Hello and welcome to the Virtual Frontier, the Podcast about virtual teams created by virtual team. Disclaimer, all of our interviews are conducted virtually. I'm Daniel your host and I'm part of the team here at the Virtual Frontier. Today's topic of our Q&A session is "All back to the office. Really, Apple and Co?" Since more and more restrictions triggered by the pandemic are being lifted we have been hearing and reading in the media in recent weeks about several large corporations who want to get their employees back into the office as quickly as possible.

In the case of Apple, for example, this has already led to employees railing against this back to the office strategy. Now, that's the Pandora's box seems to have been opened after more than one year of working from anywhere the question arises how the changing demands and desires of employers can be reconciled with the strategies of the company? What are the dangers when companies insist on the presence of their employees, and what alternatives could there be. These and other questions will be discussed in today's Q&A session.

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Hello Manuel welcome to our new Q&A session here at the Virtual Frontier, I'm very happy to have you again. Our topic today as it is present, more and more of the workforce is going back to the office or at some point or extends forced from the employees to get back to the office as fast as possible. And I took it as a chance for our community to open up a little bit of perspectives and talk about the reasons why some companies are urging their employees and co-workers to get back to office. Some others have a more open approach to this important topic. And I want to get into the topic of you a little bit and see where that is leading us. So my first question is, how do you receive this recent narrative around getting back to the office strategy some companies are having already in place are preparing for their employees?

Yeah, that's a good question, really happy to talk about that, because I wasn't even aware of the fact that so many people are moving back to the office again. I think we need to differentiate that between work that really can only be done in a physical environment where people need to be together to get the work done, like everything that deals with manufacturing is a no brainer of course, they have to be physically present. I would I would keep these industries outside of this conversation.

But for every work that can be done digitally, which is more and more every year, and I think it's the majority of those people that now move back to the office because the other they had to some months ago already because otherwise they cannot do any work. And I'm wondering really what's the root cause? And I think it's some lack of control if it's really driven by the employer. I cannot imagine that. I mean, I can't even imagine having an office because I had one.

And it was like, yeah, we were just limiting ourselves by by the office to talent that is living around one hundred square kilometers around the office. While now if we are not limited by a local presence anymore, we can open up our Talent Pool and literally make the entire world our Talent Pool. So that gives us a little bit or not a little bit, but a lot more flexibility and freedom to choose the people we want to work with.

So maybe these employers don't see this opportunity. Maybe they have bad experience during the lockdown that either productivity went down or simply people requested to get back to the office because they miss their coworkers. I think that can also be a human need that needs to be satisfied, that has nothing to do with work itself. But if people see the office as a place where they get their human needs satisfied. OK, that that might be a reason. So I'm really curious, who is the driver of this movement?

Is it more the employer side or are it is it the Workflow side or is it the employees? And honestly, I don't know it, but I'm really curious. Do you have some insights about that?

Yeah, well, I can just talk for for some of the things and articles and contents I researched lined up from our conversation. And we are talking about big players like Apple, where Tim Cook was sending all his letters to to the company. And they are already railing against that because I see it more like that we open up the Pandora off of this working from anybody last year and getting the genie back into the bottle is kind of difficult. So I was reading about Apple, I was reading about Citigroup, which intends to get back 30 percent of their employees by the end of the summer. Another example, New York City, the city of New York wants to get back 80000 of their city employees into the office. So it's not the small company from around the corner. We're talking about big enterprises. And I'm wondering a little bit about that. I could see that also in a lot of comments and videos, I saw that employees are mostly happy with the new gained freedom to choose to work more flexible and choose when to work and come back to work.

And why companies ignoring the fact that their employees are probably more happy with this new kind of possibilities to work from anywhere.

I think it's a lack of control and the lack of skills to lead people remotely by results instead of availability. I think that is them. And or maybe they have employees that are simply not disciplined enough to be somewhere else than in the office and focus on getting the work done. I think that's not for everyone. I also realized that when in 2018, we transformed our entire business to a global organization, one hundred percent Remote. It's not made for everyone. Some people quit and I had to let some other people go because simply they were not able to work in such an environment.

