The Future Of The Workplace

Embracing change and moving ahead

The pressure regarding working from home (WFH) is understated. Kastle Company manages access controls in 2600 office buildings in 138 cities in the US. Their data shows an occupancy rate of 44% and moving more down than up. Companies are facing significant pushback from the employees regarding the back to the office. As a consequence, most of the pushbacks are done under a kind of passive resistance with real rationales, but also through weaker arguments. Companies that are offering full remote, mention it in their advertisements to attract talent. Linkedin data shows that remote jobs offer represented 20% of the paid job posting and received over 50% of all applications. Companies that are not offering it (like Google), list their offices from which you can work. It is clearly an important element for recruiting talent.
 

Let us check what did not change in the last century. First, is the increasing need to meet and communicate. If you look at the big trend for the last 100 years regarding the way we work, they are all about improving the quality and the speed of communication. From the first wired phone to Slack, from the fax to Zoom, from feature phones to WhatsApp. Linked to it, is the pressure to execute fast. What those communications brought on top of the intensity and density of communication, is the speed.

When my parents were working, they were communicating with memos, and the expected time for an answer was within a month, and at the end of their career, fax pushed down answering time from one month to one week. When I started to work, the main communication stream was email and you were expecting an answer within days. With instant messengers (Slack, Wechat, etc.), you are talking for hours, or even minutes. A company is a competitive social organization, and the ability to communicate and move as fast as possible will always be a key success factor.

The unstoppable trend with structural effect on average salary, commute infrastructure, urban planification, internationalization, cultural domination, and management. The collateral effects will be visible on numerous levels. Most importantly, we are at the start of this wave, starting to understand it and adjust to it. Many examples and data mentioned above are confirming the trend. It will impact the organization, the management, the infrastructure, the working hours, and the commuting.  On one side, you have companies that are reluctant to offer work from home. They resist the push by asking their teams to be at the office “40 h a week”, or to be at the office a few days per week.

On the other hand, you have a vast majority of the teams that do not want to lose time commuting and have more freedom in the way they use their time. As said, it might be scary, disturbing, and challenging, but you have no other choice than to embrace the change. Embracing it will give you the choice to organize and structure it. If you do not, you will face passive resistance, demotivation, legal risk, and counterproductive behaviors.

We are piling productivity tools, and the acceleration of the trends is impressive. As mentioned above, we moved in a few years from 5 tools to 20+ software. They have for the moment limited capacity. Artificial intelligence will change that, it will write basic emails on our behalf, set reminders, build to-do lists, and define the best process.

It is a major collateral effect of the WFW. If you allow people to work from wherever it also means you can recruit people from wherever. In that case, why would you recruit a developer at $100K if you can have one at $50K? Outsourcing to third parties abroad has been in place for decades. The new wave is the recruitment of full-time employees from all over the world, not as external consultants but as full team members. It will reshape the labor market, redistribute the wealth between different countries, and decrease the pressure on rare skills.

From pro to private and from real to virtual. We met most of our social network during college and at work. Spending less time at the office will impact our social interactions in quantity and quality. Virtual connections to initiate social interaction will be more and more successful. As a reminder, in April 2020 – the start of the lockdown in many US cities – 19% of the 30-44 yo population had an active account on Tinder.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will be key elements to appreciate the ethics of the company.  VC, HR, are tracking in detail the indicators regarding DEI. Internationalization should ease this trend.
Humans, and by extension, companies have the tendency to resist changes. I love to say humans are mammals full of habits. When wire phones arrived at work, there was only one phone by company or service, because management thought it would distract people. I saw the same trends on the internet. At the start of the internet, access to the web was restricted, because companies wanted to be sure that employees were not wasting time surfing the web. 10 years later, those behaviors sound absurd.

When you have a massive push about the way people want to work, it is counterproductive to fight or even slow down this evolution. It might be disturbing, and scary, but you have no other choice than embrace the change, especially when that change is about freedom.

Gilles Raymond is the Founder & CEO at Letsmeet. Connect Gilles Raymond