Wonder Drug / Common Side Effects May Include..
With every new technology, or paradigm shift, one problem is solved and new one created. Sometimes it’s an easy choice, sometimes a deal with the devil. But once we reach consensus on change – bingo! We have progress.
Zoom.
I even hate the way it sounds. It’s silly. Could they just allow me to get through life without having to say, “Should we Zoom”?
Yet Zoom was a lifesaver in 2020. The pandemic raised the possibility of a flexible workplace, and Zoom was central to the shift to remote and hybrid work. It continues to be ubiquitous in the workplace even though much of its core value is overrated. Virtual meetings are, by definition… well… virtual, meaning not quite the real thing, but a close approximation. Almost.
It’s not all upside with virtual communication – we are losing something.
Can You Hear Me Now?
We know it’s no replacement for human interaction, but so what? Do we really need to communicate well to do our jobs? (Sarcasm). But this really isn’t just about Zoom. It’s about the whole culture of virtual work and having a real conversation about what impact its limitations have on our productivity.
Virtual meetings obscure our communication in subtle ways. It’s not a completely transparent connection — more accurately, it’s translucent. Light gets through, but some definition is lost. An imperceptibly thin layer of film is placed between two parties communicating, inhibiting the conveyance of our best selves.
In contrast, when you meet people in person, you pick up intangibles: their posture and body language, decorum and poise, sincerity, earnestness, humility, and confidence. In a great meeting, people can show you the sum of their experience, intelligence, and commitment, coalescing with an unwavering assuredness and passion for what they do—self-actualization occurring in real time.
It’s like comparing live music to YouTube.
By contrast, virtual communication has a commoditizing effect. Our lighting commoditizes us, and blurred backgrounds frame our faces like yearbook photos. Our audio doesn’t perfectly match our mouths. Awkward frozen screens. Talking while muted. Not muting while the kids are screaming bloody murder. We become another talking head in a sea of talking heads. Do we really think our message is getting through? Are we really “connecting”? At a minimum, do you believe it is as efficient as we want it to be – or as we need it to be?
Quick Fixes and Risky Business
In the heat of the moment, we accepted virtual work worlds because the alternative (unemployment) was far worse. In our exuberance to race to the future, we overlooked that we may have to dial things back once the whole global pandemic thing was over. It’s not our fault we were so excited. Work in sweatpants from a desk in the basement? Sign me up!!
Yet there was A LOT that we overestimated during the pandemic. If you recall – we were convinced that we would all work from home in the future. Corporate office work was dead. Real estate values in high-cost urban centers would plummet, and mass migration to low-cost, low-tax states would continue unabated, blah blah blah.
This was around the same time FTX was a great American business story and meme stocks were all the rage. Need any more evidence we’re capable of rushing to conclusions? In our eagerness, we not only flew past the limitations of the hybrid work environment but also failed to consider its true Achilles heel: RISK MITIGATION.
I’m talking about real risk. The stuff that keeps every business owner up at night. The rogue wave can appear at a moment’s notice and sink the whole ship.
People manage risk. Teams of people. There are times when everything hinges on a company’s ability to respond to it RIGHT NOW. Risk can be so high that you need to look around the room and see the whites of your co-workers’ eyes to make critical calls that could mean everything. Your month. Your quarter. Your year. The whole enchilada.
Call me old-fashioned, but when the s**t hits the fan, I’m not inclined to debate matters over Slack.
Mind you – this is not a total indictment of hybrid policies and virtual communication – it’s about the overlooked inefficiencies of these new tools and practices and our reluctance to question them mostly because they fit into a larger narrative of how well technology works in our personal lives. “New software solves old problems! What is the issue?”. Yet, there is an issue. How we incorporate tech in our personal/social lives is no indication of its success when incorporated in our professional lives.
Our compulsion to trust software solutions has ushered us directly past any real scrutiny of these systems – yet we know that productivity bleed occurs when we’re not looking.
Productivity and Virtual Work
Most jobs indeed have some components of their routine or process that can be managed autonomously in your home, as successfully – if not more successfully – than in your office. Yet, at the same time, virtually every employee of an organization has some level of liability or exposure tied to their performance. No one is so benign a presence that they are exempt from it. In those moments of exposure, our best defense lies in the ability of leadership to quickly assess and decisively marshal a course of action. This requires input from multiple people—a coalition of information. We cannot do this effectively without easy access to our partners and crystal-clear communication. Anything less slows response, diminishes effectiveness, and, at worst, leads to blown calls, losses – and liability.
Yet, it doesn’t have to be within the context of a dire scenario or existential business crisis. There is risk everywhere and on every scale at work. More often than not, a business’s fortunes rely on its staff’s ability to respond to a myriad of daily issues that require decision-making by junior and mid-level team members. They may not have the authority to render decisions on matters of significant consequence – but they all have some autonomous function within their job that contributes to the output of the whole. Suppose your organization’s ability to clearly and decisively communicate and respond is mitigated by proximity (hybrid work) and clarity (virtual communication). In that case, these problems will reach your balance sheet.
