The situation: after 4½ years of pandemic-encouraged working from home, organisations are still trying to get people back into the office and it’s still not working.

You may or may not agree with that basic premise – maybe you’ve given up trying to get people back in, or maybe they’re all back in, or maybe WFH is working for the people who like being remote and the office is working for those who like being in the office. Also, people flow easily between both modes and any work that needs doing gets done, whether the people involved are in the office or on a beach in Madeira. Yeah right.

For most people I speak to, it’s a long-term conflict that has possibly reached stalemate. Progress towards resolving this conflict has been made, but people broadly fall in to those for whom working from home has been a liberating godsend and those for whome it was a nightmare that they couldn’t get away from quickly enough.

Note that I say “progress towards resolving this conflict” – not “progress towards getting things back to normal” or some such weighted phrase. I don’t know what’s best for you or your organisation, but I do think that the door that was opened by lockdown situations (at least here in the UK) showed us a glimpse of other ways of working that we’re still struggling to come to terms with.

In the meantime, positions are hardening around whether your physical location has a positive or negative effect on your productivity and the overall success of your organisation.

Long-term readers will remember that (consults notes, faints, recovers) for at least ten years I’ve been saying “We will work anywhere, but not necessarily the same ‘anywhere’ every day” (captured in this talk I gave in October 2014 – oh there’s also video of it)

So I’m biased towards individual freedom in this matter, but I also recognise that asking for total individual freedom within a business or organisation that has a main purpose other than the total freedom and happiness of its employees (sadly, most of us) is always going to come up against that purpose eventually.

So my evidence is very anecdotal, but broadly the arguments seem to be

“I’m more productive if I can choose whether and when I come to the office. I’ve found that working from home releases me from distractions that I can’t escape when I do go in. I realised that those distractions had been detrimental to my mental health.”

versus

“We believe that our productivity and general mental health is enhanced by having all of our people in the same place. Also head office (or whatever, some higher authority than the person making the pitch) have decided that we need to have people in for at least three days a week and so we’re already recording how much time people are here”.

Perhaps you’ve heard more.

I think we’re on a hiding to nothing by rooting this conversation only in terms of productivity and mental health. Mental health, because it’s hugely subjective and one size does not fit all. Some people have been driven crazy by being at home *and* some people have (possibly always) been driven crazy by being in an office – and some people drift between the two over time.

I also agree with Cal Newport that the trouble with looking at “productivity” is that we just don’t have good measures of what it is in knowledge-based work nor do we have solid facts about how to achieve it and so we end up with “proxy measures of productivity” like busyness, messaging overload and presence in the office. And although not everyone has the language to describe it, we all know that something is off with the way we work together.

So it seems to me that the people who are pushing (or are being pushed) to make sure the office is full of people again need to come up with a warmer version of the “why” – it can’t be just about “your contract” or “an edict has come from up top”. It has to be couched more in human terms about how its honestly affecting all of us so that we can put that distraction aside and get on with what we’re supposed to be doing – serving clients, helping people, making cool stuff that will help people even more and having fun (or at least not killing each other) in the process.