Is Remote Work Better Than Being in the Office? It's Complicated | Mark Mortensen | TED

Over the past two years,

how many times have you heard that the times have changed

or about the new normal?

There’s no shortage of opinions

about whether remote work is for the better

or spells destruction for our businesses.

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, said, "I don't see any positives,"

whereas Suresh Kumar, CTO of Walmart, said, "We haven't just coped.

We've actually thrived."

But what does the research say?

How can we know, not just think, that hybrid working actually works?

There are so many questions.

What's the right balance of work from home versus work from the office?

And who gets to decide?

Is it managers, is it the employees?

Is it both?

How long can a given employee actually remain productive working from home?

Is there a limit?

And who gets to work in each way?

What should it be based on in terms of criteria?

Should it be based on seniority, task, personal situation?

The list goes on and on.

So many questions and unfortunately,

no simple answers.

The reason these questions are so hard to answer

is because we're thinking about hybrid work design as a single problem.

One problem to solve, when in fact, it's actually three different ones.

The first problem is are we able to effectively deliver

on our stakeholder commitments?

This is otherwise known as the effectiveness debate.

The second is will we be able to attract and retain the talent that we need?

This is the staffing discussion.

And the third is can we maintain or even cultivate, nurture, our culture?

This is the talk about social fabric.

Let's take a minute to highlight the challenges inherent in each one.

I've been working with a range of organizations over the past two years,

helping them determine what their future of work should look like.

Now, I'm not here to make a broad statement

that remote work is or is not universally good.

I think we're all smart enough here to know

that nothing works all of the time.

I am, however, here to warn you that we need to be wary of our data.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Many people point to their organization's effectiveness during COVID

as proof that they're actually good at remote work.

Now it is proof that remote can work, but not that it necessarily will.

COVID was a massive social experiment with unique conditions.

Most organizations dealt with it by cutting the fat

and becoming laser-focused on short-term efficiency.

In effect, we were productive because we were in survival mode.

But the question we have to ask is whether that's sustainable.

Data shows around the world

that people's working hours have increased,

and many say that they actually find it harder

to delineate work-life boundaries.

Data also shows that the experience wasn't the same for everyone.

With “The Economist” data showing that parents of school-aged children

experienced much greater stress than many others.

And data from Microsoft shows that it's actually even changing the way

in which we work,

with people working more hours but less collaboratively.

The question of whether we can effectively work remotely

needs a contextual answer.

Contextual based on the people who are doing the work

and the tasks that they're trying to accomplish.

Remember, one size fits none,

and we need to think about the sustainability

of our effectiveness.

Now, when it comes to the staffing discussion,

ask anyone who has recently been involved with hiring.

The most common question that recruiters are being asked these days:

"What is your flexible-work policy?"

In effect, we’re facing the same escalation of perks

popularized by tech companies during the boom.

Do you have a barista pulling the perfect flat white in the lobby?

Do you have nap pods? A ball pit? A slide?

What about on-site daycare, right?

So then instead of work from home, we actually bring home into work.

Your current or potential future employees are now weighing your hybrid work policy

as a key criteria in their decision of where they want to work.

And that is the crux of this staffing challenge.

What you need to recognize

is that the comparison isn't actually between work from home and office work.

Instead, it's really between the perception of work from home

versus the perception of work from the office.

And you need to reclaim that narrative.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

The first is what I call the recovered commute.

Many people have told me,

"I've saved so much time now that I don't have to commute."

My challenge to them?

What did you actually do during your commute times?

Maybe you read, maybe you caught up on calls or emails,

maybe you just use it as time to decompress.

Personally, I used to get an hour to shake off a particularly rough,

annoying, frustrating day before I got home.

Now it takes me exactly six seconds to be immersed in my family upstairs.

Another example, the after-meeting postmortem debrief over a coffee, right?

We use that to do some relationship repair,

maybe to do some collective sense-making.

The most important thing to recognize here

is that what matters most is the experience,

not just what the policy is.

We need to reclaim the narrative to help ensure that everybody recognizes

what a given approach either buys or loses for them.

And this brings us to the social fabric.

Think about what happened when you joined your organization.

You probably went to orientation.

Maybe you looked around,

you talked to some people, you observed

and you learned what it's like to work here.

Why does that matter?

Well, because our research shows reductions in things

like psychological safety and trust, changes to power dynamics,

increased feelings of isolation and loneliness

when we are working remote from one another.

Importantly, all of these shape our cultures

and make this conversation even more difficult.

And on top of that,

social systems are dynamic, emerging, evolving human systems.

Now, I'm going to be honest, I don't have the answer to this.

And honestly, anybody who tells you they do,

they're trying to sell you something.

We do know about different approaches to building

and establishing culture in these contexts.

What we have to recognize is they operate in ways that may not be the same

as the way we built culture when we were face to face.

What we have to remember here

is that organizational culture is a long game.

What we do right now affects the social fabric of our organizations

and will have repercussions down the line.

So when it comes to the social fabric,

we need to think not only about today,

but about tomorrow, next month, maybe even next year.

I hope you recognize that these are three distinct conversations

that are also not fully independent.

We also have to recognize what makes this challenging

is that they are almost ideologically different positions

about what creates value in your organization.

Is it about the output of what you produce?

Is it about the people in that organization

or something in the ether, the culture?

The first most important step is getting these issues on the table,

having an open conversation.

And this is far from easy.

But if you find yourself in disagreement with somebody over these issues,

whether it's a boss, a subordinate or your leadership,

I challenge you, ask yourself,

do you really disagree on how to create effectiveness,

deal with staffing or the culture of the organization?

Or is it maybe just that you have slightly different prioritization

of those three different parts of the whole hybridity conversation?