Avoiding Returnaggedon

How a company has treated its staff over the last 18 months, and how they treat them over the next few months as traditional workplaces open up, will have a huge impact on their future. Forcing teams back into the office is likely to result in Returnaggedon, where they come back just long enough to hand in their notice.

Now that most legal restrictions in the UK around COVID-19 have been lifted, thoughts are inevitably turning to what happens next in terms of remote work. Many of us are drifting back in for the odd day here and there for meetings, while some CEOs seem determined to revert back to how things were before. Apparently working from home doesn't work for those who want to hustle, and if you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come to the office. Although most of the time, the impending switch back to the old normal was immediately pushed back as the delta variant proved to be no respecter of desires or plans - a couple of days ago Amazon were the latest to push back from a September 2021 to January 2022.

Expecting everything to go back to how it was because that's how you liked it seems rather short sighted to me. While many reasons may be given for why everyone needs to be in the same physical location to get their work done, a lot of this will come down to trust, or lack thereof. The pandemic forced many managers to trust that their people were working even when they couldn't stand over them and, while they paid lip service to how well it was all going, that trust really wasn't there. Hence some can't wait to get everyone back in the office where their every move can be watched. Trust begets trust, however, and many employees report not trusting their leadership to manage the return to work safely - last September a survey found only 14% trusted their CEOs and senior leaders to make the correct call, which is pretty shocking. 

It's not just about safety though. People have adjusted to the benefits of part or full time remote working and are reluctant to put the genie back in the bottle.  No commute and saving money are the main reasons that most people want to stay remote, and they won't give that up easily, especially if they can avoid it by simply changing jobs. And people are changing jobs. A lot. So much that it's being called the Great Resignation. A Microsoft survey of 30,000 workers around the world found that 41% of them were considering quitting or changing profession. Imagine losing 41% of your workforce - it's hard to see that as anything other than catastrophic, given how long it takes to fully onboard new employees. While most executives say they don't want things to go back to how they are, around 70% of them want people in the office 3+ days a week, so it's clear that many want it to look an awful lot like it did before, with a few bones thrown to pretend they embrace remote work.

In Salesforce world, the competition for talent has always been intense, and somehow gets hotter every year. Companies need to offer people what they are looking for, or they will miss out to those that do. A survey of 1,000 US office workers in May said 39% would consider quitting if their employer didn't show flex. If you add in to that how easily people can walk into another Salesforce job, it's clear that if employees want to continue with this way of working, an accommodation must be found.  If plans aren't in place to offer remote/hybrid working going forward, it's going to be a bumpy ride!

Follow @bob_buzzard

Remote Work - The End of the Beginning?

As we head into May in the United Kingdom, COVID-19 cases and deaths have settled at around 2-2.5k and 10-40 respectively, so the planned relaxing of lockdown looks set to continue. Vaccine data from around the world makes us cautiously optimistic that the impact of catching the virus is significantly reduced, so it could be that once we re-open then we stay open. While this is very positive news, it does apply pressure to those of us who have been regularly writing about remote work, as the clock is ticking down on the "all remote all the time" approach, and interest in hearing about it will start to wane.

I've read a number of research items suggesting that people feel less productive when they work from home, in part because when they hit a problem they can't just look up and ask someone a question. Instead they either have to self-serve via Google or track someone down in chat and type out their question. While I can see the impact, it isn't the whole story. As the person who was usually on the receiving end of said questions, and answering a large amount every day, I'm often a lot more productive as I can more easily get my head down and concentrate on some deep work. I can also choose to ignore my email/chat/phone much more easily than I can ignore someone who comes and stands next to me and starts talking! Obviously helping people is a huge part of my job, so I don't expect to go off the grid for days (or even hours) at a time, but even breaking off to tell someone I'm busy and can I come back to them later disturbs my train of thought. I'd really like to see the numbers from both sides to determine the real impact!

The "Work from Anywhere" narrative is being dialled back to a hybrid approach of "Work from Anywhere  Half the Time and the Office the Other Half", which kind of ruins the anywhere aspect. If you have to go into the office 2-3 days a week, you'll need to keep living near to that office unless you really fancy commuting from the beach for several hours a day. To be fair, some companies are sticking to the fully remote option, but typically caveating with "where your role allows it", and what's the betting a lot of roles turn out not to allow it after all.

From a pure getting things done perspective, I've feel like I've always embraced working from anywhere. Prior to the pandemic I used to do a fair bit of travelling, including a few trips every year to the US. This would typically involve several hours on buses/trains/tubes, arriving at an airport three or four hours early and then sitting for ten hours on a plane. With a little planning I could churn out work wherever I found myself, writing designs or documentation when I was offline and Apex and Lightning Components when I had connectivity. 

From a leadership, collaboration, and support perspective it's less than ideal - Zoom calls and messaging tools can cover a lot of this, but sometimes there really is no substitute for a face to face meeting where you can scribble on a whiteboard. But you don't need that all day every day either, which is why I think the classic remote work approach is likely to be rolled out more going forward - employees are based at home and don't have a desk in an office, but they spend a day or two a month meeting with their colleagues in person. 

One thing is for sure, remote work isn't settled as we tentatively venture back into different houses, pubs,  and offices. In November 1942 Churchill gave a speech at the Lord Mayor's Luncheon at Mansion House where he said  :

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning

and that is where I feel we are with remote work. The beginning was the momentous turn of events that saw us pivot to "as remote as possible" with very little planning, and stick with it for over a year.  We are now coming to the end of the beginning, as offices will soon be able to reopen. When that happens we enter the middle as we try out lots of changes and tweak things as we go. The end is still some way off, which is when we all agree that we have nailed it and remote work is as efficient as it can be. And that will be the normal until the next momentous event that derails everything!

Follow @bob_buzzard

A Year Remote

Today (16th March 2021) marks the one year anniversary of BrightGen pivoting to a fully remote workforce. We knew it was possible, as we'd carried out a trial run the week before, but we didn't know how well it would scale, or indeed how long it would last for. It's pretty safe to say that none of us were expecting it to go on this long! The scaling worked surprisingly well - people's internet connection held up, kitchens and bedrooms were pressed into service as home offices, and we onboarded new joiners pretty seamlessly. Not perfect, and not everyone's first choice, but it was a very smooth transition.

For some, including me, the biggest challenge is stopping working from home turning into residing at your office. When you live and work in the same space, the boundaries become blurred, and if you have few distractions (because you are in the middle of a pandemic lockdown maybe) then it's easy to start working as soon as you get up and not stop until well into the evening. It's also easy to end up in a state of always on, where you check your email and instant messages every waking hour and jump straight into solving problems. This really can't scale, so you have to keep reminding yourself to take breaks and to set a time to switch off. The BrightGen team have done a great job of providing distractions, including virtual coffee breaks to mix us up and get us talking, pub and Kahoot quizzes, Taskmaster and more.

In the UK the vaccine rollout it is going surprisingly well, and confidence is growing that we will be able to open up the country on the government's target timeline including, at some point, our offices. This present us with an opportunity that doesn't come along too often - to redefine how work gets done. We've blown it all up for the last year, so we should spend some time thinking about how we can put it back together for everyone's benefit. The good news (in my opinion) is that simply going back to the way we worked before isn't going to happen. The genie is out of the bottle!

Follow @bob_buzzard

Subscribe to my Substack