Returning To The Office Does Not Magically Improve Collaboration, Culture or Leadership
Last week’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos reenergized the debate about working from home. There were numerous comments, including from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who said that working from home “doesn’t work for young kids or spontaneity or management.” While he allowed that jobs like researching and coding can be done remotely, the tenor of his and others’ comments were largely against working from home.
While he’s not entirely wrong that spontaneity and management are potentially more effective in the office, what his and others’ in-the-office preferences get wrong is that being face-to-face doesn’t magically cause those things to happen.
For example, Leadership IQ’s study on The State Of Leadership Development discovered that even in-person managers struggle to effectively perform coaching, giving feedback, and more. For example, only 16% of employees say their leader always removes the roadblocks to their success. And only 20% of employees say their leader always takes an active role in helping them to grow and develop their full potential.
Executive teams still struggle while working in the office, with one study finding that only 14% of senior managers strongly agree that members of their executive team are comfortable disagreeing with each other. And only 10% of executives strongly agree that every executive team meeting ends with clear to-dos, deadlines, and accountabilities.
Company values should be much easier to teach and promote working in person rather than working from home. Yet in the study Why Company Values Are Falling Short, we discovered that only 33% of people believe that their direct manager holds people accountable to the company values. And nearly a third of people believe that highly skilled employees can always or frequently get away with not living the company values.
The point is quite simple: Working in the office does not magically make leaders more effective, company values stronger, or teams more effective. Collaboration, culture and leadership could potentially benefit from working in person, but just being in person does not automatically improve any of those issues.
A Leadership IQ study called The State Of Working From Home found that employees are evenly divided on whether the productivity of meetings is better or worse working from home. The reason is that whether meetings are virtual or in-person, it takes effort and skill to run them effectively. Simply being remote doesn’t make meetings worse any more than being in person automatically makes meetings more productive. Before the pandemic, how many in-person meetings did you attend where participants were disengaged or otherwise occupied? How many in-person meetings lacked a clear purpose? How many invited the wrong people to attend?
Arguing whether people should work from home or in the office is the wrong debate to be having right now. The bigger issue is whether leaders and companies are serious about addressing the fundamental activities of leadership and culture-building. Is it a little harder to conduct a coaching conversation over a videoconference rather than in-person? Sure, but a good leader conducting a virtual conversation will be exponentially better than a mediocre leader holding that conversation face-to-face.
Worrying about remote work without fixing the underlying management, culture and team processes is like worrying about the paint job on a car with a seized engine. Who cares how good the car looks if you can’t get it out of the driveway?
