“WFH…It is impossible to create culture from a bedroom.”
Keep the conversation going
It is a shame that Chris Powers tweet over WFH (work from home) emerging was deleted. Though, judging from the replies, he was better off.
I respect a good conversation, one that debates opinions and stimulates questions and doubts. Chris’s tweet had all the potential to be one, and it was at some level, to be honest. It is social media, after all, a platform where we tend to participate in the hourly race-to-the-bottom-of-the-barrel, so yeah, it got too much aggressive, and he deleted it, I guess.
The original tweet by Chris said:
WFH doesn’t work for high functioning teams.
It is impossible to create culture from a bedroom.
A hill I’ll die on.
Ok, his last phrase signalled to many that this is not a conversation. So, in internet culture, this means a burst of opposing opinions firing at each other.
Then came John’s response :)
Jonh’s “edit” is precisely where this WFH debate should always be. None of us commands any lifetime experience in knowing what will be the best system moving forward. Even the traditional 9–5 is relatively new to our timeline of human and society development.
I love how Chris reacted to John’s opinion and how this gave room for a conversation. It was a fruitful exchange of views amid tweets from people ready to die on that hill.
I have spent a good chunk of 2020 and 2021 having conversations that included this specific topic. No one, except the arrogant or the misinformed, was firm on their belief that they figured it out. The rest were people like you and me, still navigating these new waters. The overlapping statements, which I believe will dictate the “reform” of the upcoming decade:
- It is about options now; it is the knowledge that there are more ways to get it done.
- It is about empathy, knowing what each person have to go through to get it done.
- Just because you didn’t figure it out, don’t rule it out for the rest of us.
- Some people want to be in an office, not for culture, but for safety (more stories on this later).
I enjoy finding out how people describe WFH. For most of us, it is a vision, and a picture painted based on our own experience, culture, country, city, way of living, cost of living…etc. It is fascinating once you realise how far from reality most of our descriptions are.
I don’t think WFH (or from the beach, or coffee shop, or daycare, or from the parking lot where your second job is…) is a culture in itself. Today, it is an affirmation that we’ve done what we could with the old system, and it took a pandemic for us to realise we are due for an upgrade, and it has nothing to do with productivity and work culture.
