WFH: We're having the wrong argument

Ever since Covid-19 lockdowns ended, bosses and employees have been arguing about working from home. At first, grateful for any effort that kept companies alive, managers were open to flexibility: full remote working, a day, 3 or 4 days a week in the office. But as they waited, the return to office work didn’t pick up much momentum. So now everyone searches for the magic number of days that are good enough to be effective but not too many as to exacerbate resentment and exits.

As more and more companies mandate a five day office week, misunderstanding has become rife. Workers believe that demanding their physical presence is simply a demonstration of brute force. Bosses think wanting to work from home is slacking. Few appreciate how very expensive commuting has become in both time and money, and it’s hard to quantify what gets lost when everyone works from inside their own bubble.

This snarling row is the wrong fight.

The issue is not about numbers of days in the office.

It ought to be about productivity, one of the most critical aspects of work that is also one of the least understood. Ever since the 19^th century, we have known that optimum human productivity at work taps out at around 40 hours a week. It isn’t physically impossible to work longer of course—it’s just that, when tired, we make more mistakes and then need extra hours to clean up the mess we’ve made.

But a deeper appreciation of productivity came from an study done by Leslie Perlow. She was working with a software division that had never shipped a product in time. That wasn’t so uncommon in the industry at the time, but the problem now threatened the group with closure.

In came Perlow who had engineers keep logs of where their time went. It makes for tragic reading. Coming in early to complete an important piece of work, an engineer is sidetracked by colleagues who need his help, by managers wanting status reports, by phone calls and casual conversations in the hallway. The work he had hoped to finish by lunchtime didn’t get started til 5pm. Sound familiar? Everyone was exhausted; tired engineers make more mistakes, a vicious cycle.

Perlow identified two different kinds of work. What everyone called ‘real work’—writing code, presentations, reports—demanded concentration. But no one got more than 20 minutes of quiet time before they were interrupted by ‘everything else’: meetings, hallway conversations, helping colleagues. This work wasn’t irrelevant; engineers said 96% of it was helpful. It wasn’t urgent but it was wildly disruptive.

Why not, she proposed, schedule the two kinds of work differently? On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, nobody could be interrupted before noon; these quiet time windows were reserved for real work: head down, concentrating. The rest of the week was open season for calls, meetings, football pool, fire drills, you name it.

The result?

A productivity gain of 65 percent.

The product shipped on time.

The experiment had cost—nothing.

This amazing result had two causes. The first is the more obvious: multi-tasking is a disaster. Jumping from email to a presentation to a conversation to Slack and back to the presentation isn’t just exhausting; it wastes time as each new work mode requires a readjustment of focus—where was I? – and back again. It’s tiring and, long term, makes it less likely you will ever remember the information you were handling. To be done well, real work requires that you not be interrupted.

But all the other stuff matters too. Helping each other is critical to any organization’s success. It’s how information flows, from one person to another, making the whole group better informed. That’s also how problems get solved and new ideas emerge. Knowing that their time was protected by Quiet Time made the engineers more helpful, more willing to explain concerns and help solve problems because they could be confident that the time they needed for their real work was protected.

How does this relate to working from home?

It implies that distinguishing between the two kinds of work is critical to productivity. Real work needs to be done wherever the individual is best able to defend their concentration from the dive-bombing of managers and colleagues. For some, that might be at home; for others it will be in an office. All workers should be trusted to make their best choice. If they aren’t, that is a separate question for both parties.

But being available to help and to be helped is better done where it can be spontaneous and generous. That’s an office. If 96% of this work is important, then eliminating it, or making it harder, will damage productivity. Helpfulness is a critical characteristic of high achieving organizations, a quality which should be taken more seriously even if it doesn’t always look or feel like work.

I’ve frequently discussed this research with CEOs and senior executives around the world. Their eyes light up at the prospect of a 65% increase in productivity that won’t cost them a penny. And a few companies have implemented lite versions of Perlow’s framework: they ban meetings before noon, or after 4pm. Organizations that make Fridays email-free so employees have to talk to each other. Offices that give each cubicle a big Do Not Disturb sign for their chairs. But few bosses have shown a willingness to forfeit their power to interrupt.

From this, I draw two conclusions. The first is that the employee’s instinctive interpretation of the demand to return to work as a power play is not wrong. In organizations where the personal demonstration of power wins over productivity, much is awry that needs attention. Such attitudes breed distrust and resentment, which are distractions in themselves.

The second is that, as the late great Richard Hackman demonstrated time and again, helpfulness is a mission critical part of any great culture. Why? In part, because it is how information flows, how people learn from each other, catch mistakes and find new possibilities. I often think of companies as electrical networks in which any constraint on helpfulness (like time pressure) is an impedance, uselessly consuming energy. Liberate helpfulness and energy is released.

And everyone, from the CEO to the janitor, needs help. At the beginning of a career, you need people to take an interest in you, something they can’t do if you’re not there, visible and appreciated. When you’re successful, you need people who will tell you the truth, notice when you’re struggling or lost. (Yes, this happens to CEOs too.) It’s hard to help people you don’t know and can’t see. It’s hard to be helped if you’re remote or invisible.

At the firm that Perlow studied, employees were ranked; those who were most present, working up to 12 hours a day, were ranked (and, as a consequence, paid) more highly. Those who were less visible but more helpful were downgraded. That is simply ignorant. It isn’t where you are but how you contribute that matters.

This is the discussion we should be having: not about hours, not about how many days in the office. But about productivity.

Managers and their reports need to share a better understanding of the two kinds of work. They should trust each other to know how to make productive decisions about where to do what. Good choices benefit everyone; this is not a zero sum game. Who doesn’t wish to be less exhausted? Who wouldn’t prefer to start a task and finish it without interruption?

Why do I give Perlow’s research such credence? For the simple reason that, even before I encountered it, in every team and company I’ve run, I never specified when or where people should work—and I was never let down. And we did ship on time.

If You Want to Go Further

I first encountered Perlow’s work via Adam Grant’s brilliant first book Give and Take, one of the few business books I recommend to anyone who asks. It’s counter-intuitive, challenges a lot of business school assumptions and is a thrill.

Perlow’s study is very accessible and highly insightful on what she calls ‘the sociology of work’ and I wish every CEO would read it.

What Gives Me Joy

In my forthcoming book, Embracing Uncertainty, I write about Nina Simone, so of course I’ve been listening to more of her than ever. Her range is famously phenomenal but I particularly love the echoes of Bach in this performance of ‘Love Me or Leave Me’. The way she collaborates with herself (on piano and vocals) is nothing short of astonishing.