Facebook announced plans that by 2030 half of the employees would be working from home. Similarly, Twitter announced that its employees would be allowed to work from wherever they feel most creative and productive.
The epidemic has shown that that employees can be as productive and in many cases more productive when they work from home. This is applicable even in traditional industries too where a well-managed video meeting can be as effective as a face-to-face one and a lot easier to organize.
Its quite possible that Facebook, Twitter would be less remote in the next ten years than what has been predicted but more than what was thought of six months ago. But the more important question is are the leaders thinking deeply enough about what they want the new work to achieve and whether they can establish systems that will meet the objectives.
Work From Home is helping go through the immediate crisis but what is required in the long run? Higher productivity? Office space savings, travel, cost of living adjusted salaries, better morale, and higher retention rates?
Work from home is a system in itself with many inter-dependencies, both human and technological like
- Technologies needed to make the system workable like collaboration, productivity, and creativity.
- The resources, the policies, practices, and processes your system needed to function.
- The rules, norms, and key metrics to prescribe to preserve and enhance your culture and values.
For all of this to be developed and managed in the right way, a different innovation approach is required.
Future-back thinking and planning
Future-back is designed to help leaders develop a vision of their best possible future and a laid-out strategy to achieve it.
Thinking and planning from the future allow you to fully articulate what you hope to achieve with your new work system and design its major components from a clean sheet. Once you have created your vision, you need to consider all the things that would have to be true and test those assumptions with initiatives that you can begin today.
This consists of four stages
Stage 1: What is your vision of your ideal work system of the future?
The aim is to develop clarity and not achieve analytic certainty. Sketch out the workforce of tomorrow and frame it as a purpose-driven and object driven narrative. It should include your purpose, objectives and metrics, concise list of components of the system, and how they fit together.
Look at the resources and assets. What kind of people are required and where? , how different functions will work, remote technologies needed policies, processes, norms, and metrics.
Stage 2: Consider implicit and explicit assumptions
There are knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns you should take account of. Work through each of them and accept or reject them. eg: problem can be done by the remote team as well as an in-person team, executive development can be done online as well as in-person meetings.
Stage 3" Test those assumptions
What do you need to learn and how can you do it best? Walk your vision back to the present in the form of experiments. you may require different scenarios if you have multiple geographic locations, business units different from each other.
You can carve out a business function, systematically apply all WFH technologies, practices and norms you wish to use, measure these results with the larger unit.
Stage4: Use learnings to adjust your system and vision if required.
Through this iterative process of exploring, envisioning, testing you will be able to identify the best way forward. This will be an ongoing process.
There will be tradeoffs. You may be able to tap more talent and save money by not requiring new hires to move, it is likely your ecosystem will become more diffused. Some teams may need to meet frequently in person. You will have to beef up the technical and human capabilities as well as the bandwidth, reducing some of your anticipated savings. You will have to be prepared for systemic incompatibilities and rejection.
Do not trade one dogma for another.
It is important that your aspirational what is best should be more than your bottom line. A company's vision should reflect its leaders thinking about why besides its what and how.
Even if WFH turns out to be less productive, reducing carbon-based emissions, improving work-life could make up for it.
Future-back doesn't reveal a future that is written in stone, it gives you a way to shape it and own it, ensuring organizations' long-term viability. The organizations that can develop the clearest, most inspiring vision, learn the fastest, and pivot the most capably, are the ones that win.
Does Your Company Have a Long-Term Plan for Remote Work?
by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz HBR July 20, 2020
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