The
Real Reason You're Not Ready for the Office
It has
less to do with the state of the pandemic and more to do with the state of the
workplace.
·
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
Are you really ready
to rush back to the office? Take a moment to reflect before you answer. I'm not
asking how desperate you are to get out of the house, since we all know the
answer to that question. As the country singer Alan Jackson wrote, "the workday
passes like molasses in wintertime, but it's July. I'm getting paid by the
hour, but older by the minute." But I'm wondering why - for millions of us
and our companies as well - it just hasn't been that much of a challenge to
resist the urge and the tantalizing temptation to get right back into the
groove and the grind. Most people I talk to just aren't in a hurry. Taking care
of business and taking the train back to work are two, much different concerns.
In my conversations
with entrepreneurs around the country who are juggling any number of challenges
and often concerned about their very survival, worrying about how soon they can
get back to the bricks and mortar barely makes the list of pressing matters. I
understand that for retail operators it's more top of mind, but even those
people have increasingly discovered the cost efficiencies and other wonders of
the online world. Furloughed folks who work for larger concerns are hesitant
because they aren't sure that their employers are playing straight with them;
or that, once they return, their bosses aren't gonna quickly 'fess up and tell
them in a timely fashion when there are enough Covid-19 issues at the office to
require sending everyone home again.
My guess is that we
won't see much of a massive movement until February 2021 at the earliest and,
of course, some of the biggest tech firms are pushing their return dates out
even further and also talking about letting people work remotely permanently.
We're learning a lot about working at home (WFH)
every day and many of the most valuable lessons aren't apt to disappear any
time soon, which is actually pretty good news.
If and when we do head
back to the office, it won't be about bouncing back, it'll be about moving
forward. Not resilience, but reinvention. We've seen that many of the old
ways of doing business were wasteful, unproductive, and time-consuming without
adding any real value to the enterprise. Meetings, memos and meals come readily
to mind. Snacks, pool and ping pong tables were already on the way
out. Hopefully, when we do go back, we'll take care not
to drag along a lot of the tired old baggage and other time sinks from the
past.
But if you really want
to know what's slowing us all down, I'll give you four good reasons.
(1) WFH
Is WPW (Working Pretty Well)
It's much better than
we imagined overall for the white-collar business community. Sadly, it's almost
a complete bust for our K-to-12 kids in terms of their educations even if they
have sufficient computer resources and connectivity, which so many don't. And,
of course, the pandemic (and the ongoing lies and denial from the dolts in
D.C.) are still killing essential workers and endangering millions of others in
the workforce who don't have the privilege and luxury of staying home. But, for
the moment, inertia at home is continuing to overwhelm new initiatives.
(2) No
One Wants to Be Last.
Amazingly and beyond
prescient, Bruce Springsteen wrote about this concern in 2007. He talked about
the cities burning, "faces of the dead at five", and the wise men who
were all fools. And he concluded, like we all have as we relive the nightmares
today, that "no one wants to be the last to die for a mistake."
No one really wants to be the first either - not the first ones back, not
the first ones to try the vaccine, and not the guinea pigs for anyone's latest
experiment in herd immunity. It's scary enough to have to risk sending your
kids back to school. Putting yourself back into the suspect soup just raises
the odds of someone in the family getting sick.
(3) The
Main Street Economy Still Sucks.
Forget the stupid and
inexplicable performance of the stock market and its crazy fluctuations. And
the morons who believe the Con-in-Chief's lies about the rapidly returning and
magically robust economy. I'm talking about millions and millions of people still
unemployed. I'm talking about what you see every day with your own eyes on your
own streets: stores shutting down for good, more homeless all over the place,
cities unable to meet the demand for basic safety and sanitation services, and
hospitals regularly overrun. No one's in a great hurry to re-explore stagnant
marketplaces and make fruitless and frustrating calls to prospects and former
customers who aren't buying much of anything now. We're all feeling the weight
of the Great Wait.
(4) We're
Praying for the Nightmare to End.
Whether you want to
admit it or not, each of us is praying for the national nightmare of bigoted
bile and BS that we've lived through for the last four years to end - one way
or the other - so we can try to get on with our lives and our businesses. For
me, it would conclude in a fashion that would also allow us to start repairing
and rebuilding the nation as well, but there are no guarantees. The result is
that we're all stuck until late January 2021 at the earliest in a limbo that is
debilitating, enervating and contagious. No one really has the energy or
appetite for much of anything at the moment.
When the final
accounting occurs (and who knows when that will be), this miserable and
omnipresent malaise that sucked the life, energy and optimism out of so many
people in our country will be the most lasting and sad legacy of our country's
foolish, feckless and fraudulent leaders.
SEP 29,
2020
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their
own, not those of Inc.com.