we want.