Now WFH is RTO. It’s still a controversial topic. I remember when our governor closed the state on my birthday 2020. At that point, I’d worked full-time from home for decades. Now everyone was doing it to varying levels of chaos, depending on personality, parenting status, and even how much physical room people had for their improvised WFH rig.
Suddenly we were all WFH. I was a veteran of that but at the same time my years of productive WFH had been partially subsidized by everyone who worked in the office. I was part of a system that was integrated with an inoffice culture. In some ways, I was remote from that culture and in many other ways I benefited from it. There was a hub where my co-workers had access to each other and to our bosses face-to-face. They could advocate for things I couldn’t. There were things they understood and thought of that I might not have. On the other hand, I was not distracted, I was a machine of productivity, and I had different good ideas because I operated at a distance from some of the assumptions and habits of the office.
One of the dare I say, positives of Covid is how it built more workplace trust for a lot of us. We had to trust, so we did, we had to adapt, we had to go into survival mode and innovate through the brutal circumstances and uncertainty. At the time, I thought that we had broken through some fossilized assumptions and structures, both technical and human. I thought we’d all be smarter and more flexible, and we’d take the best of what we were learning and reinvent work for the back-to-normal.
Since then and particularly over the last weeks, the WFH/RTO discussion has taken on that binary tone again. The old battle lines creep back in. There’s a temptation to be either/or. There’s a temptation to assume that workers will get away with whatever they can, or employees will extract whatever they can. And while there’s plenty of evidence that those patterns happen, there is a lot in between.
You wouldn’t always know that from the news. AWS CEO Matt Garman recently took a hard line and arguably disrespectful tone in his RTO mandate. We’ve had Dell demand five days a week, and PWC implement spying technology to enforce RTO. Employees have pushed back, sometimes with some success. This week Eric Schmidt, softened his own absolutes by acknowledging data that says WFH plays an important role. It’s all bad for morale.
I know that patterns are hard to change, that WFH and RTO were probably going to duke it out on the binary. I think there’s still room for innovation and compromise. I hope so, just from a personal societal level, and also more narrowly for our industry.
When it’s WFH vs. RTO it’s hard to know what to invest in for technology. The uncertainty of what the landscape of work will be means that our solutions—which can bridge both worlds—get stuck behind the either/or. Through Covid we had the magic tools to keep corporate, education, worship, and government moving. For better or worse, there wasn’t an alternative. I thought we’d never go back once we saw the hybrid world. But the pull of past patterns is strong and will determine where opportunity lies for AV, probably not as quickly or as clearly as we’d want.
