Why Back-to-Office Policies Won’t Help Big Tech Sell AI
All images were generated by the author’s prompts on Meta.ai.
There is a growing tension between Big Tech’s pre-pandemic promotion of remote work and its current back-to-office efforts. The shift in workplace dynamics and management strategies forces buyers to question the tech industry’s credibility. This reversal not only contradicts years of marketing collaborative technologies but also threatens Big Tech’s position in an evolving AI-driven market. Based on this conflict between technological capabilities and traditional management approaches, Rasmus suggests that embracing flexible, commitment-based work models may be crucial for tech giants to maintain their innovative edge and market leadership.
Business Insider reported that up to 50% of Dell Workers have chosen not to return to the office (Business Insider) even with career advancement truncation and in-office attendance monitoring for those selecting the “hybrid” work option.
Many other businesses are also struggling to entice people back to the office. It’s a particularly bad look for Big Tech, however, that for years before COVID lockdowns, it touted the flexibility, productivity, and employee experience benefits of remote work facilitated by technology.
I personally wrote dozens of papers, presented to thousands of customers, and created immersive experiences while at Microsoft, most of which made the argument that using collaborative technology was just as good as being in the office, if not better. The Dutch office went so far as to take the Freelance Planet scenario, one of four future scenarios my team crafted to explore technology futures, and asked for my help to implement it.
The key Dutch office story was that people did not need to be in the office to be productive. When people were in the office, it was no longer a traditional office; it was a choice, a remote workplace that offered an experience. The country manager, however, often said he would rather have his people near customers, avoiding the long commutes into Amsterdam from outlying areas.
Back-to-office mandates, or coercions, suggest that the promise of IT-facilitated collaboration was disingenuous. It tells customers that their investments in collaborative platforms are not what they thought they were. They weren’t meant as a tool for creating remote team cohesion but rather a more mundane extension of what happens after people leave a conference room.
As the author of content touting remote, hybrid and road warrior work, I still stand by my words. The issue is not one of technology’s failure. I just got off a Google Meet with a potential partner who found a global market during COVID for a product that would once have been considered an in-room experience. He can now facilitate simulation-based improvement experiences in Australia from the UK because of remote collaboration technology.
I have not worked in an office for nearly 15 years. I collaborate with people all over the world. Sure, I still travel to conferences to speak and to client sites to consult, but not as much as before. I offer advice via video conferences. Some conferences that I once attended remain but have become completely virtual, including the vendor showcases.
While remote work may not prove ideal for all types of work (I hear you retail, healthcare, manufacturing, extractive industry, and service workers), it does work for most tech jobs. Dell’s motivation for bringing people back to the office isn’t about the failures of technology; it’s a worry about what people are doing on the margins of their time, which comes from a management perspective, not an experience reality.
I have suggested to all who will listen that the answer is not moving people back to the office but adopting commitment-based work as the approach to measurement. Agree to commitments like the outcome and the timeframe, even the collaborative model, and hold people accountable for following through with the commitment. Where and when the work takes place doesn’t matter as long as it is delivered with quality and at the time promised.
Commitment-based work can be set in as small a chunk of work or as broad, depending on the type of work. Unfortunately, it requires different management skills and a more collaborative, empathetic, and trusting attitude than many managers possess. It is easier to “manage” people when you see them than to trust them on their own.
Commitment-based work raises several issues about management, leadership, employee evaluations, key performance indicators and a long list of other things that are not relevant to this post. That there is a viable alternative to in-office work for many that aligns well with the promise of mobile, remote work, and collaborative technology is relevant. Technology always needs an operating model that allows it to be effective.
Big Tech has not adopted an operating model that permits it to adopt its own promise of a technology-connected world where people can work from anywhere (and other superlatives, like living the life they want while still contributing to the economic value of the world).
So, what does all of this have to do with AI? AI is the next collaboration platform from the marketing perspective. It is the next promise. Big Tech is telling everyone that AI is the thing. Everybody’s doing it. Get on board or be left behind. For Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many others, before COVID, powerful IT in general, and collaborative technology in specific, was the thing to get on board with. Even Zoom is asking people within a certain radius of an office to spend time in the office (see The Washington Post here).
The distancing of Big Tech from a previous promise makes accepting the next promise harder. That while espousing the virtues of AI, those same companies are saying their previous technology, which they are still selling and using (and infusing with AI), isn’t really doing for us what we are telling us it can do, is a tough marketing conversation with savvy buyers.
Even for buyers with the same management concerns who want people to return to the office may think “Well, didn’t you say TEAMS/WORKSPACE/WEBEX/ZOOM was going to make remote work work? And now you are saying they do, but not really for you. And for employees who really got into it and mastered remote work skills and managed to get their work done, to excel, those people don’t get promotions anymore; they get monitored, perhaps even ostracized. So, are you telling me that as you are also selling AI as a productivity tool that won’t replace people, it will just make them more efficient and increase their productivity? Really?”
Perhaps the association with COVID will make people forget that the promise of remote, hybrid, technology-enabled collaborative work existed before the pandemic, but it shouldn’t. That promise was marketed for years before people were forced to test it. Remember also how much Big Tech spent on shoring up their promise through R&D and acquisitions during the pandemic to make their promise even more robust? Collaboration technology is better today than it was at the start of the pandemic, and while much of that investment has been redirected to AI, those systems are still improving because they are the recipients of AI technology.
I’m not sure what Peter Drucker would think of modern Big Tech managers. I know he thought technology and ideas like knowledge management would restructure work. The moves by Big Tech to bring people back to the office run counter to embracing change, the change they created. Big Tech is now the incumbent to the hundreds of AI startups, many of whom may someday be big enough to swallow a Microsoft or a Google. I think it will be this moment of retrenchment rather than advancement, this acceptance of rigidity, that will be seen as the tipping point when traditional Big Tech starts to decline, and new types of companies emerge.
There is still time for Dell, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Cisco, Zoom and many others to revisit their choices to embrace what I called at Microsoft The New World of Work, but the time is running out. AI is driving a rapid innovation cycle. Big Tech is now the curmudgeon grousing about the upstarts. They should ask those DOW component companies that are no longer DOW component companies how well the grousing worked out for them.
AI icon by Siipkan Creative from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
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