A Hamster Wheel Isn’t A Hive. America, It’s Time To Go Back To The Office.
Last night my wife and I were flipping between late-night shows, and were surprised to see Stephen Colbert is still recording his show from his home. If it’s possible for a late-night talk show to be socially awkward, this was it. Colbert’s only laugh track was his family, who were presumably holding his cue cards. The show wasn’t funny. Worse, it was painful to watch. Colbert came off as a house cat with teeth that were no longer sharp. It’s not every day you get to watch a late-night talk show host, whose very job it is to drum major us through pop-culture, seem so myopic and out-of-touch. As I changed the channel, I found myself muttering, “he needs to get out more.”
And maybe that’s the point, with social distance comes social awkwardness. Sitting at home with just our thoughts changes us. But this article isn’t about celebrity talent being afraid to return to the studio, as I’m certain there are other reasons for that. No, this manifesto is about the importance of America returning to the office.
In the beginning, there was very good reason for all of us to work from home. It was a global pandemic, this was the necessary adjustment. Flatten the curve, take care of your neighbor—we all did our part. But over a year later, it’s high time we start cranking up the “all-clear” siren.
Because if you pull the curtain back, there are two primary reasons America’s return to the office has been delayed indefinitely:
1) Companies are being cheap. Once companies started realizing that they could cut back on their commercial real estate and their business wouldn’t cave in, they got drunk on the savings and they don’t want to go back.
2) Employees like the flexibility of working from home. Maybe it’s no longer paying for childcare, or the freedom of being able to go on a run in the middle of the afternoon. Regardless, a lot of folks are more than happy to keep pressing the snooze button, and Zoom from home.
I’m not going to argue the financial or flexibility benefits of working from home. But these benefits are also both extremely short sighted. The tradeoff companies are making for a little savings today, will greatly reduce their potential in the future. And the flexibility employees are enjoying now, will stunt the development of top talent in the future.
Said simply, the companies that can get their employees to come back to the office quickly will have a competitive advantage and be stronger because of it.
Companies and employees are at our best when we are in the office. No matter if you’re selling Apple MacBooks or fertilizer, the real magic of ideas and corporate culture happen when people bump into each other at the office. Throughout my career, when I’ve had the pleasure to be working at a company or on a team that was on top of its game, it was driven by these connections. A manager might say something impromptu to a junior employee walking out of a meeting that changes the entire trajectory of a project. There might be a drive-by conversation at a desk, or in a stairwell, where a few employees spontaneously converge on the right solution. Let’s face it, ideas like sliced bread, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and Teslas weren’t born on a Zoom call. Quite the contrary, they were fueled by late nights, airplane rides, and coffee fueled rooms of people having their version of an Apollo 13 moment where everyone looks into each other’s eyes and says, “We got a find a way to make this fit in the hole for this, using nothing but that.” If you’re still on fence on this issue, ask yourself a few questions:
Would the Beatles music catalog be as rich, had they done all of their collaborating on video conference?
How would you compare the experience of breaking bread together at a restaurant with a group of friends or family to everyone ordering DoorDash to their own homes?
When we hear about someone embarking on a long-distance relationship, the common response is that it’s going to be hard and is unlikely to work. So why are we suddenly comfortable settling for long distance working? Shouldn’t we expect the same unhappy ending for our companies and careers?
It's likely that big corporations are seeing the recent reports that working from home can actually increase productivity. But when you take a step back and think about it, it doesn’t pass the eye test. Working from the office and working from home are two completely different experiences, it’s night and day. I’m not sure the methodology on these productivity studies, but I guarantee you the right team could accomplish as much in one 90-minute eye-to-eye working session, as it would take them a week of Zoom calls to achieve.
I’m disappointed in Corporate America for being such hypocrites on this issue. As many of the very same people screaming about the importance of getting their kids back in school and the failings of distance learning, are for some reason okay with “distance working” from home.
Here’s the thing about distance: it makes you further away. It makes things harder, and outcomes less likely. Distance makes things more difficult to see, and to feel. Yet companies continue to work from home, blinded by short-term benefits obscuring the long-term tradeoffs.
At its best, working from the office is like a hive of energy with sparks forming between people and a corporate culture fueled by a buzz of energy. When a company is in peak performance, you can quite literally hear it humming. But we’ve traded this high energy hive for a collection of disconnected hamster wheels as companies have become increasingly comfortable allowing their employees to work from home. Working used to be an experience. Working from home reduces it to a task. Think about the new hires, that have never set foot in your office—or any office for that matter, as they start their careers. Forced to be trained or mentored, likely not very well, over Zoom and Teams calls. They’ve never felt the buzz of the hive. They’ve never experienced those sparks of serendipity, let alone a killer happy hour with their team.
Corporate America needs to look in the mirror and take a long hard reality check. Is working from home really the future? Is it really better, or even the same? Is it acceptable that the next generation of talent won’t have the experience of working in an office? Can your company create the same magic and culture with everyone working from home?
Here’s the other dirty little secret about Corporate America not returning to the office. A big reason, is the employers have absolutely no idea how to get the employees to come back. The genie is out of the bottle, and now you’re either old fashioned, or worse, insensitive should you dare suggest we might be more productive working under the same roof.
So how do we get people to come back to the office? Here’s a crazy idea, maybe the leaders in the company have the courage to tell their people that they have to come back. That’s right, take off the kid gloves, and tell your people that to effectively do their job requires them to be in the office.
Tell them it’s important for the company as a whole, and for their own personal development that we return to the office and get back to working together. That maybe, just maybe, we’re more likely to reach our full potential buzzing and bustling together in the hive of an office, than each of us spinning alone on hamster wheels working from home.
