I work in public sector digitalisation and have for a decade, so this article sort of rings home with me. Especially now, having passed a year of thousands of office workers working from home and having seen a rise in efficiency and quality across all our sectors. I’m not saying working from home is an all-good sort of thing, we have also seen an increase in stress and depression related sickness, but in terms of getting shit done, things have been never been better.
Which is sort of ironic from my department, because this has also been a year where our process optimisers and MBAs have been almost completely unable of performing their usual efficiency and benefit realisation consulting in our different departments, as that’s a hands on sort of thing. Not that they’ve done nothing, they’ve been to really good work helping managers coordinate remote work and teaching both the CEO and Political layers how to use Microsoft teams efficiently.
Anyway, if we’ve increased efficiency and quality more in a year or not trying to, it sort of begs the question what good trying really does. You obviously can’t really conclude anything scientific on our anecdotal measurements as we’ve seen the major change of going remote on top of it, but it is something to think about.
Not that we will, we’re already trying to figure out how to go back to the way things were, as the majority of our managers still seem to think people work better if they spend 7 and a half hours in an open office 5 days a week.
It reminds me a little of a story I read about Alcoa, the Aluminium manufacturer.
They had been have issues with improving productivity. One of the issues was the workforce and unions were reluctant to accept any change.
New management came in and rather than pressing on productivity issues they decided to double down on safety. They hadn't been particularly bad but not great either.
Obviously staff and unions are never going to complain about making their workplace safer. What also happened was as soon as process were open to change to improve safety they were also open to change for productivity.
I wonder in cases like yours whether the pandemic just unstuck a lot of things because all the previous excuses floated away as soon as someone says "because covid".
Anecdotal but I know at least one megacorp that is doing layoffs of manager level positions after noticing that their services/industrial processes worked well while them being on furlough during the lockdowns.
Which is sort of ironic from my department, because this has also been a year where our process optimisers and MBAs have been almost completely unable of performing their usual efficiency and benefit realisation consulting in our different departments, as that’s a hands on sort of thing. Not that they’ve done nothing, they’ve been to really good work helping managers coordinate remote work and teaching both the CEO and Political layers how to use Microsoft teams efficiently.
Anyway, if we’ve increased efficiency and quality more in a year or not trying to, it sort of begs the question what good trying really does. You obviously can’t really conclude anything scientific on our anecdotal measurements as we’ve seen the major change of going remote on top of it, but it is something to think about.
Not that we will, we’re already trying to figure out how to go back to the way things were, as the majority of our managers still seem to think people work better if they spend 7 and a half hours in an open office 5 days a week.