Let the People Work and Live Where They Want

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Madison College had a mix of full-time staff and consultants all working on-site at our Madison campus. Our PeopleSoft consultants flew in from all over the country on a regular basis. We put an immediate stop to that as more data about the Covid-19 pandemic and the necessity to curtail travel became clear. This actually worked out quite well for the consultants, who had been asking if they could work remotely even before the pandemic struck. As our entire IT department along with the rest of the college left our campus and went home to work, some of our full-time staff left Madison to join family in places throughout Wisconsin and throughout the country. Some took the opportunity just to live and work someplace new and different while the pandemic evolved.

As a long-time advocate for a distributed workforce and for allowing remote working arrangements, I had already been working with my leadership team on some basic remote work guidelines, since the concept of “teleworking” was new to the college. Before February 2020, my leadership team was tentatively prepared to dip their toe in the remote work water, so to speak. The pandemic forced us to experiment successfully with distributed teams within IT and throughout the entire institution. Overall, our technology teams did not miss a beat in supporting the college’s transition to remote work even while we were maintaining and expanding our own technology capabilities for the college’s new remote working and teaching scenarios.

A couple of months into the transition to an all-remote work model, we had team members working quite happily throughout the state and in some instances, around the country. The leader of our learning management system team had decamped to Texas to be closer to her daughters. One member of our security team found a place in northern Wisconsin that brought him joy and enabled him to work in peace and tranquility. One executive even sold his house in Madison and relocated for several months to work from a mountain state.

As was the case for organizations around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic that started in 2020 was a jarring and unfortunate experience, but it also reinforced some things that many other organizations already knew: Talented, motivated people can work from anywhere given the opportunity, given trust, the right tools, and a culture that rewards the results achieved versus the time spent in the office.

Remote and Distributed Enables Diversity

2020 was not just a year of a pandemic. Shocking events in the United States during 2020 also sparked an intense focus on social justice and racial injustices along with renewed and sustained attention to increasing the diversity of organizations and teams. At Madison College, the success of remote work gave me the opportunity to leverage and advocate for this as a means and an opportunity to increase the diversity of our technology team. Knowing that we could recruit technical talent from around the country in addition to the greater Madison area meant that we could have more opportunities to recruit and hire and retain a more diverse workforce.

We know from experience and research that diversity in the organization improves the capabilities and performance of teams and organizations by introducing diversity of thinking, backgrounds, and lived experiences. The remote and distributed work model enables organizations to increase the diversity of their workforce by recruiting across a much larger geographic scope than they would otherwise have if they limited themselves to an on premise, locally defined working and recruiting model.

The interview process itself is also streamlined in that, like the Automattic example earlier in this chapter, the entire interview process as well as onboarding and start-up takes place remotely. This makes it easier for candidates to participate in interviews and removes potential hardships some candidates might face when trying to arrange a chance to interview for a new, better job. Travel is potentially eliminated, and less time off from a current job or other obligations is needed to participate in the interview.

Diversity in the workforce should be an ongoing concern and objective of every organization, and discarding the geographic limitations imposed by an “in-office only” working model enables organizations to act upon diversity as a value, to the benefit and advantage of the organization, its people, and the community.

Space Needs Flex with Remote Models

The remote work model offers growing or changing organizations many options and flexibility regarding their working space and its location. With some or all of the organization working from home or elsewhere, the space needs for the main office can be considerably reduced. If an organization feels a need for a prime location whether for image reasons or for entirely practical reasons, this space can be smaller and cheaper. Consider this – If you can forgo prime real estate in expensive locales and markets, you save on rent and can invest in people and technology – elements that might provide more return on investment than the spend on the physical space.

In the course of researching and writing this book, one of the interesting facts I learned about Automattic is that their San Francisco office closed in 2017, doubtless at least in part due to the cost of maintaining it compared to the use it got. Scott Berkun described how during his time with Automattic the office was seldom occupied – a tribute to the Automattic culture and the success of the remote work model (Berkun, 2013). Coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations planning to embrace remote work for the long haul made important decisions regarding their office real estate needs. For example, Salesforce canceled a 325,000 square foot office space lease because its updated work policies anticipate that at least half of its workforce will work on remote and flexible schedules (McLean, 2021).

As you consider your organization’s needs for space and the location options and costs associated with space, it behooves a leader to think seriously and carefully about your staff, your space needs, and how adopting remote and distributed models of working affects all of these elements. Make sure you consider the trade-offs between location, commute times, proximity to public transportation, existing employee locations, and of course, the cost of office space factoring in square footage and location.

Plan to Rethink Your Current Space

In early 2020, Madison College began demolition of my IT department spaces for a long-planned renovation. We’d spent a good portion of 2019 in planning and design meetings for this new space – it was exciting to think about how to make optimal use of what was sure to be a beautiful and modern new area, with all of the teams (previously parked in separate rooms) in one large space. During the planning process, all assumptions revolved around the need to accommodate about 110 “butts in seats” inclusive of full-time College IT staff and the consultants and student workers who made up the department.

