This article from Fortune magazine nails the new normal for tech workers. Society has finally figured out that all the rules put in place for farmers are completely useless today. We aren’t just talking about daylight-savings-time (which is being canceled all over the world for all the right reasons). No, we are talking about the base expectation about when tech work happens based on the objective realities and needs of today’s modern workforce.
Not only does tech work not require daylight, it is usually best done in the dark. Knowledge work takes immense concentration and everything from the leaf blowers outside to the random annoying co-worker who has to stop by your cubicle for no reason are enough justification to allow knowledge workers the maximum amount of concentration.
This focus on concentration is one thing I noticed IBM got right from the very beginning. They never put anyone in cubicles. There is good science demonstrating that cubicles are actually counter-productive. This is why Apple was so stupid to force massive, over-priced cubicles on their entire workforce.
Better than cubicles, however, is one’s own choice of where to work. Remote work fundamentally requires the individual setting up ways to focus that work for them. If they don’t, they fail. Modern generations of workers are setup to discover and meet these needs for themselves without having them dictated for them. And they also have the freedom and will to leave a job that doesn’t respect this.
All of humanity changed their schedules to accommodate those who wanted more daylight for their chosen activities (farmers or elite depending on which version of history you accept). With that same reality why then is it not a complete no-brainer to shift the “work day” for tech and knowledge workers to begin with the sun is setting instead of rising. This allows activities that require sun to be done while there is sun including personal recreational activities like sports and travel. Instead of being forced to sit in front of a screen or at a table for entertainment after the sun has set, modern workers given flexibility in their schedule can be surfing, cycling, volunteering at elementary schools, shopping while stores are open, and any number of other activities that simply cannot happen after the sun sets. Forcing tech workers to sit in their remote places of work and look out the window at the beautiful day they are being forced to miss because of 9-5 work schedule requirements is just stupid and will always fail.
Allowing remote workers to make their own schedule that includes being sure to show up for meetings when one is needed to bring everyone together is far more productive than forcing them to all be around at the same time. Forcing a meeting makes sure people don’t waste time randomly chatting about things that could be hashed out in an asynchronous chat thread and then finalized in a 20 minute meeting to confirm consensus. Even support roles that need to respond immediately to outages can easily be expanded to include automated alerting to mobile devices calling those available back online when needed.
The only people who think they need to control remote, modern workers are the boomer managers and other employers with a defunct mindset that suggests their companies productivity will suffer if they don’t see every one of those workers sitting in a cubicle. The irony is that forcing people to sit in a cubicle pretty much guarantees they won’t be productive. They have to give up hours of their lives just to make living from a cubicle possible. There’s a reason there are so many jokes—even entire television shows and comic strips—about such life. It was never productive. The rising generations not only realize this but simply won’t tolerate it. Life is too short and there is far too much to do to make life better for everyone than waste it on such foolishness.
Go ahead. Force an enlightened worker to come into the office and work some arbitrary number of hours. Watch your company fail. It might look initially productive, but in the long run all the best people will go elsewhere. And, my God, it’s about time.