The nature of work
Much has been written on the seismic shifts that have occurred to the nature of work since the onset of the pandemic and the explosion of remote work. When considering what’s next, it’s important we keep an open mind to evolving employee expectations, consider the uniqueness of particular industries and positions, and remember both the pros and cons of traditional work environments.
Leaders of businesses of all stripes are grappling with these issues. Elon Musk, arguably one of this generation’s greatest innovators, leaves his innovation at the front door when it comes to his employees. Musk recently demanded that all Tesla staff return to the office full time or “pretend to work somewhere else.” This heavy-handed, out of touch approach insults employees, demonstrates lack of trust and asserts falsities about all Tesla workers. This illusion of control, borne of old-school management practices, will undermine employee satisfaction, retention and recruitment. Not to mention research shows his premise is untrue. In fact, surveys and behavior tracking show remote work results in higher productivity.
All this is occurring at a time when the market for talent is fierce. The ability to work – and hire – anywhere is driving some tech companies to embrace remote work as it enables those with deep pockets to poach talent wherever they can find it. Tech companies rely more, perhaps than any other industry, on human capital – and they are spending big to find and keep employees. Amazon is doubling the cash pay caps and Google parent Alphabet is creating a new program to enable bonuses to be issued at any time and in any amount for almost any reason.
Edward Glaeser, chairman of Harvard’s economic department, has noted that for many of us in the latter part of our careers, remote work is quite tenable, stating that it’s not necessary that every employee come back to the office. In a Wall Street Journal piece, he asserts that Zoom and hybrid work are likely here to stay. At the same time, “for most of us, the most important interactions of our lives will occur in the real world, and, consequently, location remains absolutely critical,” he says.
Glaeser goes onto state that in his view in-person work is vital during the early stages of a career. Face-to-face contact at work has an “essential learning experience component that is valuable and crucial for workers who are young … young people that don’t want to come back to the office don’t really know what they’ve missed.”
A study of 61,000 Microsoft workers reported in Nature magazine states another challenge with remote work: difficulties with collaboration. The study found that remote work made it more challenging to acquire and share information and caused the collaboration between workers to become “more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts.”
What’s the lesson in all this? First, Elon Musk needs to rethink his position on remote work or risk losing tremendous talent. But for the rest of us, including those in agriculture, we should also try to think differently about our teams.
The inherent nature of agriculture, where food is grown, inspected and harvested from the ground, prevents some positions from ever going remote. For other positions, remote work is possible and, in those instances, we need to be less rigid in our approaches and empower our teams. At the same time, we can’t lose sight of how we keep them engaged, help them collaborate, and foster learning and growth among younger workers. This means acknowledging that some things are difficult to do in a remote environment and weighing when in person work is needed and when it is not.
The underlying issue of remote work is not productivity; it is the effect on worker’s evolution, training, and acculturation. Sitting around a sales desk for many years, in arm’s length proximity to colleagues, enabled me and others to learn from each other, and those learnings were critical to my own growth and evolution. In addition, we talk a lot about culture and values. These are critical elements to every business’s success. If we are not working physically together, how will we as leaders instill a sense of culture and our values in our teams?
These complexities will require some creativity, nimbleness and loosening of historic reins in the future as we evolve the nature of work to reflect new realities and expectations from both the workforce and management. Leaders who do it well will benefit from a multitude of rewards from increased productivity to better employee satisfaction, retention and engagement.
