It’s hard not to be confronted these days with arguments on both sides of the working from issue. In general, we’re seeing more employees desiring to keep work from home options and more CEOs and managers wanting to see more of their staff back in the office. Employees say they are more productive at home. Employers say the business is less efficient. What’s going on?
Aftre reading an interesting HBR article on redesigning how we work (https://hbr.org/2023/03/redesigning-how-we-work), it struck me that employees feeling more productive at home and CEOs feeling their workers are less innovative when they are not in the office (and therefore overall, the company is less efficient) are actually the same thing. Employees feel more productive at home precisely because they are less innovative.
Innovation is hard work. It requires synthesis of a number of different ideas. It dead ends far more frequently than it leads to new vistas. It requires energy and motivation to pursue. Innovation is inefficient — a distraction. Working from home eliminates a lot of the office distractions, allowing workers to get high quality focus time to complete their work without the extraneous ideas, thoughts, and counter-proposals that arise in an office setting. These distractions make it harder to get the job done while occasionally spurring meaningful innovation that drives the company forward with a sudden jolt.
Many times the office dynamic just feels like too many cooks stirring the pot, like a buzz of activity for activity’s sake. Office employees are grateful for that hour during lunch or at the end of their day where they can actually get their work done. At home, that hour is actually the entire day and employees are indeed doing more in less time, just as they say they are.
Meanwhile, CEOs have it right, too. Employees are doing their work, but not synthesizing new ideas and generating new ways of doing things. They get more done, but they have fewer chances to innovate and bring new ideas and new efficiencies to the organization because they have few chance encounters and conversations with diverse opinions and thoughts.
The challenge, then, is to capture the best of both these worlds. Provide those working from home with purposeful opportunities to share ideas, motivate each other, and develop new problems and new solutions. Provide those working at the office with more high-quality, distraction-free time that they can control to focus on their work. With some purposeful thought, we can share the good from both environments, be both efficient and innovative, and hopefully move on to another water cooler topic.
As an independent contractor, Scot generally works from home where he uses the variety of projects he is working on and ample breaks to expose himself to other ideas, fields, and people, to spur innovation. Comment below on what you do to be more innovative at home and more productive in the office.