The 2020 pandemic changed everything, including my thinking about this new space. As of this writing, we’re rethinking the whole layout – with potentially half of the staff working elsewhere at any given time, do we need permanent desks for everyone, or can we switch to a combination of hoteling desks and flexible and configurable workspaces, along with some permanent cubicles for those staff who plan to be or need to be on-site most of the time? Do I, as CIO, need a private office reserved for my use even when not working remotely, since when I am working on-site, meetings tend to keep me away from my desk at least 50% of the time?

This type of thinking enabled our space and furniture design to offer back approximately 25% of our originally planned space to the college to use in addressing the challenging aspects of optimizing physical space for the evolving needs of a modern busy technical college even as we looked out to the post-Covid learning and working environment.

Starting out with or moving to a remote and distributed model means that space needs can be approached in a totally different way. I’ve personally never worked in an organization that had enough meeting spaces. When you do have people on-site, the most likely reason is because they want to meet and collaborate in person with other humans – this means meeting space, not offices and desks. If you need or decide to have physical office space, having a majority of your team working offsite most of the time means that space can be dedicated to meeting and collaborative space. Trust me – your organization will be more productive and will thank you or whoever makes this decision.

A variation on this thinking and the many options available in office furniture configurations means that physical space can be designed in a flexible, configurable, and collaborative way. Temporary collaboration or project team spaces can be created using large movable whiteboard panels and rolling movable desks. Project teams and cross-functional groups can form temporary colocation spaces defined by the movable whiteboards, and then reconfigure this furniture and the spaces when needs change.

Make sure you are thinking about the plug and play set-ups that should be at every shared space so that staff coming in for a day have monitors, keyboards, and places to store their backpacks and personal belongings. Make sure you have the means to schedule these spaces so people can reserve them for days they come into the office. We should always be thinking about minimizing exposure to seasonal viruses – consider arranging for the cleaning and disinfecting of shared workspaces both by their daily users as well as by custodial staff, if applicable.

Remember when planning and designing space that it is easier to turn meeting space into temporary desk space than the other way around. Periodic influxes of remote staff for planning meetings, collaborative problem-solving sessions, or company events may require that the meeting rooms turn into temporary team rooms or overflow desk space for a short period of time – design flexible and configurable spaces and furnish them accordingly.

We know that a good chunk of offices and desk spaces in the traditional workplace setting goes unused regardless of remote workforces. Vacations, meetings, flex schedules, and other absences mean that people are often away from their desks. One 2018 assessment offered that up to 40% of a workplace’s dedicated desk space could be unused at any given time (Pochepan, 2018). Organizations adopting remote/distributed models can take this into account as they plan new or updated workspaces.

I’ll not attempt to write a primer on calculating space utilization models – there is a lot of literature on this topic available, and the office furniture companies are all over it. It has in fact been my experience that whatever the emerging trends are in office space and furniture design, you can count on them being behind it. In reviewing available information and considering conversations with the facility planners in my own organization, key factors are clearly elements such as weekly utilization. Consider your approach and focus on elements such as overall space occupancy or individual desk usage. One consideration is the thought that a full-time on-prem person translates to 1:1 desk to staff ratio while 1:5 ratio of five remote workers using the same desk one day per week – both of these scenarios equate to 100% usage of that desk (Sheynkman, 2020).

Consider the Humans

When considering and designing for a hybrid workforce, there are human factors to consider such as proximity, need for personal space, feelings of safety, and other basic elements. The balance between creating sufficient space for shared or hoteling desks and the standard equipment expected to be in place while creating enough of those spaces to meet the anticipated numbers of humans expected to use these spaces is an art and a science. Humans can objectively understand the concept of temporary shared desk space and the relatively spartan nod given to personal privacy and space, and yet viscerally need some degree of separation in order to embrace these spaces and be productive. This is why for years, one could walk into an open concept office space and see dozens of people sitting side-by-side but wearing expensive noise-canceling headphones in order to preserve some sense of quiet, privacy, and concentration. So much for the constant collaboration the planners envisioned.

Expectations about workspace usage and methods to put in place some measure of control and certainty for the humans can be important. I recall walking into a San Francisco tech company a few years ago and seeing people literally sprawled all over the office – sitting back-to-back on lounge chairs, side-by-side at the coffee bar, parked in individual cubicles, and of course sitting at traditional open concept office desks. In the CloudCraze downtown Chicago space where I periodically worked, the local-to-Chicago crew tended to take the rows of closely spaced open concept desks at the front of the office overlooking Wacker Drive while the remote team and certain others ended up in the back room at similar desks – but with no windows.

In each case, the humans created traditions and unwritten rules about desks and space until the office administration stepped in to create rules. This is important to keep in mind. Many people need some sense of habit and certainty. For example, you may have a remote worker who decides to come in every Tuesday, and after a few weeks of securing the same desk space each Tuesday comes to think of that space as “theirs.” Then one morning, they come in and find the space occupied by a smiling coworker, oblivious to the fact they have disrupted what has become a routine. It happened to me more than once.

