By Mark W. Johnson & Josh Suskewicz
Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his plans for the future of remote work at Facebook. By 2030, he promised, at least half of Facebook’s 50,000 employees would be working from home. A few days before, Jack Dorsey had announced that Twitter and Square’s employees would be allowed to work wherever they feel most creative and productive, even after offices reopen.
Covid-19 has shown many companies that their workers can be just as productive—or in some cases, even more so—working from home. Are we on the brink of a new work paradigm? Will corporations empty out their office buildings and shrink their physical footprints? Microsoft’s Satya Nadella isn’t so sure. Switching to an all remote system is “replacing one dogma with another,” he said in a conversation with The New York Times.
The real issue is not whether Mr. Nadella is right or wrong, but whether leaders are thinking deeply enough about what they want their new work paradigm to achieve—and whether they can design and construct systems that will allow them to meet their objectives.
Remote work is currently helping companies muddle through, but what do they want from it in the long run? Higher productivity? Savings on office space, travel and cost-of-living adjusted salaries? Better morale and higher retention rates?
To know what’s “best” for your organization’s future when it comes to remote work, it must be put it in the context of all the things that you are looking to achieve. In other words, you have to have a conscious aspiration. Then you need to think and plan according to that aspiration.
At Innosight, where we both work, we’ve developed a way of thinking and planning that we call “Future-back.” Our approach is designed to help business leaders develop a vision of their best possible future and a clearly laid-out strategy to achieve it, starting with the future scenario and working backward.
Such an approach allows leaders to fully articulate what they hope to achieve with a new work system and then design its major components unencumbered by how things work today or have worked in the past. Once they have developed their vision, they need to consider all the things that would have to be true for that vision to be achievable, then test those assumptions with initiatives they can begin today.
The process unfolds in four distinct stages:
1. What is your overall vision of your ideal work system of the future?
At this stage you are articulating your grand purpose and envisioning what the new system will look like. Your initial aim is simply to develop clarity about your intended future, not achieve analytic certainty.
As you begin to sketch out your work force system of the future, frame it as a purpose- and objective-driven narrative. This is your vision. As such, it should include: your purpose; your objectives and metrics; and a concise description of the components of your system and how they fit together.
For example: In order to expand our talent base to the four corners of the world and ensure that they are fully motivated by 2022 (purpose), 50 percent of our creative work force will work remotely for up to 50 percent of their time (objectives and metrics). Employees will be fully reimbursed for the costs of their home offices and work-related travel; salaries will reflect local costs of living (components of the system).
2. Consider the implicit and explicit assumptions you are making
As Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, there are known knowns and known unknowns that must be taken account of; in addition there are also unknown unknowns. Work through each of them, bringing to the surface as many of those known and unknown unknowns as you can. Each will need to be proved or disproved: that virtually convened teams can problem-solve as well as teams that meet in person; that executive development can be carried out online as well as at in-person meetings—or not, as the case may be.
3. Test those assumptions
What do you need to learn and how can you best do it? To answer these questions, walk your vision and its key assumptions back to the present in the form of experiments. You will need more than one if there are different circumstances or contexts in which the system would work—for example, if your company includes geographic locations with different societal norms or government regulations, or business units that are fundamentally different from one another. People are different, too. Telework makes tremendous sense for some roles and personality types; less for others.
If you are a multinational and want to learn if telework can work within one of your geographies, carve out a business function or small business unit; systematically apply the remote-work technologies, practices, rules and norms that you wish to use; run it in parallel for a short time; and then carefully measure its results against those of the larger unit.
4. Use the learning from these experiments to adjust or pivot your system’s components and your vision itself
Through this iterative process of exploring, envisioning and testing, you will ultimately discover your best way forward. This learning will be an ongoing process, not a discrete event, unfolding over time as your assumptions are converted to knowledge.
Inevitably, there will be trade-offs that must be negotiated. While you may be able to tap more talent and save money by not requiring your new hires to move, it is also likely that your creative ecosystem will become more diffuse. Some teams may need to meet in person as frequently as several days a week, so they won’t have the luxury of living wherever they wish. You will likely have to beef up your technical and human capabilities before you can fully apply your new knowledge across your organization; significant investments may be required to provide sufficient bandwidth for your employees’ homes, reducing some of your expected savings. You may find that your new system won’t work in every business unit or geography.
Future-back thinking doesn’t reveal a future that is written in stone — it gives you a way to shape it and own it, ensuring your organization’s long-term viability. As Satya Nadella suggested, trading one dogma for another is rarely your best solution; in most cases, those dogmas themselves are your biggest problem. At the end of the day, the organizations that can develop the clearest, most inspiring visions, learn the fastest and pivot the most capably, are the ones that win.
Mark W. Johnson is cofounder and senior partner of the strategy consulting firm Innosight and a coauthor of Lead from the Future. Josh Suskewicz is a partner at Innosight and a coauthor of Lead from the Future.
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