Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what I’m missing about return to office mandates. What study are senior leaders absorbing that perhaps isn’t publicly available, what hidden metric are we optimising for that requires a particular level of insight I don’t yet possess, what possible benefit could there be in actively cultivating a less productive workforce who are increasingly exhausted, unhappy and ill?
Perhaps the most cited explanation is economic fear for high street cafes, bars and lunch spots. Particularly following COVID, it’s possible we’ve conflated lockdown engagement with local amenities and drawn the conclusion that working from home would mean never going out to a restaurant, shopping for new outfits or grabbing a coffee on the way home from the gym.
Then there’s the similar economic fear around offices and travel infrastructure. As gruelling and unpleasant as commuter trains and noisy overlit offices tend to be, they are presumably making a substantial amount of money for somebody, and that somebody likely wields a great deal more political influence than we do in demanding that the suboptimal reliance on such infrastructure is indefinitely sustained.
Likely there are outdated status quo factors at play here as well. We’ve always worked this way, I had to do it and therefore so do you, we can’t have people moving out of the big cities, work is about more than getting things done, how do I know my employees aren’t at the beach, I had children on the basis somebody else would predominantly take care of them, that sort of thing.
While I’m sure each of these are important contributing factors, the variable I personally find most convincing and seldom discussed is the idea that the working world is almost exclusively setup to recognise and reward extroverts.
As Martin Gutmann highlights in “we celebrate the wrong leaders”, extroverts thrive with a captive audience and I’d argue we’re now at the point where our entire global economy centres around this performance paradigm.
From venture capital agreements, speculative stock pricing and precarious investment bubbles, rapid growth critically depends on the ability to confidently sell future value before creating present reality. This leads to a self-reinforcing system that it’s not what you build, it’s what you dream and so companies are necessarily setup to optimise for the dreamers who require our undivided in-person attention, encouragement and praise.
Like a Lady Gaga lockdown gig, audiences are just not the same online.
Digital Becca 