"Management" Wants You Back In The Office. They Just Can't Tell You The Reason Why.
This Week In Leadership #2, Week of January 12th, 2022
Hey there, reader,
Welcome to the second issue of the TWIL newsletter! This week, we’re going to look at a couple of topics that are intertwined with the COVID-19 pandemic that’s caused such a radical shift in how we think about, and do, work.
First off, let’s talk about telework. Speaking personally, I was put on telework status almost from the get-go with COVID, March of 2020. I didn’t go back into the office, until November of 2020. Let me tell you, during that time I felt pretty freakin’ useless. Partly that was because of the nature of my job at the time (instructor) and partly it was because I’m an American male, so I derive a lot of my self-worth from being seen as important at work. When compared to the risk of catching COVID, though, I quickly learned how unimportant I was.
I’d always assumed that others experienced the same things. I read numerous articles talking about the “exponential rise” in remote and telework jobs. I read all the articles about how to make your home office bearable, how to deal with Zoom fatigue, and so on. I assumed everybody was like me.
Which is why I found this article, published back in September of 2021, so interesting. Apparently, teleworking is not, and never WAS, even during the height of the pandemic, as common as I thought. As the author points out, a lot of what we read about telework at the time was little more than confirmation bias; we assumed everyone else was, because we were. When that was simply never the case.
That brings me to my second point (and the title of this post): to hear CEOs, managers and other corporate shills tell it, you would think NOBODY was in the office in post-pandemic America. Bloomberg, Forbes, and WSJ are chock-full of articles bemoaning the sad, empty, depleted office complex as if it’s some kind of herald of the End Times. Which, I guess for them, it is. After all, the real reason that “Management” wants you to come back into the office, and why they are shelling out millions of dollars to pay lip service to COVID precautions (office pods, air purifiers, whole-building HVAC renovations, you name it) all boils down to one thing:
If you’re not in the office, “Management” has nothing to do.
The entire modern office construct is built on the Industrial Revolution-Era ideals of so-called Scientific Management. Call it what you will (modern organizations tend to refer to it by some kind of buzzword like “task-oriented optimization”) it’s all Scientific Management, as espoused in 1880 by Frederick Winslow Taylor.
I’m not going to bore you in this post with the whole sorry history of Taylorism and its lingering effects on the corporate construct, despite being over 140 years old (bad ideas never die, they just get renamed). But, what I will say is that Taylorism, and its focus on the amount of work a person should be able to do (derived from some arbitrary standard of whatever the boss thinks qualifies as a “good day’s work”) is the entire reason for the professional managerial corps.
In other words, professional managers exist because of the assumption that human beings, if left to their own devices, will not work as efficiently or effectively as possible.
Millions of gallons of ink have been spilled, and countless dollars spent, on trying to overcome this basic assumption. But, with very few exceptions, almost nobody in corporate Western society ever asked the question: What if that assumption is wrong?
What if people, if left to their own devices, and properly empowered and motivated, will work MORE efficiently and MORE effectively without professional management? Well, thanks to COVID, we now know a little bit more about the answer to that question. And the answer, as with many things in life, is “It Depends”
Are there places where a manager is legitimately needed? Sure.
Are there workers who are never going to be self-motivated? Absolutely.
Are there good managers? Definitely!!
But should we be wary of applying a one-size-fits-all solution (of ANY flavor) to the problems of leadership and management in modern corporate America?
You’d better believe it.
So management wants you back in the office, so they have a reason to exist again (and justify their white-collar salaries) but has your manager, or boss, actually taken the time to find out what YOU need to be most productive, most efficient? If so, then perhaps a return to the office is justified, especially if you’re one of those people (like me) who works better “At work” and gets constantly distracted trying to work from home.
But if the powers that be at your company haven’t taken the time to poll the audience, or get to know the individual needs of their employees, and are just making blanket return-to-work policies, I’d be willing to bet it has less to do with “our super fun office culture!” and more with good old fashioned Taylorism.