We Have Work All Wrong

We need new operating models for a new world!

Since writing about TwitchCon, I’ve had a flood of conversations on the future of work in tech, and about productivity overall. All of these have convinced me it’s not about a Great Resignation, but about companies re-setting. 👾

Working remote from DreamWorks Studios in LA

In the last 10 years, technology has enabled so many new tools, abilities, and scenarios that we have simply missed the fact that we are now working wrong for the surroundings we have. There’s a quote from Star Trek that came up during lunch this week that seems especially relevant to the mistakes we make when thinking about the future of work:

We think it started in the past, but it didn’t. It started right here, in the future! That’s why it’s getting larger in the past.

The situation of the quote isn’t important (here’s the scene, if you’re interested). The point is that, after 100 years of office work, our processes and expectations have become so fixed that we’ve missed how the world and every context and scenario of use has changed. We think the future of work is moving the office online, but in reality it’s so much more than that, and in some ways, the opposite.

Here are just a few examples of the contradictory views we’re still hanging onto:

1. Many people now take online meetings as audio-only, whether on their laptops at a desk, or on their phone while walking, so they can focus better. But online meeting software generally makes audio-only meetings appear to be a degraded experience, and our cultural expectations suggest that if we don’t have our camera on, we are not paying attention — when the opposite is often true.
2. Being in the office creates the appearance of being more productive, but it can also be more distracting. Companies around the world are either coaxing or demanding employees return to the office, and employees are responding by leaving in droves. It’s not simply that individuals can get back the time they spent in traffic, or have a better set-up at home, with more time to focus. Being in the office also means being presented with more distractions, wasting more time in meetings (for the sake of being visible), and getting pulled into other work that isn’t critical.
3. Synchronous meetings are needed for buy-in, but communication and writing often work better when we’re asynchronous. For decades, companies used meetings to focus discussions, share information, and achieve buy-in. But this also means meetings have allowed individuals to become lackadaisical in their communication abilities. When you’re constantly in meetings, there’s less need to write out detailed plans, or share in-depth thinking. Meetings are used as a substitute for good planning, process, and communication. People often end up attending for the wrong reasons: to make sure they get information that won’t get shared any other way, or simply to appear busy and valuable. Better communication could take the place of a huge fraction of the meetings in most organisations.

These examples, and many more, make it clear that the way we work needs to be completely rethought.

But why isn’t this happening?

Old shots working from various offices

The people running large organisations often cut their teeth in offices in the 1990s: before mass usage of computers, the internet, and a global perspective to work was prominent. But now they’re hiring and managing people who were born into the current, very different, world. This creates a massive cultural gap that we’ve barely started to address and those in charge overlook (or don’t see).

We need a moment where we can look at everything anew and realise the potential it offers 🔮

Over the last five to ten years, and even today, companies are looking at digital transformation and creating new types of innovation organisations to focus on building new products. I would challenge this is not big enough thinking. Digital transformation must be about not only digitisation and building new products, but also building new skills and completely new operating models that break from the current ones. 🌏

Better operating models would take advantage of the new tools, talent, and scenarios before us. In these three examples, we can quickly see how new models empower us to deliver better products at lower costs:

1. Better global talent can be obtained at a lower price — Once you’re distributed, you can hire anyone, from any location. Chances are the best talent won’t be found locally, so companies need to expand the way they find talent.
2. Work can be delivered more quickly and efficiently — Being distributed should force companies to improve their communication, process, and planning. It should also force them to build libraries of tools to speed up building products: design and development libraries, building blocks, and components to build consistent experiences and applications. If companies can provide the specific tasks and building blocks for individuals to work on, then they can scale to larger teams, working in unison, all producing exponentially more work. We see a path to delivering more work with a better experience at a quicker pace and better quality, with the added bonus of potentially cheaper labour and better margins.
3. Rental and office prices can be reduced, or funds reallocated — Imagine that, instead of spending money on an office that few people want to come to, you could provide all your employees with a kit for travel and streaming so they can work amazingly from any location.

Approaches like these won’t work for everyone, and I don’t advocate them for everyone. But existing companies must start taking small steps to explore new ways to work. Start-ups and companies that form in 2022 and beyond will already be thinking in these terms, taking the best talent, shipping software faster, delivering better experiences to customers, growing faster, and achieving higher margins. Incumbents will continue to struggle unless they make adjustments and change starting now.

This is only the start — expect more on this topic soon exploring new ways of working.

The conversations of this past week have made me a feel a bit like these lyrics — that I’m simply bonkers. But at the same time, you have to embrace a bit of chaos and be bonkers to accomplish the Loonshots and we’ve been told to always Choose Possibility. Let’s start experimenting.

Everybody says that I gotta get a grip
But I let sanity give me the slip.
Some people think I’m bonkers
But I just think I’m free
Man, I’m just livin’ my life
There’s nothin’ crazy about me

Lastly, if you’re looking for a great blog from someone who already does all of this, check out my friend Ninh.

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