A glimpse at the future of work.
Eleanor Cummins September
8, 2020
In The Modern Office, PopSci gives
readers a glimpse into the workplace of the future, from seismic COVID-era
shifts in our built environment to the long-awaited demise of the 9-to-5.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic immediately
altered when, where, and how we work, and more changes are yet to come. As
public health officials have come to understand more about the novel
coronavirus, it’s become increasingly clear that our offices, our most common
commute strategies, and even our elevator rides can contribute to the spread of
this deadly disease. But protecting people from the ravages of COVID while
still processing invoices and running meetings is a tricky balance, and one
we’re only just beginning to strike.
The typical American workday is already
radically different than it was in February: The percentage of employees in the
US working remotely full-time rocketed from just 5.2 percent before the
pandemic to roughly 50 percent at its peak
in May. At home, workers are juggling deadlines, children, pets, and the stress of a mass casualty event.
They’ve given up commutes and conference rooms to keep each other safe. But
what comes next? We spoke with experts in management, design, and cognitive
science about workplace trends of the near past and future, and how they might
factor into our return to a new normal.
What does a healthier
office look like?
Perhaps the biggest change to the office will be
the number of people working in it at any given time. Despite its grand proclamations about
a remote work future, Facebook began calling select workers back into the
office after the Fourth of July, according to Business Insider.
But employees work in shifts to ensure the building remains at just 25 percent
capacity. Even those on site on any given day must practice social distancing,
with limits on the number of people in meeting rooms, “grab and go” meals
replacing the communal cafeteria, and work stations spaced 6 feet apart. In
other words, the social network’s offices likely won’t feel very friendly for
some time.x
To limit the spread of COVID-19, employers
across the country are considering new strategies for socially distant elevator rides, upgraded air filters,
and hygienic cubicle barriers.
Tech for in-office contract-tracing—smartphone apps, for example, that track
which employees interact, where, and for how long—could soon be worth $4 billion annually in
the US, according to market research company International Data Corporation.
The lobby of the future likely “resembles an airport security
checkpoint,” according to the New York
Times, with facial recognition, touchless entry, and health
screenings creating “a kind of no-fly list.” The number of available and
proposed new gadgets and gizmos grows everyday as sanitation-minded startups
race to meet demand.
Despite the challenges, some of these
pandemic-era changes could bring about long-awaited innovations in office design. Anja
Jamrozik is a cognitive scientist who studies both physical and
digital domains. In her research, she’s found that small things, like proximity
to daylight and a good view, can have a profound effect on people’s workday
well-being, as well as their sleep and emotional state outside the office.
For example, “when people are experiencing
noise, especially speech, it’s very distracting to people’s work,” Jamrozik
says. While few people enjoy a perfectly quiet space—the background din of a
coffee shop or the artificial buzz of a white noise machine is helpful to many
employees—an excess of these sounds, and especially crystal clear conversation,
are disruptive to many. But current popular office layouts have often
flagrantly disregarded these basic needs. “So many offices have moved to this
open-office concept, where there are no specialized areas, and people are
generally unhappy with that,” Jamrozik says.
Historically, “[m]uch of modernist architecture
can be understood as a consequence of the fear of disease,” writes Kyle Chayka in The
New Yorker. Tuberculosis sanatoriums of the late 19th century were designed
to maximize fresh air, sunlight, and minimalist interiors, all of which doctors
believed would heal patients. In turn, we designed our homes and offices much
like sanatoriums, with big windows illuminating our sparkling white space. More
recently, office layouts have prioritized cost-effectiveness, eliminating
private offices in favor of open floor plans that maximize the number of
workers who can fit into a tiny space. Architects are now designing with infection in
mind once again, but the coronavirus—and our enhanced understanding of disease
transmission—demands something different.
While open-office floor plans have long been
touted as a way to encourage collaboration, studies suggest they actually have the opposite effect—with
face-to-face interactions plummeting in open spaces, replaced by electronic
interactions, like email or instant messaging. Now, these layouts also seem potentially deadly—the
very opposite of social distancing. As companies reconsider their conventional
best practices, researchers say they have an opportunity to think not just
about cleanliness, but worker satisfaction.
What makes a space into a
workspace?
Since at least the early 1970s, when former NASA
engineer Jack Nilles coined the term “telecommuting,” employees have eagerly
anticipated the promise of widespread remote work. But the pandemic may finally
make this dream a reality. Everyone who can is working from home, and even when
it’s safe to return, 53 percent of Americans say they’ll be reluctant to go back to the office full-time.
Timothy Golden, a professor at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, has been studying remote work for 20 years. Initially, he
says, telecommuting was about reducing the burden of commuting on employees and
their communities by keeping people out of overtaxed transit systems. But people liked the
policy for other reasons. “Employees generally tend to like choice,” Golden
says. It can help them pursue hobbies and curate free time. It can also make
things like childcare and eldercare simpler, though these responsibilities are
always tough to balance, especially when schools are closed. And logging on
from home got easier and easier to do with the rise of smartphones and
workplace apps.