It requires discipline, it requires self-awareness, and it requires focus to get the work done from where you are. So the more freedom you want to have, the more discipline you need to bring and the more like Ownership you need to take over your results. While being back in an office is an easy thing when you say, OK, now I'm back in the office, dear manager, dear boss, I'm here tell me what I should do.

And then you do the work. And if it fails, you say, OK, he told me so. So it's not my fault. That is a valid reason and that's story that's totally OK, because some people want to work like this. And I can imagine that really an environment where they are left on their own choice when they work, with whom they work, how long they work, and it's just about the results. It's not for everyone.

So I think if you have these kind of people in your business, then you might have seen lower performance, lower results, more complaints, more emotional conversations, because people don't feel. Engage socially connected, they feel socially isolated if they don't see the benefit in this Remote work and then you free freedom, but more like a threat or risk. Then I think it's better to bring these people back to the office where they get what they are used to, where they see and have what they want, and then maybe the productivity is better. And, yeah, you have less, less complaints and less people that feel isolated.

So the statistics are showing that many people are heading back to the office. I probably will share that so people can check that out. But what I found out, this is not so much because nobody was working during the last year the past year. It's because people are getting more and more anxious and fear about getting excluded, missing something in the company environment or in the worst case they have the fear that they know what's going to get fired when they're not showing up in presence in the office. And so my question is, haven't we learned anything during the last year?

I cannot judge for for everyone and for we, but. Not sure if this has something to do with learning, but more with the culture. If you have to fear that you get fired, if you are not present, your culture is driven by fear. That's one thing, because obviously there is more punishment than there are rewards. And on the other side, presence might have a higher value than results. Now, people might not even be able to orient on the results they need to deliver, because if the business doesn't provide the transparency and clarity about the results they want and the goals they want to achieve, then it's simply for the best people not possible to do the work that contributes to these results, right. If you then are afraid or have fear that you get fired.

I think that's that's a cultural thing. I never want to work in such a culture. I don't want to build such a business where people are just motivated by fear. But yeah, I think there are more than enough businesses that still have this old school culture. And yes, they didn't change them during the Remote work time and maybe, yes, they didn't learn anything, or maybe they learned, but they learned that Remote work is not for them, might also be something.

Maybe they learned that Remote work creates lower performance than physical presence. They must have a reason. I'm also very curious to to to get these reasons. Maybe we should invite somebody who really says, I get all my people back to the office and have a conversation in this Podcast with these guys. Because I'm curious.

Yeah, me too, because I see the other side also, like the companies that have a positive impact on that. I was checking on SAP, Spotify, for example. They did go completely different paths. They said that they said during the pandemic they adjusted their Workflows and everything what is needed and say, OK, now we are settled and you can really work from anywhere and we don't care when you show up for office. We're gonna set up the environment and we're going to have maybe Hubs, where are we going to meet and everything.But we are not forcing all employees back to the office. So we let them choose to from work to work on. What is going there differently and what is leadership style, you can see from from the outside as a leader of yourself?

I think these these companies you mentioned, they are all empowered by technology. They are all used to work digitally. They are all driven by technology. And that's a different thing than if you have an office. And all the work is non digital because everything just happens when you meet at the Water Cooler or you you have meetings in the meeting room and you develop the belief set that you have to meet in person because otherwise the work can't get done. And you have to have these Water Cooler meetings because otherwise problems don't get solved.

If you build up these stories as your belief system, then of course you will never change because you believe this is the only way to get work done. While other businesses that are driven by technology found another way. They have a virtual office, even if they are physically in the same office. But if all their tools they use are digital driven by technology and they are used to communicate in a structured way using technology et cetera. So they adopted it.

Well, I think for them it was easy to adjust their Workflows because they were already used to leverage technology to be more efficient, while others still think we need to like, communicate all the time, physical presence, etc.. And I think that is what what helped them to understand that when people or let me rephrase that, when they experience that Remote work works for them and is supported and driven by technology, then leading by results is the natural next step as you don't have presence anymore.

And being present in video Calls for like six to eight hours every day is really exhausting and not productive at all. I think these companies, they found out that. It's totally unproductive if they just have to have video Calls all the time to, like, get the work done, and then they found that technology can help to implement structured communication and asynchronous communication, which speeds up the flow of information and gets better results because it brings more clarity to the everyday work of team members.

