The Politics of Work From Home(WFH)
The most famous word COVID19, has changed how atleast the IT, Tech and Service industries work. Work from home (WFH) is a common aspect as lockdowns continue across the world.
Companies are divided on the strategy, duration and methodology of WFH. We see there are 2 types of companies.
- The ones who have gone all in, saying that their employees can WFH forever
- The ones who are cautious and believe that WFH in the long run is not good.
A premise of why this has happened is essential to the understanding of how companies behave and organise themselves.
If you look at companies who are resisting, they tend to be larger corporates, who have established themselves before the 2000’s. They have grown considerably in hierarchy and are inexorably linked to the a lot of the discussions and decisions being taken over what I call ‘Water Cooler Moments’. These water cooler moments define a large part of how the organisation is structured too. There are various levels of decision making and following. Strong policies in place. This means, you have more number of people working, because there are water cooler moments. It is not that it is not important, but this is how the company is structured. Moreover trying to change the structure would change the delicate balance maintained to the shareholders.
On the other side, there are companies, who are structured flat from the beginning. There are lesser water cooler moments, and decisions are taken based on data. For everything an experiment is run, data is collected and even in a virtual meeting decisions are taken.
The major difference is to the power structure in these companies. Positions matter in the water cooler companies, and there are too many people stuck in positions where their job is only to meet teams and other people to make decisions. Doing this virtually is practically impossible as a zoom/teams meeting does not give an opportunity to sway the decisions.Moreover it could be recorded (grin grin)
Effects of WFH
There are definite benefits to WFH, real estate saved, to operations cost savings, to more freedom for employees as well as employers. A lot has been said about this, however there are definite cons too.
- Humans are social beings, the longer they are away from each other, the harder it is to blend back in when required. As an example is the phenomenon of Hikikomori in Japan.
- Apart from this is the pay disparity cost, Facebook is already discussing this. If one is working from a Tier 2 or Tier 3 cost city away from SFO for example, why do we pay the same.
- What will happen to small business which depend on clusters of people at office areas, restaurants, hangout places etc.. These are completely dependent on office goer traffic, and have invested in expensive places as they are typically located in CBD (Central Business Districts)
- Will we become more socialistic than continue with capitalism with all the expenses being lower due to the above mentioned reasons. If so what will happen to notions of consumerism, GDP et al..
- How will work monitoring be done. In a lot of the service organisations, in countries like India, there is constant monitoring of the work force, in person/through meetings. With WFH, a facade is created. Will there be stricter surveillance as we see in here. If so what happens to quality of life and work.
So where are we heading?
With all this in focus, we see there is a very clear difference in companies which are flat, to companies who are hierarchical. Also we see as humans we want contact, yes more will move to the online/virtual world. However there would be many more opportunities/reasons to connect. We are going to see “Separate the Wheat from the Chaff” moment for companies and individuals
I can only say one thing. This situation of Work From Home will bring the best out of companies as well as individuals, and, also will show the chinks in the armour in companies and individuals.
