I read an article in the HBR published February 24th, 2021. I found the line of reasoning in the article hard to argue with, it describes a reasonable approach on how a manager should make sure that as the Hybrid Workplace - where some people are remote and some aren’t, and some people are remote part of the time - becomes the new norm, they don’t see preferential treatment of those that are present over those that aren’t. My chief issue with the article is its earnest attempt to fix a problem in the face of overwhelming other management failures. It’s akin to putting a band-aid on a cut when the patient is riddled with bullet holes. If this is the only solution you see in this situation, you have utterly failed in effectively managing and enabling your knowledge workers. Allow me to explain through some deconstruction.

Mortensen and Haas focus mostly on the power imbalance in these situations. They have a clear bias towards office work is done best in the office (despite overwhelming evidence that this isn’t a universal truth and this past year has confirmed it) and it shines through in all their reasoning. They also clearly think in terms of top-down management where a manager’s directs are puzzle pieces to be moved around. When citing the benefits of remote working they list reduced carbon footprint second and increased employee satisfaction fourth. I can’t wait to go back to the office, see all my colleagues, and travel to events and our customers to help them better. I was not one of those people that saw my productivity soar while working from home. However, I was also not blind to all the learning opportunities that presented itself because members of my team did enjoy the newfound flexibility and several people I interact with frequently seemed to really excel in this new arrangement.

Chief concern is how Hybridity affects power, in terms of access to resources and visibility. Let’s decouple these and dispell any concerns right away. Access to resources has long become less of a logistical challenge and more of a technological one. Most information doesn’t live inside a filing cabinet, nor do you pass a stack of printouts to someone in a cubicle who then turns it into graphics you can present to leadership on an overhead projector. At varying rates and degrees almost all organizations have taken steps to put information and processing power in a cloud resource (whether self hosted or offshored to a SaaS). Access to resources is now a Single Sign-On solution away, whether you’re at home, in the office or on an airplane. There are limitations of course, HIPAA and other compliance measures still need to be followed, but in my experience IT teams and competent management can find solutions around that. VPNs, needing access tokens, MFA, and various other measures can mitigate that. Your weak points are usually not going to be at infrastructure points, but at the user, so invest in their training and enablement. A minor aside, there are many failures of management that are possible root causes of many symptoms we see. One of the most prevalent I see is the expectation of salaried workers to work the standard 40 hour work week. If that’s a metric you still use for salaried workers, you’re failing your workers and yourself. More on that in a separate article.

Which brings us to the second type of access, the home office disparity. There are three possible challenges here, so let’s address them.

  1. I don’t have a dedicated space in my home to set up a home office.
  2. I don’t have the ability to sequester myself away (ie there are kids running around).
  3. I don’t have the same set up at home as I do at the office.

The third is the easiest to solve, the boss should pay for a comparable home office set up or allow you to take it home with you. If the ROI is worth it at the office, it’s worth it at home. Monitors and ergonomic chairs are not expensive, and the difference in productivity is usually recouped in months, if not weeks.

The second challenge is different, and it’s a common challenge for parents working from home. There is no clear answer to this (if you know one, please write it up and send it to HBR), but the best solutions I’ve seen are basically around accomodating both responsibilities. I’m not an advocate of making parents work their 40 hour workweek when their kids are asleep (ie late at night), but making the most of asynchronous communication, allowing them to be productive when they can be (like when the kids are doing schoolwork), and not being affected by them needing to step away to attend to kids needs (both visibly as well as in how you view them) are good starts. Most people I know who were dealing with this try to find methods to split responsibilities with their partners so each can have some productive time and still give the children the attention they need. Two things help me keep this in perspective - first, most of these employees have a whole new job forced upon them by the pandemic, and second, if they can pull off even partial productivity in that time, it signifies to me that they have found some great habits that will likely take off after this imposed inconvenience ends. Post-pandemic it may make sense to supplement their salary with child care stipends, or something else.

The third challenge is also tricky, post-pandemic I think co-working spaces and other opportunities in local communities (think libraries) would see a wealth of opportunities to support these workers. Save on the commute, maybe meet new people doing the same in your neighborhood, etc. For some people this isn’t as big a challenge as it could be, my wife splits her working hours between her home office (which we set up for maximum productivity on our own dime) and the couch, where the change of scenery and posture help her with some of her tasks. Again, adaptability is what matters here. There has been 12 months of pandemic life that have yielded an amazing array of coping strategies, as well as all the stuff written about WFH tactics. Make those available to your employees that could benefit from them.

The other power disparity issue is visibility. The article opens the section titled “Managerial Challenge” with “"”While employees need to ensure that they’re visible to their managers and can access the resources they need for their work, managers similarly need to make sure they stay informed about what their employees are doing and facilitate their access to those resources.””” That’s a lot of red flags about poor management behavior in one run on sentence. Unless I’m running a restaurant-type of establishment where customers need to see a worker to interact with the business, workers shouldn’t need to worry about visibility. Fostering an environment where visibility is an important facet of being seen as productive and getting ahead leads to posturing, looking busy and various other facsimiles of work that don’t actually benefit the business or its customers. Similarly, managers don’t need to know what their employees are doing at each moment in time. You’re managing the wrong thing here and stiffling your workers’ abilities for your own (unproductive) needs. This isn’t to say you should ignore your employees, quite the opposite in fact. You hire people who are good fits for the job, enable them to excel and watch them do so. Position yourself as an enabler and watch them shine. Communicate effectively (in ways that serve both of you) so they can report blockers for you to remove, update project statuses for their colleagues to pick up, be transparent about when they are working and when they can’t be. All this leads to happy employees, motivated to do their job, and excel at it for their own reasons. That’s a win-win-win situation for you, your customers and your business.

While I agree with many of the conclusions the authors draw - design, educate and monitor. They are using those verbs to purely address a problem that would never become one if you apply them to your mindset on work. If you’re building a tower, it makes more sense to solidify your foundation than it would to find some funky way to balance a bit higher on a wobbly base.