Virtual Reality
More and more I am hearing of people who are working from home. I am unclear how I feel about this. Who among us hasn’t said something like, “I can do my work from anywhere.” There is a very big difference between occasionally working virtually on the fly, organizing your job so that you spend one way of the workweek at home for convenience, and closing down your office altogether and working entirely from home or on the go. For years, we have tolerated salesmen with far-flung territories only showing up in the office once in a while for some facetime. In some ways, salesmen who spend too much time in the office are considered non-productive. And then there were new mothers who chose to work four-day weeks and take a 20% pay cut. They and their managers all knew that the drop in productivity would likely be 0%, but that didn’t stop the employer from taking its fifth of flesh in allowing women to be with their children a bit more.
There are always people who can focus better and can be more productive than others. While this may take the form of an efficient person driving their productivity through the roof, the cultural aspect of not making others look too bad causes people to default getting their work done and perhaps a bit more, and then backing off and using their excess time to whatever other purpose they can imagine. The ability to focus is both an asset and a liability. I always remember the story of the time that a college friend and I had a spring break job together. It was a menial task job that sounded like a thinking job. We were research assistants, which translated into coding questionnaires so they could be digitized for statistical analysis. Even that description seems higher order, but not so. In the old days of IBM computing, the standard unit was a Hollerith Punch Card that had 80 columns and 10 rows (0-9). Most research was organized to translate data into a single-digit number. If you could keep your questionnaire to 80 questions that could be coded 0-9 you were in business. That allowed each questionnaire to be represented on one punch card. Then if you had, say, 500 questionnaires, you had all your data in one deck of punch cards which could be sliced and diced (in a data management sense) any way you wanted. Statistical data is the heart of most social science. Our job was to translate the questionnaires into 80 digits.
These questionnaires were designed to make digitization easy. The questions were not open-ended. All you had to do was transcribe the answer onto an 80-box coding form. A 6 was translated to a 6 in a box on the form. Very challenging. Except for bad penmanship by the questioner, this was mindless and relatively effortless rote work. The only worker variable was how good your eye-hand coordination and page-turning coordination were. If you had tried to design a test of a person’s ability to stay focused, this would have been a good one. What it showed me was that I was able to stay on task and my friend was not. There was truly nothing difficult about the task, it just required you to stay focused for periods of time and muscle through the work. It was digital ditch-digging. I was able to do the mule work and plow through by playing games with myself. My friend would get wound-up quickly with the menial work and had to take many breaks and walk the halls rather than plow the field of questionnaires. Was he too smart for the work? Perhaps, but I suspect he lacked the nimbleness to force his mind into a groove as needed to get the job done. Intelligence and focus are very different characteristics.
I believe that the ability to work remotely is informed by one’s ability to focus. In an office setting, the day is an array of random distractions that must get juggled and managed to allow work to get done in between the distractions. Supposedly the big advantage of the collective workplace is its efficiency and the added value of social interaction, presumably to enhance ideation and collective endeavor. In a solitary remote environment, one must have the discipline to stay on task without the benefit of much social interaction. No matter where you are, there are certainly distractions of some sort and if not, people have wonderful abilities to self-generate their own distractions. Few people work best in a sensory-deprivation environment, but efficiency is probably optimized when distractions are minimized. How long one can maintain focus without burning out is always at issue, but that becomes both a personal trait and may even be a learned behavior.
Back to the notion of working remotely, our new ubiquitous technology, which is to say our smartphones with FaceTime, give us the ability to have virtual and a very adequate substitute for interpersonal contact methods. However, how often does one use FaceTime for normal interactions? My personal experience suggests we have gone the other way and do more texting than even emailing, calling or certainly FaceTiming. That suggests to me that maybe collective effort works better with minimal interactions. New conference calling technology like Zoom, the meeting app that costs little or nothing to allow very effective video conference calling, breaks down the last barrier to multi-remote meeting work. In other words, the need for physical co-location gets less and less critical. Hence the accelerated rise of co-working space in lieu of permanent large office installations. People involved in a collective endeavor can now agree to gather infrequently to re-establish their true interpersonal bonds and to use technology to work from wherever they choose the rest of the time.
I am thinking about this virtual reality workplace because I am moving to California and my colleagues are in New York and elsewhere. But I recently heard from my son-in-law, who is a mortgage banker for a large national firm, that he was giving up his office permanently. He had been working from home often anyway, but now he was choosing to give up his personal office desk. His business operates like a small business that gets charged for the resources he uses. His dedicated office desk cost him $37,000 per year. He can access a communal desk space (for free) when he wants or needs to be in the office, which is very rarely. If I apply that metric to my desk and ratchet that up for my private CEO office, my physical office space is probably more like $60,000 per year (we have 12 offices and pay $500,000 per year).
This is no longer a moot point. We have decided to sublet much of our office space. We will be left with six smaller offices and three desk spaces for $145,000. That brings the cost per spot roughly down to under $20,000 per head. This makes a lot of sense financially. The trick will be to see whether our remote location will be able to maintain the collective momentum to our effort and cause. Therein lies the rub to all of this. Maybe we gather in business to constantly prod ourselves into success. We may all agree that should not be necessary, but human nature may prevail and solo work perhaps leads to lackluster results and less collective staying power. I guess time and results will tell whether virtual reality has a chance to create real value.
