Virtual insanity

One of my senior leaders once told me a funny story about the time his kid was asked about what Dad did for work. “He talks on the phone in the basement all day,” the kid replied.

This pretty much sums up a lot of people’s perceptions about virtual work

The optics of stuff like staying clad in business casual khakis and collared shirts (except for Fridays, which seems arbitrary, TBH), sitting in traffic and driving miles to go to a generic cubicle in a generic office to do what could instead get done in the aforementioned basement must be more important than productivity, engagement or retention

That’s really the only conclusion you can draw from the fact that while it’s a widely growing trend and principal driving force behind the purported rise of the “gig economy,” virtual work remains just that in the eyes of far too many companies.

Working from home is, for whatever reason, often dismissed as a logical contradiction – despite reams of research suggesting that – just to scratch the surface, statistically speaking –  virtual workers work over two hours a day longer than their office-based counterparts, were about 1/3 more likely to express job satisfaction and scored an average of just around 25% higher in their annual performance reviews than those required to face time for face-time.

Virtual Reality and the New World of Work.

Instead, advocates of the “traditional workplace” tend to eschew quantitative evidence for more subjective, amorphous TA outcomes.

You know the ones.

They’re the kind of leaders who think unexpected “collisions” (effectively, these are, by definition, unsolicited work interruptions – yeah, this is an accepted theory, SMH) created by open office environments have more benefit than creating an environment conducive to working without having to worry about colliding with anyone at any time.

Or the kind of leader who wrongly assumes that showing how cool the physical space where employees are required to spend more time than their own homes is all that’s really required when building an employer brand, ignoring the fact that for an increasingly large segment of today’s workforce, the very concept of work is something you do, not somewhere you go.

Culture and proximity aren’t necessarily positively correlated, and as much as we’d like to believe that where work gets done matters in determining how (and how well) it gets done, there’s no evidence supporting either of these theories. In fact, the opposite seems to be true – 87% of virtual workers said that they felt “extremely connected” with their company and their colleagues.