The Case Against Letting Employees Pick WFH Days

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1:10And the big change for me has been, if I look back, I thought, what would be great is to let every employee choose what they want to do. So like a menu. If you run things forward to July, August 2021, I've spoken to hundreds of organizations and come to the conclusion that full choice isn't a good thing. The first reason for being concerned about people choosing which days is mixed mode. Mixed mode is this horror whereby there's six of you in a meeting, three are at home in individual Zoom boxes, and the other three are in the office in one similar-sized Zoom box with their tiny heads. You can see they're talking.

1:46Something happens, there's some controversial statements. There's whispering, there's people smiling. It's just, I've heard over and over again from companies, mixed mode is horrible. However you set it up, even if you make everyone in the office connecting on their own laptops, go to cubicles, cert fields, even, you know, after the end of any controversial meeting, you at home close your laptop. The three folks that are working and close their laptops stand out of their cubicles and carry on the discussion, go grab a coffee, talk about it over lunch. So mixed mode almost always seems to lead to in-groups and out-groups.

2:15The second reason for being concerned about people choosing their days were the issues around diversity. If you look at who wants to come in on which days, it's not random. We've surveyed 50 ,000 working age Americans. In the data, we see that college-educated women with young kids, disabled people want to work from home more, people living far from the office, low-income people that can't afford transport. Put simply, there's various subsets of people that are going to end up choosing if you give them the choice to work from home, let's say, four or five days a week. So in many ways, that makes total sense, and we want that flexibility.

2:49The tricky thing is if they're doing that and other groups, let's say single young men living next door, are going to come in five days a week, you can see this is going to lead to a huge diversity crisis because when you have teams whereby some folks are working from home four or five days a week, other folks are coming in full time, there's a big disparity in promotion. In one study, folks working from home had half the rate of promotion of those being in the office. So if you let people choose, in the short run, they're potentially really happy, they work from home four or five days a week.

3:19In the long run, a lot of people may not realize that that's going to lead them to get left behind and the promotion they get frustrated. It's a huge issue for managers, for diversity, and of course it's a legal risk for firms in the long run. So the two choices really are the team-based approach whereby each team decides but within the team everyone has the same days. And then there's the company decides. Apple for example recently announced everyone's going to come in Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, work from home Wednesday, Friday. team by team has the upside of choice you can tell each team manager you get to choose which days you come in for your this episode is brought to you by google chrome you think you know a browser but gemini and chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks gemini and chrome is here for it ready to make anything online makes sense?

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5:10Well, it's a problem if you're a firm and you're trying to either save an office space or you're trying to reduce density because people don't want to be crushed in elevators and lobbies. So either way, if you have the office empty on Monday, Friday, that doesn't make sense. So that's one problem with letting people choose team by team. Second problem with letting teams decide versus letting the center decide is what's called the great unraveling. So that's pretty easy to see. Some teams could say, look, we're all going to work in the office three days a week, except the CEO decides to come in for that extra fourth day.

5:42Then the folks reporting to the CEO comes in and then the folks reporting to the CEO come in and the whole thing unravels. So it's actually critically important, not just to say you're allowed to work from home three days a week, is actually you have to work from home three days a week. Otherwise you have some risk of backsliding. The interesting thing is when I put the piece out and I got a ton of angry emails. And the one hand, yes, for some people, they're quite upset about it. They want to choose which days. On the other hand, it feels a bit like trying to take the longer run view on things.

6:13And it's important to note for employees that, look, hybrid is great, but we do need to make a success of it. So if instead we say, let's have this free-for-all, everyone chooses which days, the thing is frankly a disaster. People are coming in, there's mixed mode problems and in-groups and out-groups and, you know, diversity crisis and the office is crushed on Wednesday. most employers are going to say, look, you just can't run a business like this. You guys are going to come in five days a week and we're just going to abolish hybrid. It doesn't work. I feel right now is to do the exact reverse of that old Silicon Valley saying of go fast and break things.

6:45We are in a completely revolutionary world with this hybrid working is completely new. So as a result, I'll do something boring vanilla. I think hybrid when we come in three days a week where it works well and people are generally happy, that's kind of low risk. And importantly, you make sure folks that are working from home on Wednesday and Friday really do that and there is no backsliding. So it feels painful to do it, but in some ways I'm like, bank the gains that we have. Make that work. Maybe build off that rather than try and go, you know, something that seems the first best but in all reality isn't going to work.

7:17But keep your ears open and your mind free and collect data. Continue to talk to customers and employees and see what works.

7:36Thank you.

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