Today, “it’s hard to find a large company that
doesn’t have some form of policy,” Golden says. “Telecommuting is almost a signal
to employees to say, ‘Hey, we care about you, and we’d like to accommodate your
needs and desires,’” he adds. “If you don’t have a telecommuting program, it’s
almost the converse…[a] signal that you don’t care.” In one study, researchers
showed that just having the option to telecommute increases engagement, which
is shorthand for an employee’s commitment to their organization and motivation
to succeed.
But remote work can be a double-edged sword. It
may give employees better work-life balance, but Golden says it also requires
them to “to carefully manage their home environment.” Establishing a routine is
crucial. Each day needs a defined start—and a clear ending—or you might end up
burning out. People still need to find a way to bond with their colleagues
virtually to have functional working relationships and a sense of solidarity.
And at-home workers need a separate space, no matter how small, to get down to
business. Ideally, this creates some sense of separation from your roommates
(including a spouse or children), and screens out distractions like TV.
Telecommuting won’t work for everyone in the
long run: Some people do their best work in the office, others get lonely at
home, and some jobs—like the hardware designers and operations managers who
are already back at Facebook HQ—simply
demand substantive in-person time.
But for those companies that will continue to
have employees working remotely, Golden says formal telecommute policies—and
remote work training programs to help people put those policies into practice—will
be essential. To prevent frustrating and burnout, managers need to work with
their charges to develop written agreements that outline, among other things,
when employees will be available—and when they won’t.
How could we restructure
the work week?
The American work week has always been in flux. But
without a commute—another casualty of COVID—it stands to change even more.
Before the pandemic, few companies offered total
flexibility. In 2018, Erica Coslor, a senior
lecturer in marketing and management at the University of Melbourne, and her
colleague Edward Hyatt published an analysis
of how government employees in the U.S. responded to a three-month pilot
program where they worked four days a week, but for 10 hours at a stretch. The
researchers found that 65 percent of staff were generally satisfied with the
situation. But despite their short-term reports, it may have negatively
impacted them in the long-run: “A drawback for everybody—and that included
people who approved of the program—was fatigue,” Coslor says. On a 4/10
schedule, employees appeared to take more sick days than before.
The middling success of the program fits with
earlier findings. In 2008, researchers at Brigham Young University found that employees reported feeling more
productive on a 4/10 schedule and having fewer work-family conflicts than those
who remained on a more traditional schedule. But workers with a compressed work
week experienced no real change in overall job satisfaction, which is typically
one of an organization’s primary goal when shifting schedules.
Researchers aren’t sure why this disconnect
persists. But part of it may be about an employee’s sense of control over their
own time. The people in Coslor’s study were, in the words of ABC News in
Australia, “forced to be flexible.” Their companies decided on a
compressed work week, instead of empowering employees to create their own truly
flexible schedule. When employees felt their managers did a good job
transitioning the staff to a new routine, Colsor’s research indicates, they
were more receptive to the program.
Coslor thinks that truly flexible hours could
alleviate some of these issues. Employees who spend three to four days a week
working outside the office are the most engaged, according to
Gallup. They often have a smaller environmental footprint.
And they may be healthier than employees working more rigid 9 to 5s: At
least four studies have
shown improvements in metrics like blood pressure, sleep quality, and social
support among employees with flexible schedules.
Flexible hours aren’t a silver bullet. Employees
actually tend to work more when they have control over their
own schedule. Heejung Chung, a sociologist at the University of Kent who has
researched this phenomenon, thinks it might be a case of “gift exchange theory”—people
treat their flex time as a gift from their employer, and want to return the
favor with hard work and dedication. It’s also possible that when people aren’t
in the same room as their boss from 9 to 5, they find other—potentially
destructive—ways to make up for what they perceive as their own slacking.
Researchers have linked this “always
on” work culture to anxiety, depression, and stress.
But if companies are transparent in their
policies, and workers can ask for the support and structure they need, the
pandemic may bring about the remote work culture many American office workers
have been dreaming up for decades.
What is vacation with
nowhere to go?
Americans have always been terrible at taking
vacations. In 2018, they left 768 million days of
paid time off on the table. This is all in one of a few developed nations that
doesn’t even guarantee paid time off (PTO) in the first place. The problem is
only magnified by the pandemic: Even if workers took their days off, they’d
have nowhere to go.
Giving employees unlimited time off, as Netflix did starting in 2004,
might seem like a good way to encourage vacations in some form or another. But
Kenneth Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work
Institute, told ThinkProgress in
2015 that it doesn’t really work that way. “With unlimited vacation it’s
blurrier,” he said. “How much are you missing out; could you have taken more;
should you have taken more; what’s your benchmark for taking time? It becomes a
lot more of your own emotional ability to manage your time boundaries versus
demands made of you on your job.”
In 2017, the human resources company
Namely published its annual
“mythbusters” report, which analyzes data from 125,000 employees to evaluate
how studies, surveys, and business promises stack up. It found that employees
actually took less PTO under an unstructured plan. Business researchers
attribute this to “choice overload”—the
cognitive burden placed on an employee when they’re asked to choose between,
well, unlimited options. The loosey-goosey policy had other downsides, too:
Employees on an unlimited plan typically aren’t compensated for unused vacation
days if and when they leave their company.