The scheduling software which is embedded in all of our typical office productivity systems is one way to help alleviate this issue. Setting expectations for the people who are on-site most of the time and the remote team members who come in periodically can also help. Put the shared desk space and offices into the calendaring system and make it clear that the space should be scheduled according to one’s on-site needs. Staff who are on-site three or more days per week could be given assigned desk space – I’ve seen that model work more than a few times.

In the Chicago/Wacker Drive example I referred to earlier, Heather, the office manager and admin to the CEO created a practice where the people who came into the office each day had assigned seats, and then reserved large blocks of space for people who came in from across the country on varying schedules. One private office was reserved for the use of remote executives when on-site.

Prior to the August 2015 move to downtown, Bill Loumpouridis and his EDL Consulting team in Deerfield had a similar set-up. One private office was reserved for Bill, who was in the office most days. The other private offices were scheduled by executives and managers as needed when in the office, sometimes by multiple people visiting and collaborating for much of the day. A shared desk space capable of accommodating about ten software development staff, equipped with monitors, adapters for Mac and PC laptops, and space for stuff occupied the open center of the floorplan. One modern and very well-equipped conference room with glass walls and one wall occupied by a giant glass whiteboard provided space for collaborative team meetings or for important client presentations and meetings.

Devalue the Corner Office

In my career, I have had some good offices and some crappy offices and cubicles. The quality of my workspace has not always aligned with my title or tenure, and in some cases, despite the hourly rate my team and I were getting, the space we were allocated at the client’s offices seemed intended to make us as unproductive as possible. These days, my favorite place to work is the current iteration of a home office my wife and I have shared since 2017 (see Figure 2-1).

Organizations say a lot about their culture with how they allocate offices and desk space. The founders of Intel famously did away with offices, opting for cubicles for everyone in the company, which was why you would find the world-famous Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove all working at cubicles. A bio-pharma company in Madison has a similar arrangement, with the exception that the founder and CEO uses an entire house as his office and meeting space – a holdover from when he lived in that house during the company’s early days.

Fully remote organizations enable many different options and conversations about the design and allocation of physical space. Clearly, anyone who spends most of their time working from home or client locations does not need much square footage at an office.

As Matt Mullenweg (Automattic founder) notes, fully remote organizations enable every employee to design their own office experience while also removing the status that is often implied, intentionally or otherwise, through the location and size of a person’s office. As Mullenweg noted in a 2020 New York Times interview with David Gelles:

…most people who choose to have offices are usually the bosses. And I’ve been to the offices of billionaire CEOs that have their own private bathroom, beautiful art and couches. But these are all things that you can have in your house. What I love about distributed organizations is that every single employee can have a corner office (Gelles, 2020).

In his own blog post shortly after this interview, Mullenweg goes on to describe the cultural differences between unlimited definitions of “office” or “workspace” as wherever you feel happiest and most productive (in my case that is often a local coffee shop or my screen porch as well as my home office desk) versus the variations of experiences between an entry-level person in a cubicle and most senior leaders in choice offices. Mullenweg points out that leaders may have conscious or unconscious biases based on their experience with their more desirable spaces that influence their thinking on culture and productivity in remote versus on-site work scenarios – be mindful of this potential bias (Mullenweg, 2020).

Business Travel – Spend Less, Invest More

Along with a reduction in the need for expense of real estate, models of remote work and distributed organizations also enable these organizations to spend far less on business travel. One emergent theme from the Covid-19 pandemic was the realization that many routine business meetings, whether internal or external, could be done without requiring travel to a physical location. This certainly has a positive impact through time savings and cost reductions for the people and companies not making the trip. Naturally, there is a cost to the many organizations who ordinarily profit from these trips – businesses such as conference organizers, airlines, hotels, and restaurants saw their revenue from conferences, business travel, and hotel stays plummet during the pandemic.

Nonetheless, organizations must realistically assess where their money is best spent as well as where their peoples’ time is best used. As an experienced business traveler myself, I can honestly admit that there is some charm in business travel – some of the coolest places I’ve ever been were experienced on business trips. On the other hand, business travel is time away from family, it is usually unproductive time, and it is very expensive. Remote and distributed models enable organizations to choose when a business trip is necessary versus routine, and channel that investment into business travel that could yield critical results.

In the remote distributed model, one very essential business trip that everyone in the organization must make periodically is the regular gathering of the organization to build relationships, collaborate, and plan, and generally build that common esprit de corps that forges the organization's identity when they are in full remote and distributed mode, the norm. Investing in business travel for these reasons is critical. Curtailing business travel due to health concerns in the short-term and to the realize the benefits of remote engagement inside and outside the company for the long-term helps make funds available to invest in these critical, culture-building all-hands gatherings.