Work is location agnostic. People are not.

I've just sent off the last big changes to my book, All the World's a Workplace, and to celebrate, I wanted to talk through a few of the ideas that have been rattling around my head throughout the writing of it. (If you prefer to hear me rather than read me, check out episode 383 of the 21st Century Work Life podcast.)

When we talk about remote work, hybrid, return to office, we talk about location as if that's the whole story. It isn't. The work is location agnostic. The people are not. The work doesn't exist without the people, and the people are now at the centre of it — and what suits one person doesn't suit another. We know this. But somehow, the minute the conversation turns to where we work, we forget it.

That's why I think we have to be much more specific than we usually are. Not "does remote work work?" but: what kind of work are we talking about, what kind of team, what kind of person, what kind of process? When is being in the office together genuinely better, and for whom? You can see why the book got so long...

I was speaking to someone recently who asked what home workers actually lose when they're told to come back in. My answer: control over their environment, for a start. Location does matter, but it matters in different ways to different people. And that's the bit that seems to be forgotten about.

Something I've noticed, and this is anecdotal, is that a lot of the decisions to bring people back are being made by people who are very comfortable in the office. They understand the commute is a pain. They understand you might want a bit of flexibility for the odd personal thing during the day. What they don't always understand is how much the office used to be the default — the place everyone was simply expected to be, with no choice in it, and so we all got used to it in the end. Take that away, and people need a reason to go in. "it's just better" isn't a reason. It's a preference.

Then there's hybrid, which I have a lot of feelings about. How much flexibility is actually in it? Do teams get to decide? What happens when the team's goals shift? If we're not clear about what we mean, people end up working on assumptions, and their psychological contract gets broken, over and over. The thing hybrid needs most isn't a fixed number of days in the office. It's clarity.

All of this is why the book ended up being about the human experience, and about dilemmas — the tensions we live with rather than problems to be neatly solved. Is this a Zoom link that I see before me? To work from home, or not to work from home?

Even though the manuscript is done, I want to continue evolving its ideas, so if any of this resonates with you — or if you've come across some research I should know about — get in touch. I'd love to hear from you.