Today’s newsletter falls in the “pandemic” box rather than AI. It is about the on-going issue of organisations trying to get their employees back into the office rather than work at home.
I was listening to yet another corporate presentation recounting their failures to get their employees — particularly, new or younger employees — into the office. Work from home (or WFH) has trade-offs. It turns out that productivity was surprisingly high out of the office and many aspects of personal satisfaction were higher. Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues have been documenting all of this since 2020. You can read that work here.
But there is a broader worry regarding more intangible issues. These range from communication to younger people “learning the ropes.” They are things that are hard to see and whose benefits if they are ever apparent come in drips and drabs over the long term. But three years into this, many have noticed that stuff is missing and many organisations want to increase the time people spend in the office.
A range of things have been tried. One was just to simply force people back under the threat of losing their job. In a tight labour market, that bluff, if it was one, has been called. Most corporates who tried this failed. At the other extreme has been providing what I’ll call “office perks.” Things like free lunches, better coffee and social activities have been tried. And they work. The days those things are offered people come in. But it hasn’t created enough of a change for the real benefits of office work to be realised.
When I was looking at the data from one firm that was multi-national, an interesting factoid stood out. Some offices had actually managed to get 80 to 90 percent average time in the office in a company where the norm was more like 30 percent. And that 30 percent was usually just the same people. That suggested to me a hypothesis and a potential experiment.
My Hypothesis
I’m calling this “my hypothesis” but others may also have had it and I am just unaware because I haven’t really looked.
My starting point is to think about habits and routines. Work is full of them. But it isn’t just about the work, it is about the stuff around the work. What is your commute going to be, when and where are you getting lunch or coffee, how to schedule other regular activities. Wherever you work, you form routines.
The issue is that routines are sticky. Once you have found one, the whole point is that you keep to it. But that also means that if there is a better routine out there, you don’t necessarily know or find out about it. You would have to do something different for a sustained period to even form another routine, let alone evaluate it.
Studies have shown this matters. Here’s Tim Harford:
In February 2014, London’s Underground was partially shut down by a strike that forced many commuters to find new ways to get to work. The disruption lasted just 48 hours, but when three economists (Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems) studied data from the city’s transport network, they discovered something interesting.
Tens of thousands of commuters did not return to their original routes, presumably having found faster or more pleasant ways to reach their destination. A few hours of disruption were enough to make them realise that they had been doing commuting wrong their entire adult lives.
In other words, people were shocked out of their routines and found something better as a result. Commuting is, of course, an easy routine relative to the whole systems people develop in their work habits.
So here is the hypothesis:
If people were forced back to the office for a sustained period of time (say, a month), new routines will be found, benefits will be noticed and when the requirement is removed, those habits will stick.
This is a hypothesis about a different sort of intervention. Yes, it imposes a requirement. But it imposes a requirement temporarily and, what is more, you can show your work. You can say exactly why you are trying this experiment. So it is fully transparent.
So I am putting this out there as an option for organisations. Choose a month, run an experiment and force people in. Give people notice that it is going to occur in case they need to make other family arrangements etc. But provide an experiment where (a) people have an incentive to form a new routine and (b) where they have the best opportunity to see the value from that new routine. If I am right in my theory here, and it is only a theory, getting people regularly into the office may be restored even if we live in a more hybrid environment than we did pre-pandemic. The idea is to turn your office into a 80-90 percent one rather than a 30 percent one.
If you do conduct such an experiment, please let me know. Hopefully we can find some stories to follow up on here.