This is the first post-Substack edition of my newsletter, the first one delivered via WordPress. At some point in the coming days, the Substack version will be going away completely. If you want to know why, then you might want to read my post on Substack and platform risk, and then have a look at Platformer’s post on why it’s leaving Substack.
It’s just over twenty years since the last time I worked completely in an office. In every job, I have had since 2003 when I left MacUser, I have spent at least a day a week working from home. And even before then, working away from the office was so frequent that I doubt there was a week between 1995-2003 when I wasn’t out for at least a day.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I find the apparent desperation to get employees back into offices so strange. According to a survey by ResumeBuilder, 90% of employers plan to return to office by the end of 2024. Over a quarter of them intend to threaten employees who don’t want to return to office with being fired.
But return to office hasn’t been plain sailing. The latest company to come a cropper with its plans is Internet Brands, the parent company of WebMD, which created a video “encouraging” its teams back into the office, ending in a screen – and I am not making this up – which notes “we mean business” and “don’t mess with us”.
Cue much hilarity from the internet. Internet Brands is probably lucky that Twitter isn’t the force it once was because the pre-Musk social network would have run with this one for several weeks. Now, it’ll get buried under an avalanche of rubbish on Threads after a couple of days, or be seen by the couple of million users on Bluesky.
But I digress.
There are many arguments over the effectiveness of remote working vs in-office, some good and some bad. Having a separation between home and work is a good thing, for one, and although older employees tend to have plenty of space to make that work, younger ones in shared accommodation or living with parents often don’t. And younger employees also benefit from working closely with colleagues, who can mentor them informally much more easily when physically present.
I think this is particularly true for the creative industries. Creative people typically like to think of themselves as the definitive solo fliers, coming up with great ideas and then hammering them into shape, before having them ruined by an editor.
But the reality is that creative work is always collaborative. For example, in digital publishing, your content teams and audience development people need to mesh and work as one team; otherwise they can make the human equivalent of the sound gears make when grinding against each other.
And that is why broad directives about the amount of time which people spend face-to-face vs remote are damaging not only to the people involved, who inevitably feel robbed of autonomy and disempowered, but also to a creative business.
To find the most workable approach, leaders should focus on four factors: the needs of the work, the needs of the people, how work gets done, and the new managerial muscle required to manage a hybrid workforce.
Broad, uniform directives can only be effective if all work is identical and performed by a uniform workforce, which is not the case in the creative industries, and not true for most others. Rather than imposing directives, CEOs should empower their managers, particularly those at the front line, to develop a comprehensive understanding of their team's work, the working styles of their team members, and the most effective ways to accomplish their tasks.
Of course that depends on having empowered, well-trained leadership down to the small team level – but you are already doing that, aren’t you?
