By Shane Rodgers
When I was in Europe recently, I noticed a prominent billboard from Spotify declaring that its staff could work from anywhere “because they are not children”.
It is a simple, yet poignant, observation. When it comes to the crunch, when an employer mandates that employees must work in an office, it comes with an undertone that they are not trusted.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton found this out the hard way over the past two weeks. His backflip on ordering public servants back to the office five days a week has opened the fissure to a molten social issue that has been bubbling in the crust of our workplaces since COVID was put back in its box.
The pandemic, and the requirement for people to suddenly work at home, unlocked a simmering truth. We were two decades into the 21st century and our workplaces were still working on 20th century paradigms.
This included feeding an energy-sapping, polluting, peak hour to drag knowledge workers into offices to work on computers that could be anywhere.
Parents had to battle poor work-life structures to safely get kids where they needed to be.
Not to mention the overly rigid industrial relations and awards systems from a land before time.
Hours, and lots of money, was wasted on preserving a corporate norm that, for the majority of computer-based employees, had long ago outgrown logic.
In the post-pandemic world, the stern memos ordering people back to the office reek of management failing to keep up with change and evolve systems and culture, rather than a policy that makes a lot of sense.
Of course, companies have the right to mandate that employees work in an office and a sizable chunk of the workforce across health, trades, hospitality and retail simply can’t work from home.
And, yes, there is certainly value in employees coming together and engaging with each other and clients face to face on a regular basis.
That is not incompatible with taking a sane 2025-style approach to work location.
I have long advocated that “work from home” or “work from anywhere” are not the right terms.
We should be working towards “working from the optimum place today”.
It is not as simple as working from home or the office. Sometimes you have meetings (face to face makes sense for at least some of those). Sometimes you are producing documents (why go through peak hour to do that?). Sometimes you have client meetings neither at home nor at the office (so why would you mandate being in the office that day?).
Sometimes we employ highly skilled “digital nomads” who live nowhere near an office (so don’t we want those skills anymore?).
The fact is that, ultimately, we need to employ people we trust who, to quote Spotify, we do not need to treat like children.
We need to give them clear direction and the empowerment to achieve the requirements. And we need to ensure they are accountable for the outcomes.
If we can’t do that with confidence, we should employ better people.
We need managers who can manage a workforce at any location on a particular day and can keep employees accountable for outcomes without the need to watch them like a 1920s schoolmarm. If we can’t do that, we should employ better managers.
There is really clear evidence that employers who do not have flexible practices have access to a smaller pool of talent. Only people who are prepared to live in 20th Century paradigms will work for them.
It is also clear that vocations like nursing and community services that cannot offer hybrid work are struggling globally to attract people. Over time this will undoubtedly require other incentives like shorter weeks in those industries (which are already being introduced in many places).
At the very least we need a grown-up debate on how we want to work in 2025, and we need to find the optimum solution for families, workplace productivity and our society in general.
The raw materials are there. We just need to have the right discussion.
Shane Rodgers is the author of Worknado – Reimagining the way we work to live.
