Do we have to go back to the office?

Hi,

Another week of interviews. Some were fantastic, in the sense that the conversations were great, and others not so much. The good news is that there are already a few at the second stage, things are moving forward.

This week, I want to talk about going back to the office. There's no lack of CEOs nowadays announcing to the world that remote working doesn't work, that it's time to go back to the good old ways.

During the interviews these past weeks, I’ve seen many companies requiring a minimum of two or three days in the office—a hybrid model—for team “cohesion”, while others are fully remote.

Do I hate the concept of working together, in person? Not at all, it's brilliant, it's the normal way we communicate as humans and how I've worked most of my life. Being face-to-face tends to make bonding easier—who doesn't remember the “water cooler” moments?—as well as team work. The context, the non-verbal cues, the ability to talk to a teammate immediately… All of that is there when we work in the same space, and some of it is diminished or lost by working remotely, if we don't explicitly address them.

As brilliant as communicating in person is, working in an office has plenty of disadvantages, specially the lovely and popularly acclaimed open-plan office. The main reason open-plan offices are popular is that they allow the most concentration of people in the smallest amount of space at a low cost. Moreover, the myth of these offices improving better collaboration and ideas is still out there. If I look at it from another lens, these kinds of offices remind me of an industrial farm.

A few disadvantages are:

• Noise and distractions

• Breeding ground for illnesses due to stagnant air

• No sense of belonging or team identity

The first one is easy to see—and hear. Since everything's open and there are no obstacles to absorb the sound waves, we're always in a cacophony, a perpetual background of ever-changing noise. Don't get me started if you're around the company kitchen, or people put music while working.

In one of the companies I worked with, I was doing pair programming with a teammate. While we were talking to each other about the code, we were hearing the loud conversation of a colleague on the other side of the office. My teammate had to ask him to tone it down. While this was happening, you could hear the microwave beep, people stirring their cuppa with a metallic teaspoon and the clickety-clack of the many programmers pushing code out at high speeds. A splendid symphony, but I was trying to hear the person next to me.

An interesting phenomenon happens in many of these offices: people wear noise-cancelling headphones. Wow, wait a minute, didn't the open plan promise collaboration and an unbounded creation of ideas?

I have to admit that I'm biased: I'm deaf. I haven't lost all my hearing, but deaf nonetheless, and I wear hearing aids. The struggle is real, very real. Many times I end up mentally exhausted trying to understand conversations and not miss a thing. Headaches are not uncommon. At the same time, being part of a casual conversation that spontaneously happens in the office is a challenge. Some people might describe me as aloof, or not talkative enough, but they haven't seen me in a situation where I don't struggle to hear them.

Let me write briefly about the second disadvantage: breeding ground for illnesses due to stagnant air. This is not a secret, if you're in an office and somebody has a cold, you might be next. The sneeze unlocks a chain reaction. In fact, I believe this is one of the reasons productivity takes a big hit.

What we have in most offices is stagnant air, caused by poor indoor ventilation. We've seen this now more than ever with the pandemic.

If we forget about COVID-19 for a second, having good indoor ventilation would help us reduce as well other illnesses in the office. In fact, the CDC updated their guidelines for good indoor ventilation, and I’m hopeful that in the future this is a point of focus.

On top of the poor indoor ventilation, we have incentives that push people to keep working sick. You have the flu and feel awful? You still have to work because there’s no sick pay, or you might earn less money, have a sachet with magic powder. With these incentives, companies are paying sick people to essentially lower the company productivity while also treating them like less than humans.

My last point is about the CEOs. If you read my article about workplaces, you probably know my opinion. What I see is bosses making decisions unilaterally, without taking the workers into consideration. Have they asked the people in the company what was their opinion or how can they make remote working work? Don’t think so. They’re disconnected from reality. Working remotely does work, if you actually make the effort to adapt and listen to people. Deep down, people are demanding flexibility, a better way to balance work and life that work for them, not having to waste hours of their days in hellish commutes.

The thing is, if you give me an office that’s adapted to not have the open plan issues with a decent commuting, I‘m happy to go, but that won’t be usually the case. At the moment I think that the typical hybrid model—while giving you much needed flexibility—can be the worst of both worlds. I’m not saying it cannot work, and I hugely want that flexibility, but the hybrid model doesn’t tend to mean we’re remote first but you go to the office a few days, it normally means we’re office centric but you can stay at home a few days. The former is a much better model.

This week’s briefer:

• Why squiggly careers are better for everyone

• Bottlenecks of Scaleups

• Fault Tolerance in a High Volume, Distributed System