When Robert Sweeney, an entrepreneur and former
Netflix software engineer, started his own company, Facet, a staffing start-up
for the tech industry, he decided to do things differently. Instead of an
unlimited vacation policy, in late 2019 Facet implemented a minimum vacation policy that
requires every employee to take five weeks (25 days) off each year. If they
want or need more, they can negotiate with their managers. But one way or
another, Sweeney says they have to meet the minimum—even in the pandemic. A few
other start-ups, like Authentic Jobs, Buffer, and Balsamiq have made
headlines for their own mandatory vacation plans. The idea has yet to go
mainstream, however.
Facet’s policy is still in its early days, but
Sweeney says he hopes to see several major changes. He wants his employees to
be healthy and capable of being creative. He wants to ensure that managers
can’t overschedule employees, and that employees aren’t wholly dependent on
their managers for achieving work-life balance. And he hopes to reduce
attrition. By creating an environment where everyone feels rested and ready to
work, Sweeney thinks employees will be more likely to stick around.
Vacation days are harder than ever to use, as
the pandemic has brought long-distance travel to a standstill. But you don’t
have to jet to a foreign beach to reap the many rewards of some time off.
Instead of hoarding their days with the hope that everything suddenly returns
to normal, employees would be better off using vacation time on smaller trips,
“staycations,” hobbies, and home improvement. Research suggests even a few days
off can help you catch up on sleep, which
can improve memory, regulate blood pressure and glucose, and, crucially, stave off burnout. It’s no
week-long retreat to the Bahamas, but time to lounge around the house or play
video games can offer a much-needed reprieve from the churn of remote work.
Which perks actually make
people happy?
For many tech workers, the pre-pandemic office
was a wonderland. Mini golf, on-site laundry, and lunch prepared by
Michelin-starred chefs with kombucha on tap were just some of the perks that
companies like LinkedIn, Google, and Dropbox were using to lure top-tier
employees. But leaving those in the past might not be a bad thing.
Even as perks have grown more common (and more
elaborate) over the last few decades, many Americans have remained discontented
with their jobs. Only 34 percent of workers reported they were “actively
engaged” in their work, according to a 2018 Gallup poll. A full 13
percent were “actively disengaged,” and the rest fell somewhere in between.
It’s no surprise perks haven’t increased
performance or engagement, says Neel Doshi, co-author
of Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures
Through the Science of Total Motivation. Most leaders “use various forms of
sticks and carrots to create motivation to drive performance,” he says. This
includes the traditional schemes, like raises for good work (a carrot) or the
threat of firing for poor behavior (a stick). But it can also include more
modern concepts, like guilt over making use of the company’s unlimited vacation
policy or valet parking at the office. While the carrots are increasingly
colorful, Doshi says “motivation is a lot more complex.”
Drawing on the work of psychologists like Richard Ryan and Edward Deci at
the University of Rochester, Doshi identifies two types of motivators: direct
and indirect. Direct motivation includes play (the things you naturally find
fun), purpose (the ability to see your contributions have an immediate effect),
and potential (the belief in a longer-term goal). Indirect motivation, by
contrast, includes emotional pressure (think guilt or FOMO), economic pressure
(the desire to be rewarded and avoid punishment), and inertia (when you
mindlessly keep going).
Many organizations are oriented around indirect
motivators. That’s fine when all you need from employees is what Doshi and his
co-author Lindsay McGregor call “tactical performance”—the kind of tasks that
follow a script, keeping things simple and efficient. But if you need more of
the quick-thinking, creative, and spontaneous work that Doshi and McGregor call
“adaptive performance,” indirect motivators will destroy your employees.
Unfortunately, even when companies have tried to
create a sense of fun or purpose, they’ve often taken an indirect approach. “To
serve play, organizations give you a ping-pong table,” Doshi says. “To serve
purpose, they give you a mission statement.” But play, purpose, and potential need to
come from the work itself.
By continuing to focus on indirect motivators,
no matter how cool, companies may be inadvertently contributing to a culture of
dissatisfaction, high turnover, and burnout. Instead of stocking a bar or
installing scooters in the office, Doshi says they need to make sure that
employees have jobs that are varied and interesting enough to excite play, feel
purposeful enough that no one is easily expendable, and make everyone believe
that they and the company are both headed somewhere big.
The pandemic may offer employers an opportunity
to reorient workplaces around employees’ true desires. “Maintaining a life
outside of work—that’s a real perk,” says Sweeney, the founder of Facet, a
start-up connecting tech workers with industry employers. Everyone wants more flexibility in
their schedules, both in the hours they keep and the places they can work from.
Millennials want more benefits in
the form of student loan repayment, reasonable maternity leave, and
professional development, according to Gallup. And a survey of 1,614 North American workers found
the number one “perk” is not free lunch, but natural light.
These motivators are a mix of direct and
indirect. But all of them suggest that rather than playing foosball in the
office after dark, employees want to go home at the end of the day with the
resources and support they need to live their lives right.
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