The Raw Signal Group newsletter this week makes the provocative claim that “The future of work is in pieces”.
The newsletter makes the point that treating work as a binary choice between in-person vs. remote work is far too limiting.
Yes, there’s an element of in-person collaboration and serendipity that is hard to match when working remotely, because, as they put it, “Knowledge work — aligned, sustained, creative, collaborative work — is very hard to do in pieces.” You can’t just do your part without knowing how it all fits together, and what other people are working on, and how priorities and tradeoffs are being made.
And yes, at the same time, the convenience and flexibility of remote work is wonderful and nobody wants to give that up. As they write, “The most wonderful parts of the future of work we’ve all built over the last few years are the places where it supports that sustainability and creativity. Where giving a person more space — mental space, child-care space, time-of-day space, geographic space, no-daily-commute space — helps them put up their best work. In many cases, it is what allowed them to be part of the work at all. That’s good shit. It’s valid to want to keep it.”
So I like their challenge to stop thinking it’s one or the other:
“The silliest approach to that question is to try to make it a fight over whether the benefits of in-office alignment and collaboration are worth giving up that flexibility. Other than from an abject lack of creativity, why would you box yourself in that way?
A far better approach is to ask, “how might we?” How do we preserve the flexibility that people value but address the isolation and scattering that piecework has created?”
How might managers and leaders communicate and coordinate differently to create the benefits of in-person collaboration while preserving the flexibility of remote work? I don’t know, but returning to what worked in the past isn’t the answer. Let’s experiment with innovative new patterns of work instead.
What have you seen work well? What are the anti-patterns that don’t work?
https://lnkd.in/eAbUXC39