10 Things we Need to Make Work From Anywhere Happen

This Wall Street Journal article was bouncing around the Internet earlier this week. CEOs and Executive Directors from Vancouver to Nairobi to Singapore are evaluating the impact of Covid-19 on work, particularly the emerging reality of our “work from anywhere” future. As individuals, teams, organizations, and communities, here are 10 things we need to make work from anywhere happen.

The work from anywhere future

Here’s Danny Crichton’s definition of “work from anywhere” that was recently presented in Tech Crunch:

“Work From Anywhere” literally means anywhere, including the very office we would normally commute to.

Flexibility means adapting our schedules and our locations for the kinds of knowledge work we are trying to do. Some days are all meetings as we try to coordinate a number of projects. Some days we need to shut out the world and just dive down into writing our novels, or developing a new algorithm, or putting together that big presentation for the all-hands meeting next week. Some days we need a mix of both. Some days we need the comfort of home, while other days we need the comfort of colleagues.

In short, “Work From Anywhere” perfectly encapsulates that freedom and dynamism our schedules deserve.

This definition jives with Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury’s excellent analysis of Work from Anywhere (WFA) in HBR, which explores myriad data from around the world in response to the question, “do we really need to be together, in an office, to do our work?”. According to Choudhury, the WFA model “offers notable benefits to companies and their employees. Organizations can reduce or eliminate real estate costs, hire and use talent globally while mitigating immigration issues, and, research indicates, perhaps enjoy productivity gains. Workers get geographic flexibility (that is, live where they prefer to), eliminate commutes, and report better work/life balance.” This said, not all individuals or organizations are sold on WFA, working from home, or bringing more flexibility to peoples’ worklife.

WSJ’s Peter Cappelli and Rocio Bonet, who wrote the article I mentioned above, found that nearly one-third of surveyed employers have not decided how to address the emerging reality of WFA. Examining hierarchical structure, enhancing accessibility, transparency, security, as well as enabling what Fast Company’s Simon Harrison calls “hyper decision-making” will present leaders with opportunities and challenges to transition their enterprise to meet the WFA expectations of the modern workforce.

Herein lies the tension. According to PWC, a global leader in remote work best practices, “while most employers (78%) expect at least a partial return to the office in the next three months, only one in five employees says they want to go back to their workplace full time.” Another aspect of the tension surrounds equity and safety, as the WFA approach favours knowledge workers, as opposed to the front-line health, service, and educational workers who will have different choices to make with the term “anywhere”.

As individuals, teams, organizations, and society, there are straightforward and practical tactics that we can initiate to make WFA the way forward.

For individuals

Workspace

These days working from anywhere means working from home. So, setting up a space that allows for as much comfort, security, and productivity as possible is essential. These tips from Architectural Digest are pretty simple: setup your workstation near a window, invest in a real keyboard, and reduce hunching over a laptop at all costs.

If your workspace is the community (shout out to my friend Deanna Button!), then equip yourself with the tools and mindset that allows you to plug into co-working spaces, coffee shops, and hoteling desks in your office with ease, health, and, again, safety (if you’re handling customer data then you need to protect it!).

Boundaries

I just read a great post on LinkedIn from Jeff Couillard, who helps leaders build powerful communities with The Ally Co. Team, on why he’s moving away from self care and towards prioritization and boundaries:

Creating physical and mental boundaries within and between your work and life are critical for thriving in the WFA reality. For example, meal time at my dining room table – for breakfast and dinner especially – is for eating and discussion, not work or devices. If you subscribe to Ariana Huffington’s approach to sleep (and the boundaries around the bedroom) then your bed should be used for two things: sleeping and sex.

Habits and rituals

What I like about the above post from Jeff is that it outlines ideas for implementing systems that maintain and enhance wellness, as opposed to reacting to burnout and stress with self-care, whiskey, or vacations. The “fake commute” is a habit that is growing in popularity as a daily habit for creating boundaries between work and life. For me, having a simple and consistent “end of work ritual” is essential for transitioning your brain and body from work to family, friends, or another important focus.

For teams

Psychological safety

Trust is essential if we are going to make WFA successful. Managers need to trust that their employees are working on what is important. Teammates need to trust each other, especially when it comes to understanding what everyone is working on so that folks can collaborate as well as explain each other’s workload (for succession planning as well as equity). Teams that build psychological safety faster and better than others will be able to move at the speed of trust.

