Every organization has two important objectives. They need to streamline and exploit their strengths and successes while also remaining creative, exploring new ideas, and keeping an eye on the horizon for future trends.
One of the most crucial modern leadership challenges is how to balance these activities, how to innovate, and look ahead even as you’re improving what you’re doing now. Few companies do this well.
When the pandemic hit, companies changed how they worked because they needed to (as Zoom’s rapid adoption shows). Practically overnight, offices were closed. Employees were forced to work from home, cut off from their colleagues and collaborative office environments, each working in isolation from home offices or the living room sofa (often while managing childcare and home education responsibilities).
Companies figured out work-from-home models and turned their attention to streamlining their services and making sure that they remained functional through a time of incredible upheaval.
Even though these were significant changes, in many organizations they were also fairly superficial. With rare exceptions, they focused on how to “turn the crank” in a work-from-home world.
But, to stay relevant in this time of relentless change, firms have to keep moving. They have to focus, again, on inventing a new kind of crank.
As the pandemic has continued into 2021 and 2022, I’m starting to see some hope for exploration and innovation. Working from home, communicating via email, and having meetings over Zoom are all great ways to keep the gears of a business turning, but it is a challenging environment for creativity and spontaneity to flourish.
To do that, we need to be together in person.
That overstates things just a touch. There are ways to undertake this kind of work remotely. Design Sprints, for example, are a stereotyped approach to innovation that have whole groups of remote-only practitioners.
But I believe that most innovation work dramatically benefits from in-person interactions.
I think that there’s just no substitute for having people together, rearranging post-it notes, and rubbing elbows. There are few faster ways to build trust than to sit face-to-face with someone, share, and let each know that they have been heard.
While we still have to worry about getting sick, vaccines and testing can help manage that risk. Indeed, I myself am on day seven of having Covid right now. It’s not an experience I relish. But, thanks to vaccines, it’s been no worse than a bad flu.
So in my mind, the important return-to-work question right now is “How do we make returning to work matter?”
Because the monolithic strategy of mandating that people come “back” to the office misses the point.
Instead, let’s figure out what work is best done at home and what can only be done in person. Rather than mandate that people come in three days a week to sit in conference rooms and have video calls with colleagues in remote locations, let’s be smart about how we work. This is what I call the flexible strategy.
Do you need to turn the crank? Work from home is probably better!
For example, a friend who works with a large government organization wrote me and shared that a grant review process that took a month in 2020 and 2021 was now well past the two-month mark with no end in sight.
When everyone was working from home, we had 100s of people working 40-hour work weeks for a month with no issues. But now we have a lot of people back in the office, it’s a disaster. Distractions, chit-chat, and other meetings have slowed things down considerably. It’s a very different process and much more difficult.
Do you need to explore new ideas, build trust, and innovate? I don’t think there’s any substitute for doing this kind of work in person. Maybe that means you and your team come together for a focused day of work every two weeks and spend the rest of the time with your pajama bottoms on.
What are you seeing? How is your company handling return to work? With a monolithic approach or with a flexible strategy?