In early 2020, an epidemic washed out everyone’s joy of spring. There is hardly any industry or company that can do it alone.
If we convert the application phase of online office into three phases, then it is probably the “online office phase” of our daily use of Internet tools, the “telework phase” that emerged during the epidemic, and the “permanent telework phase” that may emerge in the future.
During the epidemic, the application phase of online office completed a rush, from our daily “online work” into the “telecommuting” phase without transition.
But a few months ago, the last stage of “online office” was still a mixed name. Reports accompanying the online office are often linked to “996.” Almost everyone in the workplace is suing for online intrusions into personal living space.
A WeChat client, a Ding Talk boss, no matter at what time, in what place, what is being done, you should immediately put into work.
Worse than 996, many 996 jobs offer more basic compensation than non-996 jobs, even though it is illegal, or businesses will not be able to recruit the right people. Hidden on-line office overtime, however, permeates almost all positions, and no one is compensated for it.
Working online all the time is more like the perpetual motivation of the digital age than 996, and it makes it seem that companies can buy all our time with eight hours of money.
And now, after this big trial during the outbreak, what new insights can we get into the online office?
After the epidemic, there’s no going back.
In order to avoid the discussion falling into nihilism, we should first repeat the benefits of online office.
There is no doubt about the benefits of online office, which fundamentally changes the operational efficiency of modern organizations.
In the pre-Internet era, the greater the organization, the lower the efficiency of internal messaging, and even with faxes and phone calls, a decision by the president of a 10,000-person company may take a week to deliver to all employees. Now, regardless of the size of the company, the company’s top decision makers can even synchronize their decisions immediately with each employee via instant messaging or live streaming.
The same is true of bottom-to-top messaging, where sales in each region may be presented to decision-makers in monthly or even quarterly terms in the absence of the Internet. In the era of on-line office, the automated report system can display the market dynamics of the previous day for the decision-makers at the zero point of each day.
With the development of Internet of Things and big data technology, this trend is becoming more and more obvious, goods, trade, trade, passenger flow and other information in the past unimaginable level of quantification, precision, real-time. Simpler and easier-to-read data charts also reveal more scientifically the mysteries of metaphysics that used to be hidden in decades of experience and market judgment.
With the help of the Internet, a 10,000-person enterprise can theoretically be as flexible as a one-person enterprise, and the effective information that decision-makers in the background can get is even more sensitive to subtle changes in the market than managers who used to be on the frontline.
Sometimes, we turn a blind eye to the 100-fold efficiency advantage of online office because all of our competitors are also 100-fold more productive. No matter what new problems the online office brings to the individual or the enterprise, it is impossible for us to return to the off-line office era, the reason is simple: Because we can’t get our competitors back to the off-line office era.
Like many Internet products, our society quietly agreed to a long list of side effects as it began to “work online.” But no one can stop this, so our discussion should focus more on reducing the negative impact of maintaining its efficiency advantage.
Boundary: The Core Issue of Online Office
The core problem of online office is the boundary, that is, the boundary between life and work, and furthermore, all the boundaries between individuals and the outside world.
Before the outbreak in early 2020, the question about online work was: With instant messaging tools, I lost my time off, and even if I got off duty, my boss and clients would bring me back to work online.
After the outbreak, the problem with online office work is: Because we can only communicate through communication tools, I often do not contact my boss, subordinates and colleagues during work hours, and I have no idea whether he is concentrating on his work or trying to sneak off.
Just by listing these two issues here, we can see that there is only one real problem: The Internet has significantly broken the boundaries between our work and our lives.
According to the Global Workplace Status Report, released by Gallup in 2017, only 13 percent of the world’s workers are fully engaged (i.e., completely out of touch and passionate about their jobs). Therefore, such a border break is obviously neither good for life nor necessarily good for the enterprise.
In the early stage of the handicraft industry in the unit of family, there is no distinction between work and life. During the industrial revolution, the productivity of machines grew exponentially, and machines were an entity that could be produced indefinitely. In this case, people become the most inefficient part of the whole factory. In order to increase the production and output of the whole factory, entrepreneurs have developed the form of a factory – a factory with a dormitory – a factory with a dormitory that does not allow employees to go out. Currently, the boundary between work and life is clearly delineated, and the boundary of work is hard like a moving wall, constantly pressing toward the end of the living space.
However, an inevitable objective reality is that human beings can never be completely alienated into a perfect gear on the pipeline. No matter how demanding the factory owner knows, the workers also need to rest, but the machine never needs. With the struggle of the working class, enterprises have found a way to meet the objective law and to meet the individual needs of workers: Shift system, through the method of letting people rest, machines do not rest, temporarily quell this objective contradiction.
