April 29th, 2022: Greetings from Austin! I’m going to be off next week as I’m taking my seventh-week sabbatical. The goals of these weeks are to be unscheduled, explore a bit more, and see what emerges. I may end up writing something but no promises.
That's a useful breakdown of what goes into making "work from anywhere" feasible.
I keep seeing shallow and polarized discussions around the subject: by the way people discuss this, it seem that it was an overnight change.
And I keep saying that "work from anywhere" is just and incremental improvement on what they have built around the years in terms of culture and ways of working.
Lots of companies right know are giving their employees some degrees of freedom in terms of flexibility, but without the support of a culture, processes and and organizational design, it is just a cosmetic change.
They had to come up with some flexibility in terms of "benefits" because of the competitive pressure to do so, but they are missing years and years of organizational and cultural work needed to make it work organically.
While for a company like AirBnB it is just the latest, incremental evolution, for most companies to have conceded flexibility due to competitive pressure (or simply copy&pasting what other have been doing) will present the challenge of having to do all the cultural and organizational work that they haven't done in the past.
Agree - love the dimensionality and the optimism associated with this analysis and summarized perspective. In beginning doctoral research on the subject of remote/hybrid work and empowerment I have only recently learned that while it so much about physical location, it is about psychological connection for engagement and associated outcomes like retention, creativity and well-being. With whom, where and how people interact to create, solve, and produce will add even more dimensions to these. Perceptions about the experience or potential for it, will likely be quantifiably more predictive than the options to work in another country. Finally it feels like the relative bold openness to the ‘restructure of the workplace’ may be moving faster than the individual’s ability to process where they want to be, why and how. I wonder how organizations might continue to be as adaptive as they have been since 2020 and nurture the awareness of this process with individuals. Thank you Paul for the the thoughtful analysis and presentation of these factors.
That's a useful breakdown of what goes into making "work from anywhere" feasible.
I keep seeing shallow and polarized discussions around the subject: by the way people discuss this, it seem that it was an overnight change.
And I keep saying that "work from anywhere" is just and incremental improvement on what they have built around the years in terms of culture and ways of working.
Lots of companies right know are giving their employees some degrees of freedom in terms of flexibility, but without the support of a culture, processes and and organizational design, it is just a cosmetic change.
They had to come up with some flexibility in terms of "benefits" because of the competitive pressure to do so, but they are missing years and years of organizational and cultural work needed to make it work organically.
While for a company like AirBnB it is just the latest, incremental evolution, for most companies to have conceded flexibility due to competitive pressure (or simply copy&pasting what other have been doing) will present the challenge of having to do all the cultural and organizational work that they haven't done in the past.
Agree - love the dimensionality and the optimism associated with this analysis and summarized perspective. In beginning doctoral research on the subject of remote/hybrid work and empowerment I have only recently learned that while it so much about physical location, it is about psychological connection for engagement and associated outcomes like retention, creativity and well-being. With whom, where and how people interact to create, solve, and produce will add even more dimensions to these. Perceptions about the experience or potential for it, will likely be quantifiably more predictive than the options to work in another country. Finally it feels like the relative bold openness to the ‘restructure of the workplace’ may be moving faster than the individual’s ability to process where they want to be, why and how. I wonder how organizations might continue to be as adaptive as they have been since 2020 and nurture the awareness of this process with individuals. Thank you Paul for the the thoughtful analysis and presentation of these factors.