So, until someone can prove that a string of emojis can accurately describe a complex business problem, we will have to talk to one another in person.
Productivity loss starts in small ways. A percent or two, and before you know it, the interest starts piling up so high you can’t get out from under it. Many of us have struggled to optimize our businesses since the pandemic, keeping our fingers crossed that some issues are transitory. It’s been such a confusing time, and we’ve been less prone to trying to examine the root causes of office issues because so many of them seem tied to glaring cultural changes in the workplace. And let’s be honest – none of us want to be on the losing side of a cultural argument framed by a generational divide (spoiler alert: if you’re old, you can’t win).
Riding the Wave of Culture Change
Cultural change can be a veritable Pandora’s box to business owners – thorny issues we’re hoping will recede with time or at least come into clearer focus so we can form a cogent response. Present-day cultural issues are daunting – a minefield of “triggering” topics (God, I hate that word) that only seem to be exacerbated by the stark divisions in the country. Privately, many in leadership seem rudderless – it’s hard not to feel “out of touch” and easy to grouse privately about the sea change, but most of us are unlikely to challenge the norms of the day. And frankly speaking, we shouldn’t. Searching for the root cause of productivity loss through the lens of a cultural blame game is a waste of time. As the Russians say – looking for a black cat in a dark room.
Culture moves in unpredictable ways. We cannot put all the toothpaste of the pandemic, technology, social and ideological change back in the tube. We must look more pragmatically at the most obvious paradigm shifts in the professional environment and examine whether they work for our industries. To me, this begins with the virtual work environment. Yet somehow even thinking of blaming technology and hybrid work can become controversial. I’ve heard the argument that any challenge to tech is antiquated thinking. That the best companies in the world rely on virtual tools. They adapt and move while their competition goes the way of the dinosaur. Sure – but isn’t that a broad generalization? Not all businesses can change so quickly. Have you ever seen an “innovation adoption curve”? Some industries are not kind to the innovators. There are times when innovators go out of business waiting for the world to catch up to them (remember the EV1? It was the first mass-produced electric car in the US. GM made it in 1996. Let that sink in).
Technology and Innovation in a Digital World
So, let us avoid comparing all of our businesses to Meta and Google. Most industries have nothing in common with trillion-dollar tech behemoths running on 80% margins. Yet how many of us have heard employees say, “I have a friend at Google, and they do it this way…”
Those anecdotes are useless. Silicon Valley is flush with capital, and stocks are priced at P/E ratios of 30 -50X. Comparing your company to a Software as Service (SaaS) biz model is a fool’s errand. In doing so, we’ve slipped we slip down the rabbit hole of accepting business practices that work for the upper tier of the S&P500, that are not representative of the overall workforce of this country. Our acceptance is rooted in how dominant technology has become in our personal lives and how we’ve bent our lives to accommodate “it,” even though so much of our professional lives remain unchanged. Perhaps this is a sign our compulsive technology use, and increased dependence are causing some friction.
The pandemic allowed us to declare a radical shift in how we operate because it not only solved a massive issue of employment during that first critical lockdown year but also created a convenience of life we never enjoyed. However, in doing so, we’ve also accepted a real risk of degraded productivity. In an era of tightening money supply, we cannot expect any fee acceleration to offset these losses. If unaddressed, companies will suffer. Wages will stay flat. Knowledge transfer will decline, and unemployment will creep as AI and offshoring become more attractive options (regardless of the inherent risk).
We’ve accepted the miracle cure of hybrid work and virtual work tools, but now we must find a way to wean ourselves off to some degree. We will never go back to the old ways. Hybrid work still offers great value, and we will continue to refine how to use it more efficiently. But for now – the future is not here yet, and we’re dealing with genuine productivity loss in the present. Blaming young worker sentiment for our flailing productivity rates is just kicking the can. Yes – some of their messaging is naïve at best and offensive at worst. Still, the truth is, if we continue to be distracted by culture shifts and don’t move to shore up productivity in a more pragmatic way, there’s a greater risk to the industry than we can begin to describe here.
We will figure a way out. American business always seems to find a way. We don’t have to abandon these useful tools and fight culture change tooth and nail, but we do have to look at where we’re losing ground and institute policies and protocols in response.
Keep your best staff close at hand. Keep open lines of communication. Insist on more face time. Keep promoting the people who actually “GET IT” and giving them a platform to demonstrate professional behavior to all the up-and-comers through their actions. The best of our young leadership will figure out the rest and narrow the cultural gap.
Hang in there. There’s no easy fix and this will continue to be a bumpy ride. We’re all just working through the unexpected side effects of the modern work world. Perhaps this is a sign our compulsive technology use, and increased dependence are causing some friction between these parallel worlds we inhabit.