Business Strategy – Remote Work Objections:  Productivity (spurious!) & Collaboration (solvable with some innovation?)

There is considerable tension in the workplace today about working in the office vs. remotely.  The objections to remote work center on its (possibly) negative impact on productivity and on collaboration. 

I find the productivity objection unpersuasive.  With quantitative goals and metrics, productivity can be measured and managed.  The hard (but by no means impossible) work is setting up the metrics and then actually managing performance.  That’s not any harder (or easier) for remote workers than office workers.  In fact, working in the office might introduce a bias for rewarding observable activity (e.g., working long hours, going to meetings, eating lunch at your desk) rather than results.  As an aside, I assert that the knowledge worker landscape is a desert when it comes to metrics.  It doesn’t need to be.

Collaboration is more problematic.    Example:  When I started my career as an engineer in a small, elite troubleshooting unit, I sat in a cube adjacent to 2 experienced team members and our boss.  I don’t know how I could have learned my job (and my company’s culture) if I worked remotely.  All day every day, I overheard conversations and one side of phone calls.  I could stand up and ask a question … or, as I gained experience, answer a co-worker’s question.  Another example:  Innovation is often born when intractable problems serendipitously encounter unexpectedly useful problem solvers in the most unexpected places:  the random encounters in the hallways, at a coffee break or cocktail hour, at conferences and meetings, etc.  How do you create the opportunity for problems to “bump into” problem solvers in a remote work environment? 

An idea.  A virtual workplace could be a practical solution.  Imagine having 3 monitors in your home office.  One is where you work:  coding, excel’ing, analyzing data, emailing, zooming.  The 2^nd is an open zoom with your team members, replacing the advantages of sitting next to them in an office. The 3^rd is a virtual workplace where your digital twin exists and walks to the cafeteria, the coffee pot, meeting rooms … bumping into people … talking with them using generative AI.  Optimize the thing to maximize “bumping into” people way beyond your day-to-day work network.  I’m interested in your reader reaction to this “nutty” idea.