Returning to the present, the internet has brought about a hundredfold increase in efficiency, which is an important reason for this contradiction to erupt again.
Today’s “machine” is no longer a physical assembly line in a production shop, but rather an entire business society, except for individuals. In the past, twenty-four hours of closed shops, restaurants, media, cultural places of entertainment, schools and hospitals accounted for a small number of economic activities, and people lived according to the rhythm of the day and night formed since the Industrial Revolution. There are only some local wars on the rigidly defined labor time boundary.
Now, all business practices are 24 hours, and we have e-commerce, takeout, new media, online games and videos, online education and online medical care, many of which are closed all year round. Globalization makes it easier for each of us to work without being confined to a time zone.
When one person is on a day’s shift, ready to unload a worker’s label and replace it with a consumer’s label, his needs are thrown into a huge machine, routed over layers to become a remote overtime requirement that another person urgently receives during a break.
In previous objections to 996, we have learned that it is common for employees to be less efficient when the prescribed hours of work are unmeaningfully prolonged.
Specifically, if an enterprise adopts normal working hours and follows the common rule that “the work at hand is not finished, add a little extra shift,” employees will try to improve their efficiency in working hours in order to be able to get off work at full time.
But now the problem with online office is that you can never predict when things will hit.
Some companies are demanding 996 because of business downturns, in part as factory owners tried to keep workers awake to the machine’s pace during the industrial revolution. Whether the law is sanctioned or not, this model will eventually lead businesses to worse outcomes, because it is anti-objective.
Therefore, since we are known to be unable to return to the time when there is no network to participate in our work and life, the only possible solution is to completely break the boundary and adapt to this new objective reality through a matching model.
Deep-seated contradictions in online office work
Are we going to have more permanent online office in the future?
This is actually a less rigorous proposition because it is influenced by the changing factors of the online office technology experience.
If technology develops an immersive VR experience like sci-fi movies over the next 10 years and the cost makes it possible for most companies to invest, then there will be no reason for companies not to accept telecommuting. And thus, save a large amount of property and administrative costs.
But in some ways, the experience of telecommuting is not as fast as we thought it would be. The more radical argument is that the tools for telecommuting have not evolved over the past five years. Document collaboration tools, like Tencent documents and graphite documents, were first born in 2006; Slack, similar to corporate WeChat and Ding Talk, was launched in 2013; Online project management tools such as TAPD and Team position have also exploded around 2010.
Therefore, in discussing this issue, we should first anchor this changing factor, that is, whether permanent on-line office will become a trend under current remote office conditions.
Intuitively, my answer is no, but the truth may be the opposite – we’re getting more and more permanent online, telecommuting.
The outbreak, which occurred in 2020, is just a simulation of telecommuting. Around March 11, about a month after many people started telecommuting because of the epidemic, there was a small vote on Weibo, with the following results:
Only 28.1% of all telecommuting is considered completely unacceptable, which does not seem to be consistent with the extensive network of long-distance office spat. Given that the outbreak was sudden, and that most companies had not been able to establish scientific telecommuting mechanisms before, such an assessment seems to have gone beyond expectations.
Telecommuting during the outbreak will obviously break the boundaries of life and work, but with the “online office” phase we’ve been through before, companies are rigid enough to require employees to work eight hours. Another extra break to keep employees on call is entirely different – this time, the boss will still need it at 9 p.m., but employees will be able to catch the show at 3 p.m.
So, during the epidemic, one of the complaints we often hear about online work comes from business managers: “How do I know employees are working at home?”
This is the source of anxiety among middle or senior managers in many enterprises during the epidemic, and this pressure has been transmitted to ordinary employees through endless forms and video reports to some extent The Subjective Impression of “Imrealistic” Permanent Online Office.
But in fact, this is just a symptom of the problem, which reveals that some enterprises have not been able to establish effective communication mechanism, clear strategic objectives and stable workflow in daily management.
In more colloquial terms, it is that employees need to do what is not good, completely need the superior’s daily “order”; It is also possible for the leader to understand the employee’s work results, mainly by recording and even seeing the employee on the job.
Apart from telecommuting and special periods, such enterprises cannot stand the test of time and will lose out in long-term competition to enterprises with better internal management.
Apart from companies that have been fatally directly affected (such as services), the outbreak has been, in part, an accelerated phase-out, allowing well-done companies to test their models and crisis those that were already on the line.
