The current situation has forced organisations to consider remote working, something that should be a natural output when operating with effective and collaborative #SWP. That being said, it is great to see how quickly mobilisation and change can come about in a crisis and it's a pity that not more organisations, and the people within, are able to move forward more quickly in normal times.
Forbes reported only a few days ago that Google will provide a $1,000 dollar allowance this year for their staff working from home and it wouldn't surprise me if we haven’t yet heard the end of Google’s long term offering in this area.
But what is it that we are not seeing that makes Facebook believe it is a good thing to actually reduce people's pay when working from home? Can it be a form of ‘location weighting’ that hasn’t been communicated well.
It has been reported that Facebook intends there will be 50% of its staff working from home/remotely by 2030 (contrast this with Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, and his paradigm shift of letting all employees work from home “forever” ). To me, this Facebook figure sounds far too low - especially if you are "aggressively opening up remote hiring" and allowing people to work from home. Maybe the numbers has been fully modelled and, the threat of removing reward for existing employees re-locating to home, in reality stifles the change towards more remote working. Generally, there is a normal tendency to overestimate change in the next 1-3 years and properly misjudge the size and significance of the 5-10 year change so let's see. I should of course caveat this by flagging that I have no access to the internal analysis I know will have been undertaken at Facebook and I will be happy to stand corrected should the evidence show something different. My take on the Zuckerberg announcement though is that it all seems a bit vague (or perhaps just the media reports are stacked against him).
Reading the NBC News article , and given the above, I am not sure I think Facebook will be the leader they say on this topic of remote work. And reading Kristin's (which I got from a @Tom_Peters re-tweet from @DHH at Basecamp, thank you) I don’t think I am alone in my thinking, although I wouldn’t use the term “barbaric” - well, not without more evidence anyway. In her great review Kristin gives other great examples including some organisations giving $10,000 for remote work programs and de-locating.
Remote working, videoconferencing and interviewing (without both parties being in the same location) have been around and operating for a long time. From personal experience and not only the strategic thinking I do professionally in SWP, these solutions were available over a decade ago and, more to the point, worked well too. Why then has there been resistance?
Mike and Mark at Manager-Tools also prove that you can manage people without ever having met physically, the most important part is weekly one-on-ones with your direct reports - you too can learn how for free. These meetings are so important to have, that the phone will do, rather than having them less regularly in real life. I have used these for over a decade, when I have direct reports, and can testify it does work extremely well in a remote setting.
Secondly, videoconferencing is something I used in team meetings nearly 10 years ago. It made it possible to bring in colleagues from around the globe - long before Zoom was available. Today my home office set-up is somewhat better than my corporate one of a decade ago, with studio lamps for light and green screen for backgrounds, yet the cost is negligible in comparison and whilst videoconferencing is not a new technology - it is great to see it so newly available now to virtually anyone.
Thirdly, remote recruitment processes. I successfully went through a recruitment process when I join Barclays nearly 10 years ago via two video interviews. The most senior interview I had was with the top stakeholder, now CIO. At the time I had to find myself a videoconferencing suite in Sheffield (I worked with a client based there) being beamed into Barclay's offices in Canary Wharf. It didn’t make sense then and it certainly doesn’t make sense now to let distance be a blocker to gain access to the best and most suited people.
Many of activities discussed thus far fall inside, or link to, SWP: Reward, EVP, Recruitment, Scenario Planning, Location Strategy etc. It is a collaboration of all given they all have a role to play in improving effective output. And in securing more benefits from your SWP activities its reassuring to know you don’t have to be great at every part to do better than most.
If you want to be prepared for the next big change or crisis you will definitely benefit from taking a comprehensive and structured SWP approach, but one you can kick off quickly. In my experience, as a pragmatist who regularly goes into organisations to set-up SWP, the benefits and how we gain the capability of doing Strategic Workforce Planning requires in large part getting on with the real work - taking too long time to build the theory and you risk losing the chance to deliver great value.
Remember too that the outputs of SWP work rightly differs between organisations. We have different strategies for our companies, and this can naturally lead to different delivery strategies and different activation plans.
Update: 8 months later, February 2021, Spotify announced 'Working From Anywhere' giving employees freedom to chose their 'Work Mode' and location, (article in The Verge)
Update 2: March 2021, Spotify's sequel, Work From (M)anywhere on their HR Blog. And from a recent conversation with Alexander Westerdahl at Spotify (and on Li) I draw the conclusion that Spotify's approach to remuneration is quite different (and in my mind the much better and preferred) from Facebook's. Update 3: March 2021, Reuters reporting on British Banks cementing remote working arrangements. "Nationwide has told all its 13,000 office-based staff to work from anywhere in the country." and Santander is offering 5,000 staff "new working arrangements, combining working from home with access to local collaboration spaces."Thanks to Mark & Mike at Manager-Tools, David Heinemeier Hansson/@dhh at Basecamp, @Tom_Peters, Kristin and below for tweets, articles, photo or otherwise giving me input to above, the articles and links used are:
Facebook announcement by Dylan Byers at @nbcnews (Li profile); Jack at Twitter article by Jack Kelly @wecruitr_io at Forbes; Google gives by David Beasley at Forbes; Reducing salary for remote workers is 'barbaric' by Kristin Wilson on Medium and Photo by the same Kristin Wilson on Unsplash
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