Guess we knew this would probably happen. Let’s run through some of the basic reasons right upfront:
- Some people aren’t made to work from home: Some people thrive off an office, and they don’t have the tech, routines, and discipline to work at home consistently.
- Familial responsibilities: Now you might be juggling your career, your partner’s career, kids in online school, kids running around, etc… and we’re talking about an apartment or a 2/2 house. Not everyone has a palatial estate.
- Layoffs: Those are common as revenue models erode. Now the first three bullets here point to “stress,” but the more “stressed” we are, our trust in others tends to struggle as well.
- We can’t see the decision-makers: You might have had an in-office job where you never spoke to decision-makers (common), but you at least saw them racing around hallways and whatnot. Now you don’t see them. You have no idea what they are discussing on their video calls. Is the axe falling? What’s happening? Are priorities shifting on a dime and we don’t even know?
- This thing seems never-ending: We’re about to hit a year.
- We lose the cues: We can’t see as much about facial reactions, about wine and pizza spread out in the office (“They pulled an all-nighter, or maybe they had sex in the conference room”), about how people take notes, etc. Because we lack cues, we lack intel about co-workers, and when we lack intel, we lack trust.
Overall, COVID and work-from-home shifted a lot of people back to focusing on self — their immediate needs, goals, and life — as opposed to team, which let’s be honest no one really focuses on that deeply but at least when you see people 10 hours/day in a central location, there’s some focus on others in that way. The shift from “kinda team” to “wholly self” is naturally going to erode trust, and to be perfectly honest, trust was not doing that well to begin with in a work sense.
Here’s a decent article on work-from-home and trust. I say decent because the stats and context are good (yay!) but the solutions are moronic, including “Build a trust staircase beginning with your executives.” Go to a CFO and tell him you want to “build a trust staircase.” He will immediately log off Zoom, drive to your house, and stick a sword in your tires. Guys who make financial decisions for companies don’t want to “build a trust staircase” or “assume a culture of one size fits none.” In their minds, you should trust them because (a) they pay you and (b) they’re experienced, worldly execs. Period, full stop.
That brings up the key issue, tho: How do we foster trust in a work-from-home context? It’s not easy. I think people have been studying this for 20 years at this point, and no one has a definitive set of answers. It feels like the best bet might be hybrid — although some say that’s the worst bet — because then at least you get some human interaction and can read the in-person cues, and maybe you come into the office on days that other silos are there, and you make some cross-functional relationships. I don’t think a culture of trust can be built on Zoom and Teams. I think it’s too distant from how humans prefer to interact, personally. You can try “Zoom Happy Hours” and all that shit, but I don’t know if that’s building trust so much as just building awkwardness.
This has been a weird time with a lot of heady questions, and “Are our workplaces trusting enough?” is probably not even in the top 14, to be honest. But it’s something to definitely consider as the “return date” creeps to July, then September, then EOY 2021, then March 2022, etc…
