Employee fatigue and burnout was a wellbeing concern for many employers before the pandemic, but eight months in, the problem seems to have been exacerbated by granting people the very thing they coveted the most: unlimited flexibility.
Are we experiencing the unintended consequences of working remotely?
After the sudden and miraculous shift to remote work – the office fightback has well and truly begun.
Distributed working requires a whole system change. It requires trusting people, it requires removing unnecessary management, and it requires a seismic shift in how we collaborate with others.
This isn’t a binary choice between the office and remote work. Instead we must consider what work used to be, what it is now and what it could be in the future.
Remote work has accelerated 10 years in 10 days. The only thing that could pull people back to the office is the ego of the bad middle manager scared of losing control – Chris Herd The revolution in remote working , when it came, was peaceful. Orderly even. There was no fightback from technophobe hold-outs … Continue reading Did A Virus Just Bring About The End Of The Office?
If you are working in an office today you will be interrupted – or you will interrupt yourself – every 3 minutes. And what’s worse is it will take most of us up to 23 minutes to recover from that distraction. If your boss lets you, go home. Walking out the office door is likely to be … Continue reading Why Do We Hate Our Offices?
Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better – Nicholas Carr , The Shallows You’d have thought we’d have given up on the physical office by now. … Continue reading Continuous Partial Attention: Designing A Less Distracted Future Of Work
“Management is not only dysfunctional, Management is also destructive” – Companies Without Managers Last week we held the first of the Bromford #inspiremelab sessions – where colleagues curated and then discussed provocations around the future of how we work. We covered off a range of subjects but the conversation kept coming back to that opening quote … Continue reading Why Do We Still Need Managers?