And I think that's why, yeah, they maybe they just ask themselves, how can we leverage this? How can we benefit from that while the others ask them, why do we have to do that? Right. That's a different Mindset if you ask how you find the solution, if you ask why you are more like a victim and you hope that you get back to the old norm. Maybe that's a difference also not technology, but also in the brain.

Now and you mentioned already, like one of the Tools, like big arguments, I can I could see over all different newspapers and articles, I found the first one. Let's start with the second one. As you already mentioned, it is like the conversation, the spontaneous conversation on the water cooler, on a coffee kitchen or on the floor. So and I completely agree with you like people, especially after one year in confinement, most of them are hungry for this personal interaction between the co-worker probably, and everything. What I don't get is why this is brought forward as a reason to force people back to work. So I get I get the human interaction part. But what you used that as an argument to get people back to work, it's completely...

Yeah, I think because most people mix up or even confuse getting the work done with satisfying, satisfying the need of social interaction and engagement et cetera. I think that is the most most important part. Of course, we all need to have social interaction, but we don't need to get the work done. We can combine that. But it's not it's not necessary to mix that up. And I think Remote work gives us the freedom of choice to choose which people we want to meet to socially engage with.

That can be our co-workers. I also meet some guys that I like around here that work with me, but others like you that are far away in Mexico, I just meet virtually, which is also fine. And I am closer to my family, which also gives me a point of social interaction and that are also great people, right. So but I don't work with them. So having the flexibility and being able to choose with whom you want to spend your time and where you want to get your work done, I think that's a big benefit and that makes work more free and more satisfying, more self-determined for people compared to everyone needs to be in the office because they think that work cannot be done without without satisfying our human needs for social interaction. I think it's it's not beneficial to mix these things up. We both have these needs. We have both needs. But they don't have to do anything with each other necessarily.

And this is what was also something I read constantly in the research. People are much more happy in this in the setting where they can choose to work from where they want. You just mentioned, like family. So many employees have experienced the last year the setting, they had to work from home. Of course, this was in many settings, some sometimes stressful, not the right setting, not having a dedicated office space, whatever in your home or at your home.

But a lot of them experienced also this this reconnection with their family, with their personal background, that they are always around. You can interact with your family. You get you get their social social connection. And now getting back to offers of all those nice perks that they have got last year without doing anything right. They were just with their families and could spend more time with them and be more self-determined about that. That's a great point you should always think about in the future

One big argument, I could also here for a reason to get back to office is that innovation, collaboration and work on complex issues require that people are together physically at the same space. Is there really an objection or is this probably more an excuse?

Good question. I think that is what we often hear. I mean, I heard that often that complex work can only be done when you are in the same room. I think that's not true. That's simply not true, because obviously other technology driven companies that you mentioned, they are also doing complex work and they understood that it's not necessary to be in the same room. So it cannot be the ultimate truth, that complex work cannot be done without being in the same room.

But I agree, if you are used to get complex work done, not as a self driven and self-motivated person taking ownership over a part of this complex thing and asking others for help and support when you need them then you need to be in the same room so that whenever something comes to your mind that you want to ask, you have somebody you can ask. On the other side that leads to constant interruptions where people have only a little focused time.

I remember when we had the office, like we desperately tried to have focus time, only one hour per day at noon, and even that didn't work. Then people took red flags on their desk hopefully that somebody will see it. But way too often somebody came on the desk, didn't see the flag, ask a question and boom you out of your flow, out of your focus. And I think that kills performance more than like trying to get complex work done and not being in the same room.

So I think it's just a it's again, it's just the belief that it's just what you think will work for you. You are always right. Either you believe you can or you believe you cannot you will be right. Because if you believe you can, you do it. Otherwise, you will never try. So I think it's not the nature of complex work, but I agree it requires more communication, still that can be done virtually either in video calls if they are well prepared and to the point or by asking well prepared questions to a person that sounds or looks like she's the right one to answer this question.

