The Corona virus is holding the world hostage at the time I write this, and is probably feeling pretty pleased with itself. For my part, I won’t speculate about when this mess will be over, but I retain my optimism that we humans will overcome it… after all, remember the smallpox virus: it had killed millions of us well into the 20^th century, but we’ve finally wiped it right off the face of our planet. Now we’re gunning for Coronavirus… I’d be less smug if I was in its place.

Meanwhile we’re all stuck at home and have time for reflection, and here I want to discuss the current interest in working from home… and why I think it’s more complicated than you may think.

Telecommuting, then and now

So far the news are full of companies and organizations stating the obvious “our people are working from home”. Which is music to my ears, since it was I who led one of the earliest large-scale corporate telecommuting programs back in the 1990s. But there is a difference between what is happening now and what we’ve done at Intel back then:

• Then we could prepare: we took a year to define, pilot, refine and formalize a Telecommuting program, with the numerous details that made it a success. Today the need to go home hit the workplace like a bombshell, with no time at all for preparation.
• Then the home workers had an entire office-bound ecosystem to support them and interact with them. Today practically everyone is at home at the same time.
• On the other hand, in the nineties the technology and the concept of working from home were new and scary for many; today everyone is used to work (also) from home, if only after hours and on weekends (and on vacations, unfortunately).

What worries me is the implicit assumption that people can just go home full time and do their best to approximate how they’ve worked in the office. Why is that bad? It’s better than not working at all, of course, but the real goals should be (a) to optimize working from home so it’s as good as working in the office was, and (b) to leverage the entire exercise so that once this damned virus is beaten, the organization can come out of the emergency better, stronger and more effective than in the old days. The opportunities that working from home presents are many, and this is our chance to embrace them and create a better work culture. But are we making this happen?

What you should do

For sure, this will not happen if we just send everyone home and hope for the best. You need a strategic function in the organization that can step back, examine what is working and what isn’t, guide the activity now and at the same time extract the know-how for “the day after”. What I’m recommending is that each large organization assign a person chartered to follow up on the whole work-from-home situation, and work closely with all the stakeholders to make it better, now and later.

Such a person would:

• Interview the telecommuters, sampling different groups, job functions, and hierarchy levels to get a good feel in real time for how it’s working (or not) and how it can be made better for the people involved as well as for their groups and for the company as a whole.
• Recommend to senior management how to steer the methodology in real time to make things better during this emergency.
• Interface with stakeholders like HR, IT, Health and Safety, Legal, and so on to make sure the telecommuters are well supported to do a great job while caring for themselves and their families. (Chairing a workgroup including representatives of all those groups – and of the telecommuters who do the real work – would be a good way to do this.)
• Work with the corporate training group, and with external consultancies specializing in this work mode, to create and deliver training materials and guidance to the homebound employees.
• Build a set of recommendations for the day after, and have management adopt them when the day comes (and they’ll be much more open to adopting them if they’ve had an ongoing interaction with this strategist before that day arrives).

Of course, it’s easy for me to draw this list, because this is pretty much what I’ve done at Intel – except that I had it easy: I had all the time in the world to plan first, pilot slowly, monitor and define policy recommendations. Whoever takes such a role today will be working under harsher conditions, but will have the advantage of not having to fight the status quo: the status quo ante is likely shattered forever. How exciting to chart the way forward to a new age!

Some pointers

Some advice I’d give this hypothetical strategist:

• Aim high! Your goal should not be to have people doing at home what they did in the office. It should be to have them do things that are optimized for a fully distributed workforce, serving a quarantined customer base – a completely new situation.
• Ask yourself which pre-Corona work processes and workflows are dead baggage, and can be eliminated – not because they’re incompatible with the current state of affairs but because we’re better off without them.
• Ask how the current situation can be leveraged for greater productivity and better work/life balance (just think of all those dead hours in traffic jams coming and going to the office – should work hours be renegotiated?).
• Don’t think of telecommuters only as individuals; look beyond to groups, to networks of interacting individuals. For example, develop an effective methodology of group-level interaction: all members of the team need to have scheduled (virtual) face time together, in a structured way, at least once a week.
• Find ways to perfect the art of remote (virtual) meetings, now that they must become the norm. Think, for instance, of the video experience in Skype and Zoom meetings, with half the participants appearing too close, too far, too dark, or looking to the side instead of at their coworkers. Alas, we’ve become accustomed to poor video – maybe now we should raise the bar. For starters, people should all be using good quality webcams, setting and positioning them correctly, and providing good lighting.
• Recognize the interaction of today’s telecommuting with everything else that’s going on. For example: with schools and kindergartens closed, homebound employees have to deal with bored and upset children in their new “workplaces”. I believe we should factor parenting duties right into the new work culture. Before this, home-bound workers could be expected to keep their children out of the home office, perhaps under the eye of a spouse or caretaker, for the duration of a video meeting; the occasional need to attend to a baby’s cries was accompanied by apologies. But with everyone full time at home, there should be no apologies – we should accept and embrace the dual role of working parents as part of the new reality. Remember those “bring your kid to work days”? Well, now every day is like that; or is it “bring your parent to home day”?
• Assume this may not be the last pandemic, and make it your goal to build a super-robust system that can respond to future emergencies with extreme agility.

Speaking of agility – perhaps this is the greatest benefit you can reap. The ability to keep working in the face of war or natural disaster was certainly on my PowerPoint slides when I sold Intel management on Telecommuting as a direction, but I admit I never imagined something like COVID-19. I advise companies to come out of the present situation ready for a recurrence of something just as bad; we should be ready to close the office as the drop of a hat and land on our feet running – and keep the business running – time and again. With any luck we’ll never need to use this capability again, but if we do, it could be the key to our survival.

Be well, everyone!