Day: 24 June 2022
Every meeting will now be an online meeting
This is another take (from about a year ago) on remote working and the purpose of offices – this one based on a reductio ad absurdum arithmetic of meeting arrangements. The bigger the meeting, the smaller the probability, all else being equal, that everybody is in the same place. So in practice almost any form of hybrid working has the result that the title asserts – every meeting ends up being online.
That has implications both for the management of meetings and the management of offices. Most office are designed to support individuals working at desks and groups meeting in meeting rooms. Neither of those is ideal for participation in online meetings, even before facing up to the prospect of commuting to an office only to spend most of the time talking to people who aren’t there. It is pretty clear that the set of individual optimisations does not sum to optimisation for the group.
That creates a need to manage the working environment – in its broadest sense – in very different ways. And as Tubb points out, the combination of issues involved somehow doesn’t quite belong anywhere:
There is no business owner for meetings. IT owns Microsoft Teams and the M365 stack. Corporate Real Estate and Facilities own meeting rooms. No one is the owner of better meeting behaviours it is left to the assumed soft skills of the individual, the line manager or project manager.
Not for the first time, there are parallels with historic examples of how workplaces have adapted to technological and other changes; not for the first time sociology is at least as important as technology in understanding and influencing what it going on. And of course this particular instance of how technology enables social changes long predates the pandemic – a post I wrote almost ten years ago seems just as as relevant now.
The hard bit, particularly for established organisations, is culture, and particularly trust. If being present is no longer a job requirement, being present can no longer be a virtue. People have to be managed not on whether they turn up and look keen and energetic, but on what they achieve. How, when and where they do that becomes much more a choice for individual workers (and teams) and much less a matter of management standardisation. […] The message that comes across time and time again is that remote working has to be based on trust. Again though, remote working does not create the need for trust, it makes the need explicit and shows where it is missing.
The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective On the Modern Productivity Paradox
Paul David – American Economic Review
This paper, published in 1990 and focused on events almost a hundred years earlier is probably the oldest entry in Strategic Reading. But it remains fresh in providing a powerful analogy for changes we have seen and continue to see in the workplaces of the 21st century.
The central point of the paper from that perspective is that workplace adaptation follows only with what can be a long lag from technology adoption. The example given is the introduction of electricity to factories which had previously relied on steam engines to power their activities. Steam engines are typically large and their power is distributed mechanically – and that was a strong determinant of the design of factories. When electric motors were first introduced, the model of a single central source of power survived for a surprisingly long time before a small number of very large motors started to be replaced by a large number of very much smaller ones. And that transition both prompted and was enabled by new approaches to designing factories – in a sense the pace of real innovation was driven by the rate of change of factory design, rather than the rate of change of power source.
That insight has long been valuable in understand the impact of more recent technological changes on work and workplaces (and more generally in understanding that the lag between cause and effect often needs to be measured in years, if not decades). It has taken on a fresh relevance in the shock to working arrangements (particularly in what was traditionally office-based work) caused by Covid and its aftermath. We have a fresh set of tools and a fresh set of opportunities those tools enable. But the organisation of work is still responding to that very unevenly. Perhaps we will all know how well it has gone a decade or a century from now.