Therefore, through the large-scale practice of this round of telecommuting, more and more enterprises and industries that are not sensitive to man-hour management are starting to try to incorporate telecommuting into their own management.
The idea of man-hour management stems from the “factory” pattern created by the first industrial revolution, which revolutionizes the time that workers use for productive activities and leisure. In the second industrial revolution, it was established as the main mode of labor management in industrial society. The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, published by Max Weber in 1904, quoted Benjamin Franklin, the first president of the United States, as saying that “time is money” to demonstrate a working-time-based system. Is the essence of the spirit of capitalism.
In that dark era, capitalists used stopwatches to calculate the exact time that workers produced each part, then measured both when they were employed and when they were produced – if you did not complete enough parts within the specified time period, to prove you were lazy; If you finish enough parts but get off work early, it means that you become a skilled worker, can receive a small salary increase, and then usher in a higher performance indicator.
This is true for most of the past 300 years and in most areas. But with the advent of the information age, the modern workplace is no longer entirely manufacturing-centric, and the positive correlation between man-hours and output is getting lower and lower.
But in the past half century, with the development of the tertiary industry (service industry) and the fourth industry (technology and user experience), the composition of the labor force is changing dramatically, in addition to creating an unceasing demand on the consumer side.
Enterprises still need to buy labor, but labor time is no longer a necessary element in the elements of labor. A solution, an opinion, an information, a methodology, an idea, a design, a relationship chain may produce a value much higher than the value created by an employee’s one-year working time.
Unlike the atomic economy, these information-based labor elements can be reused and more adapted to permanent telecommuting.
A clear example of this is the fact that in China’s new media industry, there is a large and independent group of channels operating outsourcing. There are small institutional enterprises and individuals in this group. Their main service, is to help the brand or content organizations daily corporate number typesetting, reply to the platform messages, processing different platforms of the certification renewal, and so on.
This kind of work is generally classified as “basic labor” in the enterprise, but in fact it is not so basic. Companies need to pay higher salaries for hiring a new media operation that is skilled and capable of learning, but unless they have a lot of brands to run, most of the employee’s time on the job cannot be filled with enough work.
In the remote outsourcing mode, a skilled new media operator can run 5 to 8 accounts for the same period and have time to learn the latest operating skills to stay competitive. In the process, the skilled operator’s revenue would rise significantly, while spending per firm would be substantially reduced if it received the same level of operation.
Megatrends: the people and companies of the future
The aim of a modern enterprise is not to trap a group of people in a cubicle for 8 to 12 hours, on the contrary, if an employee can create value for the company without using the company’s offices and other means of production. The company should be happy about that. That’s why SOHO, BYOD, and outsourcing are becoming popular around the world.
The rise of part-time jobs, freelancing and self-employment will also accelerate the process in the future. Enterprises are not open to telecommuting, in fact, they cannot prevent their employees from developing the second free occupation in their spare time, but they can only prevent themselves from absorbing the able free occupation or remote workers from society to create value for enterprises.
At the enterprise management level, the increasing popularity of OKR (Goal and Key Achievement Approach) and the decline of KPI (Enterprise Key Performance Indicators) also demonstrate this. Compared with KPI, OKR emphasizes that everyone in the enterprise knows clearly what the strategic goal of the whole enterprise is, and that it is more flexible to coordinate its specific path to achieve this goal.
Working overtime is more likely to occur in KPI mode because one of the “key performance” of an employee may be the duration of the job. And “working hours” should not appear in a correct OKR program unless there is scientific evidence that “increasing working hours” is a KRs (key results) and “increasing sales” or “increasing corporate income.” This O (goal) has a direct correlation.
Of course, OKR is not perfect because it is still designed for employees with permanent positions within the enterprise. In the future, there may be an enterprise management tool that is better compatible with permanent telecommuting and many part-time employees.
And if an enterprise manages internally in the direction of realizing its own value, and the information tool is enough to support its internal communication, where and when the employees work is no longer a problem that the managers of the enterprise need to bind.
In the ideal “on-line office” described in the first section of this article, a perfect enterprise in extreme cases does not actually need a gear-type employee. In Chaplin’s Modern Times, the workers dissimilated as gears will be completely replaced by real gears (AI).
But in contrast, we will be more dependent on creative talent. Because any gear-driven machine can also be mass-produced and eliminated, only the human element itself is the most important factor for a company to maintain its unique competitiveness.
How can we grasp the hearts of those talented people? As the saying goes, “more money, less things, closer to home.” Permanent telecommuting is the end of the element of “close to home.”
