Future Work/Life is my newsletter in which I explore ideas focused on the future of work and how to design legendary careers. Every week, I share something I’ve written, a few things I’ve enjoyed reading, and something great to listen to. If you find it interesting, please share it!
The Writing:
What’s the most important reason people cite for returning to the office?
Depending on the survey, you’ll read about things like:
- Career Advancement
- Building connections
- Friendship
In every case, Collaboration will be high up on the list.
Collaboration is one of the main benefits touted for meeting in person. And yet all the signs indicate big changes are happening. Whether or not you still believe collaborating in the same physical space is superior, most innovation and investment – whether measured in time or money – is being ploughed into tools to do it online.
At a time when most of the talk on the business pages is about whether or not we’re in a recession, the top news in tech last week was Adobe’s acquisition of Figma – a cloud-based design tool – for $20 billion. What’s the rationale for such a significant investment?
Simply put, Figma’s product is built for the new world of work - designed specifically to enable multiplayer, online collaboration
Adobe was famously bold in switching from a one-off license to a new, subscription-based pricing model for its product suite in 2013. However, as Stratechery’s Ben Thompson explains:
“While Adobe successfully changed their business model, the product really wasn’t that different. Oh sure, there were new features, and a new option to save and sync your files to Adobe’s cloud, but the fundamental concept of standalone apps working on files remained; teams would have to go elsewhere to figure out how to collaborate and, thanks to Adobe’s dominance, they would drag Creative Cloud along with them.”
This sounds a bit like how many leaders and businesses are approaching asking their team to return to the office.
“We’re a hybrid business now,” they claim, as though just saying it solves the fundamental problem. Namely, that most people have realised that since the average home is better for supporting work better than average workplace than the average workplace, there’s not much point in commuting into an office every day.
To continue Ben Thompson’s thoughts on the Adobe x Figma relationship:
“Still, this left an opening for new web-based apps like Figma to start nibbling away at Adobe’s dominance: when working on things like UI design, collaboration is paramount, making the limitations of the web well worth whatever sacrifice in performance was entailed.”
In this case, the comparison is between better design tools and an improved ability to easily collaborate online, but you could just easily apply this ‘trade-off’ lens to in-person and digital collaboration,.
In-person might be better if you have the right people in the right place at the same time but this is becoming increasingly difficult. Aside from employees not wanting to travel into the office, businesses are also gradually realising the advantage of tapping into a wider talent pool. Salesforce are a significant example, as this tweet points out
So even if we assume that online collaboration is, say, 20% worse than its physical equivalent, that’s still far outweighed by being able to access talent that’s 40% better (these numbers clearly aren’t bang on, but you get the point).
All of this being the case, optimising for more online collaboration makes a lot of sense.
Which no doubt explains another of last week’s big tech stories - the $26 million Series A round raised by Polywork, a company named for the growing portfolio career trend. It’s not completely clear how many existing users the product actually has, but given the size of the deal, it signals a few things:
The ongoing and long-term trend for more independent workers
The desire for people to work together despite going it alone
The significance of enabling that collaboration.
I’ve been a beta member of Polywork since the end of last year and it’s been interesting to see how their positioning has changed in that time. It began as a cross between LinkedIn and Twitter – a social feed that indexed more on the day-to-day work progress than Twitter, but which went deeper than the almost uselessly broad career history on LinkedIn. Now it’s positioned as ‘The Collaboration Network’.
In founder Peter Johnston’s words:
“If LinkedIn is a network for full-time opportunities, we’re sort of the network for collaboration opportunities.”
Whether or not Polywork is the solution or, more likely, one of a selection of a new breed of talent marketplaces, the fact that the money’s flowing in their direction tells us that online collaboration is no longer just a poor substitute for meeting in person but the new reality. Something which can create new possibilities. Not just in how we work together but with whom we work.
Will people still want to meet in person? Of course.
Do I personally enjoy a different level of connection when I’m in the same room as someone I’m collaborating with? Sure.
Will people who’ve never experienced anything other than working full-time in an office fight against the trend? Most definitely.
But you can’t hold back the waves of change. In this case, exciting innovation is creating new opportunities. As with many of the trends changing the way we work, harnessing it will take an open mind and a willingness to reimagine what’s possible.
Have a lovely weekend,
Ollie
The Reading:
Like me, you may have read Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s book Nudge and tracked various companies and government units attempting to put their lessons into action. Some of these seem to have worked. Plenty haven’t. So the big question is do nudges really work? This article in Behavioral Scientist focuses on ‘Making Sense of the “Do Nudges Work?” Debate’.
As we gradually approach a recession, many will inevitably be fearful for their jobs, but can we predict which are more likely to be in danger than others? HR Magazine has attempted to do just that.
Combine Adam Grant’s insights with Liz Fosslien’s illustrations and you’ve got a good recipe for a swift, insightful take-away.
The Listening:
It’s great hearing about the effect technology will have on work and everything, but what about psychedelics? In case you were wondering, Isabel Berwick and the Financial Times’ Working It podcast mulled that one over this week.