Bruce, I really like that you’ve sat back from this conversation and intend to in future. The reality of work now is not experienced by the bosses and the gen Xers (like me) who are, in one way or another, established. Thanks for having the awareness to make this change and for allowing your new Co-presenters to explore the issues. Your “here is where the leaders might be coming from” is really helpful in this conversation, and comes ^after^ the experience of what might have been called “labourers” in the old days. Good work. Keep it up.
The WFH or WHO debate seems to be going around in circles and data is being used to ither justify one or other side of the argument
The real challenge has yet to be focused on. The challenge all managers face is to create the right conditions at work so that work is a worthwhile experience for all and they will enable everyone to make their best contribution. It sound simple, and yet we are dealing with independently intellgent human beings in a intelligent complex adaptive system.
Managers, and most leaders, have never learned how to work out what the right conditions are and have even less experience of creating them.
Bosses need to focus on managing the conditions not the people. This applies equally to hybrid workforces as well multigenerational workforces.
The "meeting time" stat is interesting although I always struggle to make meaning of those stats for a number of reasons:
50% of individual work is not bad - there are other stats that have this time considerably lower. Similarly, we assume meetings are unproductive and only "individual work" matters. Although we also know that in this stat, doing your emails is "individual work" and working on a new product is a "meeting".
In remote work, the number of meetings should be expected to go up, because every casual encounter that would previously have happened at the watercooler or at the coffee machine now looks like a "meeting" in our calendars because we need technology to facilitate it. Or in other words: How much of the "individual work" time in the in-office-setting is in reality a colleague coming over for a chat or a "quick questions"?
Bruce, I really like that you’ve sat back from this conversation and intend to in future. The reality of work now is not experienced by the bosses and the gen Xers (like me) who are, in one way or another, established. Thanks for having the awareness to make this change and for allowing your new Co-presenters to explore the issues. Your “here is where the leaders might be coming from” is really helpful in this conversation, and comes ^after^ the experience of what might have been called “labourers” in the old days. Good work. Keep it up.
Thanks so much. Hopefully it not only gives us their perspectives but gives them a platform too.
The WFH or WHO debate seems to be going around in circles and data is being used to ither justify one or other side of the argument
The real challenge has yet to be focused on. The challenge all managers face is to create the right conditions at work so that work is a worthwhile experience for all and they will enable everyone to make their best contribution. It sound simple, and yet we are dealing with independently intellgent human beings in a intelligent complex adaptive system.
Managers, and most leaders, have never learned how to work out what the right conditions are and have even less experience of creating them.
Bosses need to focus on managing the conditions not the people. This applies equally to hybrid workforces as well multigenerational workforces.
The "meeting time" stat is interesting although I always struggle to make meaning of those stats for a number of reasons:
50% of individual work is not bad - there are other stats that have this time considerably lower. Similarly, we assume meetings are unproductive and only "individual work" matters. Although we also know that in this stat, doing your emails is "individual work" and working on a new product is a "meeting".
In remote work, the number of meetings should be expected to go up, because every casual encounter that would previously have happened at the watercooler or at the coffee machine now looks like a "meeting" in our calendars because we need technology to facilitate it. Or in other words: How much of the "individual work" time in the in-office-setting is in reality a colleague coming over for a chat or a "quick questions"?
That's why I am always super sceptical about statistics saying "meetings surge in hybrid work": https://danielflorian.substack.com/p/why-the-calendar-purge-is-not-the