Right.And I just want to mention that if you think about complex work and probably innovative work, think about space travel, think about travel to the moon, Mars and all this, where people are working with quite a distance from here to the moon or from here to the ISS, and they're getting complex work, done, right science and everything. And they are not sitting in the same room. They have several thousand kilometers from here to the next space station. So, yeah, you already touched a little bit maybe we can get to a point where we talk a little bit more about solutions. How you construct an environment where it doesn't matter where the current physical location of a co-worker is or for team member where location is, right?

Mm hmm. Yeah, I think we had a Podcast already about this. Maybe you can LinkedIN the show nodes where we talked about how to bring this clarity to your to your day, to your team so that people really understand with transparency which goal they need to achieve how to measure their performance based on objective KPI's, not just based on subjective opinions of other managers and how technology can support that by providing a virtual office with full transparency and leading people with results, not with availability. Of course, that requires turning around the organigram, while typically you have a managers, second level managers, et cetera and they always tell people what they should do or tell them about very often abstract goals like you need to you need to be more proactive, like nobody understands what that means and what they should do. And when they are like this, everyone has a separate interpretation of these abstract goals. But when you are able to really bring goals to the point, make them clear, transparent and measurable and then help people and support them so they develop the skills and personally in order to make this progress towards the goal. Then leading is a different thing than managing, managing is me knowing the goal and me knowing what needs to be done so that this goal is reached or achieved and me hiring people as a resource while I tell them what to do.

So they work for me and achieve the goal. But that's a different thing than leading where you have a goal and you support people, so they found they find their own way to the goal. They decide by themselves which activities they start and stop and how they do it. What counts is the goal and to provide your business provides transparency about their progress so that they can see how they are doing. And then I become a coach, not a manager or leader, not a manager.

And I think this way of leading instead of managing is what is required Remotely. And if you don't change that leadership or management style, then Remote work is hard because you cannot influence people that fast, right. In the office you see that often you can go to your employee and say, I need you quickly to do this and that, but a lot of work on the desk, please do it. OK, that's the typical boss employee communication style.

But you cannot do that in a virtual environment because people are not Online all the time. Or what happens that's worse is if people feel they need to be Online 24/7 because it might happen all the time that their boss comes and wants something from them and the boss expects that I'm available right now when this person needs me. And then if you are driven by fear, of course you are constantly online because you fear that it will have consequences when you don't jump when your boss screams, that's a different thing. Otherwise, if you turn that around, if you have this leadership style, the boss waits for people until people approach the leader, not the boss, for support. OK, then you have a different you turn that around. The leader is there for the team while in the other leadership or typical boss vs. employee, organic from the team needs to react on what the boss wants.

Right, and I think this was what you just mentioned, also led to the outcome that a lot of people felt like burned out and really stressed during the last year because they tried to do what they do was already in the physical environment, like just answering right away when the bosses did asking something or being like on top all the way, all the time and not having, like, the opportunity to just having spaces and time Timeboxes where you probably answer your questions and the rest of the time you're doing the work in a focused manner and getting things done right.

As far as the estimation question for you, what what do you estimate personally? What is the current percentage between white collar and knowledge worker with blue collar workers like globally?

Well, what's that what's the difference, white worker and worker?

Knowledge worker that let's say that would be work that could be possibly done virtually or in a remote environment.

OK

and blue collar workers, what you just mentioned is the bus driver, the person that works in the nuclear power plant, scientist that works and in a laboratory and whatever.

Good question maybe for that's tough one. I hope nobody will laugh at me if I don't know that, but I really don't know, maybe it's 40 percent knowledge workers and 60 percent know otherwise or vice versa, 60 percent knowledge worker, 40 percent physical workers.

OK, you got it. You got it. Almost right. So right right now, the only global consolation is this like a 60 to 70 percent of white collar and knowledge workers. And the other part, like between 40 and 30 percent, is really blue collar work. OK, what I heard also did well more than that, more than a year that's this Remote working environment is like something for the privileged and people that only work in technology and everything.

