Working from home threatens the lines of authority in the office

Exiting the office has empowered many workers who have been forced to work on their own with little supervision. Will it permanently change the way we do leadership?

Working from home has empowered many employees

If you weren’t having a conversation about leadership this week, you weren’t really trying.

After the startling sight of the NSW Premier giving evidence to the state’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, it was hard to stop talking about how much we are prepared to forgive those who lead us. Most agree that Gladys Berejiklian gets brownie points for competence, calmness and clear communication, especially in this year of drought, bushfires and coronavirus.

Eventually her colleagues and the electorate will decide whether that is enough, but the exercise raises some interesting questions about our attitudes to leadership at work — and how these have changed in the pandemic.

Unlike the premiers, whom we have seen virtually every day since March — thanks to the new political tool called the coronavirus press conference — many Australians have gone months without seeing their managers or senior executives. Many others have seen them only on Zoom or Google Meet, and we have all read about how much more human leaders look when the dogs are barking in the background.

That reality is usually presented as a positive, as one of the ways working from home reveals us all in a broader dimension, but it comes with a loss of automatic authority that few seem keen to mention.

Consultant Jon Williams says that modern management has to be about trust rather than enforcing behaviour through rules or applying pressure. But you still have to get people to take notice of you if you want them to do what you want rather than what they want. And that was easier when we were all gathered together in our offices in CBDs and suburbs across the country.

Back then, pre-COVID-19, we were involved in a reasonably formal joint exercise in which the codes were often unwritten but very clear. No surprises there. As we have covered in these pages in recent months, the office historically was developed as a space for controlling workers and ensuring certain outputs. The culture of the office loosened up a great deal in recent decades with everything from beanbags and skateboards to breakout rooms, fabulous art and cool baristas. But even when the boss gave up the corner office and sat out on the floor, the lines of power and authority, however benign, were unmissable.

Yes, Western society’s attitudes to authority have shifted significantly in recent times as people exercised their rights to operate as individuals rather than as part of a group or community or institution. But in so many ways, and despite the avalanche of leadership conferences and literature, the office has resisted that trend.

For many people, despite the rhetoric and the leadership literature, the workplace retained its position as an institution with influence, power and the capacity to control.

Enter COVID-19 and the flight to the suburbs and months of distributed workforces. Managers and their followers worked hard to make WFH a success but it’s naive to think that with so much co-operation floating around, that power too has not been distributed. Employees have gained confidence from a time in which they have often had to sort out things for themselves simply because the boss or manager or senior person has not been physically present.

And while a chief executive will always exert an obvious authority — everyone knows that in business, there’s only one “numero uno”, to use the phrase of the moment — many managers further down the food chain became less important to employees as WFH took on its own rhythm.

For some people, working in fairly isolated situations at home — isolated in the sense of having little regular contact with peers or superiors — the pandemic has been hard work, but it also has been empowering. They have found that they can do pretty well without the presence of a boss or supervisor.

It won’t all last, of course, once the balance swings back and we have more people in the office than we have working remotely.

Then it’s likely, as Williams says, that workers will have little choice but to rejoin the group. They will be anxious about being forgotten, and worse, if they don’t put in an appearance. When work is back within the frame and structures of the office, how much power and authority will seep back to the official leaders? How quickly will the status of managers return? How long before the office reasserts itself?

If the predictions are correct, it’s likely that many companies will run a hybrid model of staffing with, for example, employees required to work three days in the office and two at home. That will generate changes in the way work is organised and in reporting lines: companies and employees are likely to embrace a more informal approach to how time is organised.

The bigger question is how much the 2020 experiences of shifting power and authority among those companies working from home will permanently change the way we do leadership and view leadership.

For years, academics, researchers and consultants have urged an end to the hero boss, the guy (and usually it has been a guy) with all the answers and ultim­ately all the power.

That converged with big changes: more women at the top; the speed and fluidity of work thanks to technology; the shift away from physical products to ser­vices; and generations of worker no longer prepared to blindly follow rules.

Yet the old ideas hung on. Let’s see if the extraordinary events this year will truly shift the dial.