Work from home is on track to remove 800B$ out of 20.7T$ of the business real estate market.
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” – Bill Gates
What changes have happened? Can we articulate them in a meaningful way?
A new Type of work
With the traditional work contract, an employer is buying hours of your life. If the employee doesn’t give the hours, the employer terminates the employee. But in a remote company, the employer can’t “see” which hours are actually executed. The employer instead is buying a “set of outputs”. Instead of buying “life hours”, employer is buying “results”, this is a very big difference and breaks the “work social contract” in a profound way.
- Team members knows each other a lot less because they don’t talk as much to each other
- Management don’t see employees. Employees don’t see managers.
- You don’t go to the office daily; you stay home all day.
Now the not-so-obvious
- Intra-company relationships are different. They become more functional and less “relationship” driven.
- Workers are more autonomous. They do more of “what they want”, less of “what you want”.
- Work is not at the center of your life anymore. Your home becomes the new center.
- Managers used to be the key employees. They are becoming less important in favor of the people “actually making stuff”.
- There is not a “one-size fit all” employment model. Each person has their own requirements. As a corollary, it becomes very easy to work with part-time workers and contractors.
Any of this point changes deeply what’s expected of an employee. Just the last point is already a revolution: part-time workers are not excluded anymore from your organization. They can have an important contribution and becomes (again) key employees.
These changes are so big that even the “non-remote employees” are impacted.
A new type of organization
An organization can be defined by the sum of the behavior of all the employees (including their collaboration). As we’ve seen above, this is changing a lot, so organization must change a lot. And a lot more that they think.
Organizations are built to “deliver work”. They organize workers around optimal trade-offs (e.g. 9 to 5, up or out, …). Remote organizations operate around different trade-offs.
Counter-intuitively remote first company are not structured around work. It’s not needed. What is especially interesting is some employees decide to put the company at the center of their life while some others do not. Remote accommodate both “workstyles”. At Inboxbooster, we have contractors working only a few hours for us and full time members. Both are part of the organization but differently.
What remote organizations are doing is empowering employees by giving them back their agency.
“Sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over actions and their consequences”
Because workers are autonomous, they can deliver value with minimal engagement and at their terms. The worker can refuses to perform some tasks or decide more important are needed. This is very different from the “20th century hierarchical model”.
It’s still an experiment in progress. How do you give workers more agencies while coordinating? And because “communication lines” are not effective, how do get engagement when we need it? When do absolutely need it? I don’t have all the answers. What I know is that it’s a beautiful human experiments where we’re empowering and learning to work with very diverse people.
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