The battle over remote work is heating up again, as more traditionalist business leaders, such as at Tesla and Google, are demanding that their employees come to the office. Yet what these executives are failing to realize is that the drama, stress and tensions caused by their demands won’t matter. Remote work will dominate this fall.
That’s because of the much more infectious BA.4 and BA.5 Covid variants, which the Biden administration predicts will lead to a major surge with 100 million infections in the fall. During both the Delta surge and the Omicron surge, companies that tried to force their employees back to the office had to roll back their plans, with all that effort wasted.
So why do these leaders pursue this doomed push to get their staff into the office? The key lies in what makes these executives feel successful and feeds their identity as leaders. In fact, one leader admitted as much in an op-ed piece, saying that “There’s a deeply personal reason why I want to go back to the office. It’s selfish, but I don’t care. I feel like I lost a piece of my identity in the pandemic.”
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By honestly saying the quiet part out loud, this op-ed reveals how other leaders use false claims that remote work undermines productivity, innovation, and social capital to try to cover up their true concerns. This speaks to a mental blindspot called the egocentric bias, which prioritizes one’s own perspective and worldview over others.
Following these predispositions will hurt the bottom lines for companies. What works much better is a hybrid-first, team-led model: a flexible approach where individual team leads consult with their team members to decide what works best for them. It was adopted by large companies like the Fortune 200 high-tech manufacturer Applied Materials, and middle-size organizations, including the Information Sciences Institute, a 400-staff data science and machine learning research center. Team members come to the office when they want to collaborate more intensely. Otherwise, team members stay at home, since workers are substantially more productive working remotely. As Covid cases increase in their areas, the teams flexibly adapt their approach to collaborate and socialize fully remotely.
This approach provides the best of all worlds. It fits the desires of employees, whose biggest non-salary demand is flexibility. It also maximizes profits, boosting retention, recruitment, collaboration, innovation and productivity. And finally, it addresses health risks. Traditionalist leaders need to recognize that hybrid-first, team-led work will bring success to their companies.
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and author of Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage.
