Will Corporate Culture Be A Thing in The Past?
It Just Can Not Survive with Extensive Remote Work Policies
When people think about esprit de corps the first thought would likely be attributed to military organizations such as the U.S. Marines, the Army Corps of Cadets or maybe even Green Berets. Many years ago people felt that IBM had achieved this with the early sales organization, and there is little question that Procter & Gamble created this feeling in both their sales organization and their brand management group.
In the current business environment one is hard pressed to come up with any company that really stands out has having a loyal, stable and committed workforce with a real sense of loyalty and commitment to the organization. Many experts have attributed this to the increasing number of very independent millennials who have joined the workforce in recent years, as this group tends to be less committed to the place they work than their older counterparts, and they are more willing to shop-around for new jobs to improve their lifestyle, even it it comes with a somewhat lower compensation package.
According to a CNN report on November 12 of this year, “a record number of Americans quit their jobs in September” . They quoted 4.4 million people quitting their jobs during the month.
While it is easy to attribute this phenomenon as being related to the increased number of millennials in the workforce, the emergence from the Covid crisis or maybe even the large supply of jobs available which provides more opportunities for advancement. It is very difficult to argue with any of these points, but in my opinion a factor that has not been considered seriously enough is the remote work culture that has emerged our of necessity due to the Covid crisis. This remote work culture show few signs of dramatically declining, and there is definitely a sense that it will continue in some form for the immediate future. While many companies have announced their return to work in the office dates, it is evident that they feel a great risk to the workforce, as so many people have become accustomed to working from home on their own schedule in their jeans, rather than going to the office in business casual and conforming to “office hours” standards. . In my opinion the remote work culture / trend is very dangerous to business, unless it is managed very carefully, which I feel would be a split schedule with more time in the office than working remote.
Remote Working – What is The Problem
There are very definite benefits to remote working, such as reduced commuting time, thus theoretically resulting in more work time at home, reduced need to purchase clothing to wear the office , or the financial savings that can be generated by downsizing offices which will reduce rents. However, it has long been my opinion ( published my first article on this in 1998) that the policy toward remote working should be limited to no more than one or two days a week. I believer strongly that full time remote workforces are a recipe for medium to long term corporate disaster. While some employees say they are more productive when working remotely ( a position I strongly challenge), there are some very important reasons that support the dangers of significant commitments to remote working. They are:
• The difficulty in creating a bond between the individual and the company which is a key part of building espirt de corps among the workforce. Simply being in a common workspace with others who are working to achieve the same overall goal contributes to a feeling of belonging to something with others like yourself. The relationship better the organization and the individual is reinforced every day the employees come to the office. It is virtually impossible to achieve this over a Zoom conference.
• The extremely difficult environment for training and development that is inherent in a remote work situation. While it is possible to provide some supervision to subordinates via Zoom calls, there is a completely different type of relationship between two people talking through a computer screen vs being in the same room face-to-face. As a result I strongly believe the effectiveness of the supervision is dramatically less in the remote environment.
• The ability to competently on-board new employees is significantly easier in an office vs a remote situation. There are many stories we have all heard about new employee being hired to work remotely, working for the company for a year or more, and then leaving the company having never met anyone in the company in person. This person very likely never created a bond with his/her employer, and as a result had no problem leaving for another situation. An individual entering a new company should experience a very fertile environment in which to work, both in terms of having resources that may be available in the office but are difficult to get ( or unavailable) on line, and the immediate availability of peers to whom this new employee can access in order to seek answers to questions or to get help solving specific work-related problems.
• Despite all the influx of group on-line coordination software, it is quicker and easier to gather a few people in a conference room to jointly solve a problem or develop a plan of action, as opposed to setting up a Zoom call with a group for some time in the future. The “out of sight, out of mind” argument definitely is relevant when a person is working on a project remotely, as the access to others takes more effort than it would in an office environment.
• There is a social aspect of working in an office that is extremely important to most people. This does not imply that workers spend lots of time around the water cooler, or talking with colleagues about the weekend football games in another person’s office. However, there is little question that having colleagues around you to interact, if only for a minute or two, does improve the quality of life for most people with virtually no impact on the levels of productivity.
• Finally, when working in an office, an employee does not have the distractions that are part of everyday life when working out of home. The chances are that in the office there is not a full referigerator waiting to be opened, a television that can be turned on at any time, a significant other that just wants to ask a quick question, or a bicycle sitting in the garage just waiting to be ridden to work up a sweat.
Where To From Here?
In view of the generally positive feelings of many, if not most people about working remotely during the pandemic, for most businesses to achieve their medium and long term objectives ( increased profitability produced by a better, more effectively trained workforce) the amount of work employees are permitted to do remotely must be controlled. During the pandemic, many companies experienced great success and some even have decided that a remote environment can work very well for them. However, I am confident that in the medium to long term the prognosis will not be very positives. While the millennial group probably will object to any meaningful commitment to working in the office, it is the challenge of senior management to explain the benefits to them and the company of their making a significant commitment (at least 3 days per week) to working in the office. If this is not accomplished, I am confident that the employee turnover reported this past September will continue, and the ultimate loser will be both the employees and America’s corporations.
Encore Strategic Business Consulting is an organization that exists to solve problems and provide practical solutions for large and small organizations. We help our clients in all aspects of general management, marketing, sales, marketing research web development and social media. Tom Greenbaum has been in the consulting business for almost 50 years, and has recently published his eighth book “ 150 Lessons Learned From 50 Years in the Consulting Business”. (72nd St. Books; ISBN:978-0-9858550-9-3)