Can employees continue to work from home as they did during the Covid lockdown, or should they all return to the office for work as was the case before the pandemic? It is a raging debate around the world. According to a Gallup research study, post-pandemic, only 9% of employees want to work from the office all day, while 32% of them only want to work from their homes, and 59% of employees surveyed prefer hybrid work schedules. Are . But there is no clarity on how many days a week an employee should attend office in the hybrid-work format.
Amidst all this ambiguity, the larger issue is that employees and their managers differ in how they evaluate the productivity of employees who work from home. According to a study conducted by Microsoft among 20,000 employees in 11 countries, a vast majority of respondents, 87% of them, described themselves as productive at work. But what was surprising was that only 12% of team leaders said they were very confident that their teams were productive while working from home. Microsoft dubbed this disconnect a case of “productivity paranoia”.
At the heart of all these debates about where to work is an important question: is work a divisible concept? If it’s neatly divisible so that each part can be taken care of by one person, work-from-anywhere should be an ideal option. On the other hand, if work is truly a collaborative process, working together as a team in one location is ideal.
As part of adopting a scientific approach to the concept of work, it was FW Taylor who first introduced the concept of work as a divisible process. As work was divided into discrete specialized activities, along with assembly lines in the factory, the level of specialization and productivity improved. But there was also a huge downside to this way of doing things. The individual worker felt like just another cog in a larger impersonal circle. The workers were unable to see the larger goal of their work – they only saw themselves as masons, so to speak, and not as builders of a cathedral. Fortunately, in the late 20th century, Japanese companies came up with workplace rituals to create a more holistic sense of camaraderie in the workplace and atone for the sins of the assembly line.
Is work in the knowledge economy divisible and should it follow the assembly line-based processes of the industrial age? The book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Walk Alone by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach reminds us of some harsh realities about the knowledge economy. The authors remind us that intelligence does not reside in the mind of any one individual, but in the collective mind of a society. Therefore, to make a positive contribution, individuals must rely more on their ability to work with others than on their individual mental strength.
Until recently, brain technologies only allowed the study of individual brain processes and hence of individual intelligence. Now, technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) let scientists scan the brains of many people as they interact with others. Using these tools, studies have found evidence for what is known as the “interactive brain hypothesis”: a premise that when people interact socially, their brains engage in different neural processes. , when the same people are thinking or acting on their own.
In Annie Murphy Paul’s book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, the author reminds us that human thought is hypersensitive to context, and one of the most powerful contexts of all is the presence of other people. In addition, a 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the development of critical skills such as establishing hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data is facilitated by students’ engagement with their peers in laboratory settings. was closely related. Therefore, there is no doubt that the development of intelligent thinking is much more a social process than an individual one. We work best when we think and act socially.
The lonely feeling, of individuals working alone with their heads down, will undoubtedly continue to be an integral part of any work process. Walking away from a problem and getting all team members working on it is an important step in any innovation process.
The pain of annoying commute in big city traffic to reach an office is definitely a reality. Therefore, as flexible working hours, which help avoid extreme traffic congestion, are sure to become the new work norm, solitude at work will always be an exception and not the rule.
Workers’ protests in the streets of Chicago in 1886 are considered by most to have contributed to the establishment of the global 8-hour-day working norm. At a time when the working day ranged from 10 to 16 hours, the 8 hour work day was a paradigm shift.
The forces induced by the COVID pandemic will bring about even more drastic permanent changes in the work environment. The number of working hours will be reduced even further. Work will increasingly become a pleasurable activity.
Emerging learning from neuroscience and the social sciences that intelligent thinking is a social process and not an individual process will guide the future of work. The work office would be more about discussions around the conference table and less about someone at the dinner table in a pyjama.
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