Team norms

I recently kicked off a remote work program with an amazing colleague, Christina. With great intention, we used the term “hybrid teams” instead of “remote teams” because not every employee would sign up for the experience. Establishing norms that align with organizational policies and reflect the unique circumstances and culture of your team is critical for leading hybrid teams. For example, a best practice for team meetings is for employees who are in the office to not gather in a conference room for team meetings when teammates are working from home or other remote locations. By having all team members meet exclusively through screens the power is diffused, as one group can’t use body language or side chats to shift the conversation’s dynamic.

Manage to outcomes/outputs

Good managers are coaching employees to create excellent outputs that drive the performance of an organization, as opposed to measuring success by when someone arrives, how long they sit in their chair, and when they leave. Building on solid trust and clear team norms, people leaders must be clear on how work is evaluated and continually engage in feedback – asking for it more than giving it – about how the experience is going for their people and what employees need to achieve their goals. Truth be told, it is much harder to manage to outcomes than measuring presenteeism, so carve out time and energy to improve your practice.

For organizations

Build equitable policies

In order to make WFA equitable, engaging, and human, organizations need to be reimagined, not retrofitted with add-ons and patches. In their awesome article about workplace transformation, Sheela Subramanian and Tina Gilbert, outline the need for policies and practices that can catalytically harness this “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to fundamentally change how work happens:

But retrofitting is not enough. True equality depends on a wholesale redesign of the workplace. The disruption and trauma of the past year have created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redesign working models from the ground up—with principles of diversity, equity and inclusion placed at the center from the start.

Such redesigned models can greatly improve the working experience of employees and communities that are disproportionately experiencing the negative effects of the pandemic.

These are lofty design aspirations that won’t be achieved overnight, but leaders have the opportunity to step up, seize this moment, and deliver lasting change by dismantling the anachronistic norms of work and redesigning flexible, diverse, equitable and inclusive work environments.

While the next year will skew the war for talent in favour of employers, the next decade will see employees voting with their feet/hands, heart, and minds like never before – whether employers define their purpose with equity, coolness, environmentalism, or something more novel, we should all be thinking of building such things from the ground up today.

Design with agility

Building from the ground up doesn’t need to be complex. Great come from testing and learning with simple, scalable, and/or delete-able experiments. I’m reading Loonshots by Safi Bahcall and have just been introduced to the concept of “three deaths”, which simply means that an idea probably won’t be sustainable unless it fails multiple times and applies improvements from these failures to the next version of the idea. WFA is new for most of us, so organizations should take an approach that favours experimentation, applies lessons learned at pace, and is not afraid to cancel things that aren’t working as well as they could. Conversely, when data tell organizations that implementing radical, or at least novel, practices are ideal, leaders should not shrink from the moment because doing so might be expensive, risky, or uncomfortable.

Support employee health

Employee burnout is a failure of systems and organizational leadership, not employees’ inability to cope with WFA/WFH stresses amidst a global pandemic. Senior leaders around the world should be conducting root-cause analyses of what is leading to declining well-being. Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant and Organizational Design Consultant Steven Fitzgerald would most likely encourage leaders to “think like scientists” (Grant) as well as look at the modern workplace experience through our employees’ eyes with empathy and fidelity (Fitzgerald). Interventions that address the root cause should be co-created with folks who are most immersed in the experience.

Create community connections

Working from anywhere will require communities to get creative about the flexible and resourced spaces that will facilitate the WFA transformation. We need more spaces that exist in the commons, such as my dream WFA location, Kilowatt, which is a co-working space (among other things) located in Bologna, Italy. Cities should work with a variety of partners to build more flexible, cooperative, and beautiful spaces for people to work.

As communities open and we are not working from home by ourselves with very limited contact outside of our households (and delivery services), I think that we will find novel neighbourhood connections that replace water cooler and elevator conversations. Some folks might see this as an awesome cross-selling with neighbours, whereas others will experience raised awareness and shifted perspective from unlikely conversations, which improves self-awareness and enhances creativity.

For teams and organizations, I hope that more partnerships between organizations and co-working spaces, such as 312 Main in Vancouver or the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, flourish across communities and, as a result, more human and economic connections are made across sectors and geographies in alignment with a society that builds back better from the Covid-19 pandemic.

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This article was originally published on March 24, 2021 (and it holds up pretty well).