Why WFH doesn’t work for challengers
Lockdown has shown us that most work can be done perfectly well from home. But if we really want to drive change, we need to do it in small teams working closely together.
A few years ago I interviewed a US Navy SEAL. I was interested in how very small teams managed to achieve a disproportionately large impact on a larger stage, and the SEAL, now in civilian life, was fascinating about the real purpose of much of their extraordinarily arduous training. Navy SEAL teams operate in units of 4 or 8, he said, and the vital ingredient for a small team like that in order to operate impactfully on critical missions is a real sense of closeness and mutual trust. The real value of spending nights together deprived of sleep, on long marches, through freezing water, is not simply developing physical endurance and mental resilience, it is developing a deep and close bond as a team within that small, essential unit. It is that deep mutual confidence in each other, and trust that each of you is looking out for the other one, that is the real key to success when the important operation begins.
A lot is being written about the future of offices at the moment, and whether we need them at all any more – hasn’t lockdown shown us all that we can work perfectly well from home? A number of companies are telling their staff that they don’t need to come in at all, ever again. Many CFOs will understandably be seeing this as a good opportunity to cut costs, at a time when the business has taken a short term body blow that it is their responsibility to help it recover from.
And there are of course certain kinds of work that can be done on one’s own at home, or in loose virtual teams, where closeness and trust between a team doesn’t matter particularly. The bread and butter of many professions, perhaps. But not all work is the same, and not all company initiatives are the same. It would be easy to write about challengers here, and the absolutely critical importance of culture and closeness to them – both because they tend to be small teams on a mission to change the category and because of the importance to a challenger of creating ‘a culture of overcoming’. So of course this is true for challengers, but it is also true of any company who recognises that a strong shared culture is central to their success.
For most businesses that daily bread and butter work may be the majority of the work they do that year, but it is not the most important work that the company does that year: there are a number of key initiatives every year that cannot be phoned in. There are key ways that they need to develop, key initiatives they need to land, key innovations that (whether the senior leadership yet realise it) need to be tenaciously driven through. External challenges aside, there will be a sapping internal buy-in process (one Head of Innovation at a large company told us that they needed 400 ‘Yeses’ before a new idea left the building), and sometimes the inevitable internal antibodies that swarm to resist change.
If I go back further in our research into how such key initiatives succeed within large companies, it is clear that it is always driven by small, tight, cross-functional teams ‘hunting as a pack’: forming as a group under a leader and staying closely committed to the project and each other over 2-3 years, and sometimes longer. These really critical initiatives will involve long marches. There will be periods of little sleep. There will be freezing water, often from inside one’s own company. And key to getting you through it will be a really close trusting relationship, with others that you know have got your back.
I am not trying to romanticize the work those involved in these kinds of critical and difficult projects do; god knows it rarely feels a romantic thing at the time. But I am struck that a lot of the commentary on the future of offices is either by journalists, whose job is usually a more individual and even solitary work than the critical team-based work we are discussing here, or CEOs, who are usually buffered from the realities of the internal struggle to get something good through. So while I agree with much of what Satya Nadella, for instance, feels about the loss of touch and social capital, and those who argue the danger that in losing serendipity of office encounters we also risk losing much our creativity, I feel both of these stop short of one of the most important benefits of a strong, healthy, office-based culture.
If we want to really drive progress, or change, or a challenge, we need to do it in teams working closely together (and feeling safe). That isn’t going to happen from people with loose ties to each other working from home. It’s going to come from continuing to build a really deep and shared sense and experience of each other, and our collective focus on the challenge we are working on. Our own team’s micro-culture, within the company’s own culture.
At eatbigfish we are temporarily completely virtual: our central London landlord wanted us in June to sign a five year renewal at a 50% increase; we declined. We now know we can work from home. We now know that we can do good work from home; we already know each other well enough, and have a close enough relationship that allows us to do that.
But in the UK we will be back in an office by January. Not everyone will come in all the time – but there will be good changes in the balance of home, office and the commute – but we will all be there for several days a week. In the US, our colleagues are ranged across a number of different locations, and an office for all of them would be impossible; their relationships with each other and us have instead been forged over the last 10 years in the intensity of workshop days and evenings together - and the weeks we come together twice a year (including a killer Christmas party). But in a Zoom world, where three day workshops are a thing of the past, we aren’t physically coming together in the same way, and we’re going to learn new ways to build, nurture and cement those relationships between us all. Particularly as we bring in a new generation.
As a company, we want to change things. We want to be a team that helps clients drive progress in the projects that really matter to them. Which means we have to hunt as a pack ourselves. And I don’t believe that, in our work, the culture successfully creating change demands can ever come from simply working from home.