“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." – Heraclitus

I'm semi-obsessed with the back to the office stories in the news. When the pandemic started and business shifted as much work to remote as possible I knew it would cause a shift with remote work tools. For instance, each fall I teach a remote learning class to high school students. The kids are located all over the Americas forcing us to use Zoom and other remote collaboration tools. The first times through the class included lengthy tutorials on the tools. The current crop of students knows more about the tools than I do. I didn't expect a work culture shift. Working remote is hard.
A week ago, business news-maker du jour Elon Musk told his employees to get back to their office 40 hours a week or leave. He must see value in the intrapersonal connections and collaboration, I thought. Then I saw his followup to a question about the new policy. "They should pretend to work somewhere else." Huh.
The way we've been successful is how we know how to be successful. "I did X, and I am successful, so if you do X you should have the same if not similar success." A CEO said this about the new generation of talent coming through his office. He got to the top by putting in crazy hours and doing amazing work. The Millennials and Gen Zers working for him didn't have it from what he sees, he told me.
Musk and my CEO friend may be right.
One thing to consider, a thing I helped the CEO with, is revisiting his history, the story he tells himself. He came through the company with a cohort. How many of his peers had his stamina and work ethic? How many made it to CEO? Since it wasn't 100%, or even 50% of his peers enjoying his success, is he sure there was no one on his team showing promise?
If your people are remote, and it feels like they are less productive, go get the data. Lack of productivity will be showing up somewhere. Get past the anecdotes and into the metrics. We know what we know until the data tells us otherwise. What gets measured gets managed. Remote work is no different.
Things change. New tools come along. Plans are altered. What shouldn't change is your vision. If your current strategy isn't making progress, show your people the data and make changes. I give you permission.
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