So what I realized is with 60 to 70 percent white collar workers already existing and this is a number of growing right as more and more work gets digitalized and and, um, is changing. Right. So this is a number is growing and we have already surpassed this narrative of privilege, because 60, 70 percent is not anymore like a small group of people, it's the majority. So what I was wondering, are we probably missing some kind of imagination what will happen during the next five to 10 years and have we lost the capability to look back probably five, 10 years in the past, how that has already changed over the last decades or how a working environment.

What do you think? I think so. I mean, yeah, so look, looking back typically is what people do when they want to find a reason why he thinks that they see today won't work. Right. They take their past experience build story around that see a situation and tell the same story related to a different situation and say you can't work because of that. So looking back is a typical habit of. Yeah, humanity, I would say.

But learning from past activities, I think it's important and I totally agree that when nowadays even 70 percent of these white workers doing doing knowledge work instead of physical work technology would speed that up. I mean, in a few years, you even will have physical work that will be replaced by robots and somebody controlling the robot or giving advice to the robot or programming the robot or whatever remotely sit somewhere else in the world. So even for this kind of work, physical presence is not necessary anymore.

So I think that will be reduced more and more every year. And if you don't see the trend and don't develop your skills to to really get digital skills, to adjust your habits and your expectations of work, maybe you have to compete with robots. I don't know. But I don't want to be in a situation. So I'm going learning is so important to keep track with the speed of change and it will be faster and faster because it's driven by technology.

And that speed things up, definitely it will be even faster in the future than it was in the past.

Yeah and for that, you could also listen to a recently recorded podcast with futurist I had, which was also mentioning about this issue of about constant learning and how you have to learn every five to 10 years something completely new are getting maybe back to the university after five years because your knowledge, your knowledge is not any more valuable or you have to update it really in a profound way.

And another futurist, which is upcoming in a Podcast, is also talking about this complete new spectrum of work that we don't even know exists right now, like the employments that we have haven't even figured out how to call them. So we should always be prepared for that and keep learning for what is probably coming up.

And I think it's not every 10 years. I think it's every day you need to work every day, reflect on yourself, what worked well, what not. And you we constantly have to learn new skills every single day because things the work itself gets more complex and you can only prepare for complex work. You cannot plan with it. So you need to be able to have an open Mindset and the constant be a constant learner, because otherwise you will be overwhelmed by by all this work.

If you don't like that, if you don't like to learn to change, to adjust, to adapt and you resist, sometimes Change will break you. And that's painful you know.

Yeah, for my last question today. I would like to ask you, why will companies that like rigidly insist on this attendance policies will have trouble retaining enough top talent in the near future and why they should maybe rethink policies right now?

I think that's obvious because top talent wants to work self-determined when they want and where they want. And if you force them to be in an office, in your local office, wherever it is I think they will not do this because they have many other opportunities that are aligned with their interest and satisfied their work needs much better than a company that asks for constant physical presence. So that is that is the thing. You know, staff shortages, I think is self-made.

I experienced that when I had an office. I can only recruit people with like one hundred kilometers around my office. While if I don't have an office anymore and my culture is completely open, I can hire people from wherever they are. And that makes it so much faster to hire people in days not, I mean, let's say three weeks. But if you hire locally, there's three to six months. That's crazy. Those people that can hire talent in three weeks compared to those that need like three to six months, they are ten times faster. And talent is the number one driver having the right talent at the right time with the right skills. That's what the Harvard University stated in their study Building the OnDemand Workforce last year. They said exactly this. Those companies that have access to the right talent at the right time with the right skills will outperform their competitors significantly. And if there are businesses that still don't see that, they will experience it at one time. Yeah.

Great. Manuel, thank you very much for your time today. I hope we could set up a kind of different narrative there when it comes to the whole topic of getting back to the office or working from anywhere and what that might means for the new future of work and the success or failure of companies. Thank you very much for taking the time and see you next week our next session.

Absolutely.

Thank you very much. See you next time.

I want to thank you for sharing with us some interesting perspectives on how to structure a work environment where the physical location of a company and their employees becomes insignificant and what it takes to retain top talent in the workplace of today. If you want to learn more about how to scale with your business at any time, working with global top talent and make work better visit FlashHub.io/start to get free access to the virtual business training. Learn in this free training, how you can build, grow and scale your business with virtual Teams and global freelancer's.

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