Image by This_is_Engineering from Pixabay
By Dave Bushy, PCC
Headlines are now appearing with some regularity that post-Covid “Return to Office” (RTO) mandates will now be enforced. And with rigor, it seems.
It’s ironic. I use ironic intentionally, because I believe we all began to metaphorically leave our offices decades ago. It just took Covid for everyone to finally notice.
Elvis wasn’t the first to leave the building.
Let’s go back twenty-five years when we were all seated at desks or in cubicles. Even then we mentally began departing the workplace aided by emerging technologies that have now become as common as the typewriters once found in offices throughout the world. Good luck finding a typewriter now by the way.
It seems like the dark ages, but some of us remember a day when accessing the internet involved a dial-up modem that sounded like a science fiction movie as it reached a high-pitched critical mass and enabled us to access limited data and emails at a snail’s pace. We used rudimentary search engines that required crystal-clear wording and long-minutes to produce limited results.
Within a ten-year span, offices placed desk-top computers at every work station, with a variety of email applications and ever-more sophisticated search engines giving our workers the ability to access information world-wide in micro-seconds and send data continents away in the blink of an eye. A far cry from sending reports by overnight mail or by courier or even faxes at a 200 baud rate per second. And it’s only going to get faster.
When we first began to see desktop computers in offices, managers became concerned that workers were “surfing the web,” or whatever it might have been called then. “We’re losing productivity!” I remember people saying. In answer to those concerns, early IT departments (itself a new term barely older than this century) were mandated to put blocks into the systems to prevent inappropriate uses by office workers and to severely limit their emails’ business purposes. A variety of other techniques were incorporated, including recording how often someone accessed the programs they might be mandated to work on, and even how many key-strokes they used in any given period of time. All this while we also tried to use conference calls to stay connected.
And then on-line shopping intervened. Buying a birthday present from the office became very easy, as well as planning the next vacation.
Mandates continued in an attempt to get employees to focus on their work, not on extraneous materials or internet excursions. Through clenched teeth, many managers vowed to “Get those people back to work!”
Then came the proliferation of portable electronic devices and handheld electronic devices. All the firewalls in the world were unable stop web surfing, emailing, shopping and travel planning by anyone who held such devices – and soon everyone did.
My point? For years, people “left the office” without getting up from their desks or heading to their cars. They did it with technology that admittedly has been as much a boon as it has been a challenge for all of us. Consider this: when Covid suddenly hit, new video conferencing systems emerged or were upgraded and enabled us to seek medical attention, to work, to socialize, to study, to innovate and even to worship from the comfort of our homes. It was, in my estimation, the crystallization of the changes that had already become embedded into our world. And it kept us connected and, I might add, productive – only in a different and markedly changed way.
All this to say that we now have new tools and ways of doing things that are seen by some as enablers – others as impediments – the same as we did with the earliest days of technology. But, in my humble estimation, mandates to physically return to offices are likely as impractical as trying to re-incorporate mimeograph machines into the 21st century.
Every day I work with clients who are using a multitude of new ways to stay connected. Some use on-line chats, regular video calls and even old-fashioned phone calls to interface with their co-workers and colleagues around the globe. One U.S. entrepreneur I know runs a successful company with ten members of his team – and none are in the same city. They have developed a rhythm that works for them – and they even all fly to one place every quarter for a day of brainstorming and level-setting, or, as my client might say, “Exchanging neurons in person.”
This century, like all the others that preceded it, requires innovation and adaptation to maintain the progress we need and seek. The answers are out there, but returning to “the way we always did it,” and mandating wholesale return to office mandates will never fully succeed, for the very practical reason that there never has been just one way of working together – and it will inevitably continue to change.
Dave Bushy of Boston Executive Coaches – bostonexecutivecoaches.com – is a an ICF-certified coach who was trained at the Gestalt International Study Center (GISC). Dave is a former U.S. Army officer and senior airline executive who works with leaders throughout the world.