Working from home doesn’t kill innovation
A belief from a different era that we should stop spreading.
As I celebrate 1 year of working from home 🎂🏠, also known as “one year in sweatpants,” I’d like to share my 2 cents around this topic, since I’ve been recently reading again, multiple times, the old fairy tale that goes “working from home kills innovation”👴🏻.
In the past 14 years, I’ve been working in different kinds of companies: advertising agencies, digital agencies, startups, media companies, a big tech company, a product agency, and in different kinds of settings: semi-cubicles, fully open space, big fun silicon valley style office, shared space.
Not once I witnessed the mystical moment when 2 colleagues casually meet at the watercooler, and from that conversation, a revolutionary idea, product, project, technology starts taking shape. On many occasions, instead, the office was a place where I couldn’t focus because of people being loud, listening to music without headphones, making long phone calls, and more.
Very rarely great ideas came out of an impromptu conversation in a corridor. Most of the time they come in the context of a brainstorming session or another dedicated moment, that we now know we can do remotely.
And the people who know me well know that I’ve very often been busy with side projects, in collaboration with others, but being physically present in the same space has never been the spark of anything. Most of the time, I worked on these projects remotely.
The myth of the open space as a way to facilitate sharing ideas and sparking innovation is an invention of guys who worked in their own private office.
Now we know that this can be applied not just to open spaces but to office spaces in general. Some people prefer to work in an office, well, fine. Let them. It should be a choice, not a matter of deciding how many days or what ratio people should split between office and home. 80–20, 50–50, 20–80… up to them. For myself, I chose 0%.
Don’t take me wrong; I had a lot of fun working along with colleagues, playing foosball, sharing pizzas, playing videogames, or just being dorky. But the freedom that WFH gives me is unparalleled, especially being a dad now, too close to my 40s, and not a single guy in my 20s.
That concept of the Google-style fun office you’ll never want to leave is clearly dying, and true or false (false), the reasons behind its success comes from a different era. An era when we weren’t culturally and technically ready to fully embrace remote communication and team-building, a pre-Slack, pre-Miro, pre-Figma, pre-Loom era. It’s different now, like it or not.
I’ve been working in places where even though sharing the same space, most of the communication, fun, and watercooler time was actually happening inside of Slack.
I’m currently working in a digital product agency (MetaLab) with teammates worldwide in different time zones. We have team building activities we do remotely (the trivia ones were entertaining), we have lots of different channels on Slack to share ideas, work in progress, passions and interests, casual chit chat and more. We have randomly-matched calls with each other; we have 1:1s, we’re going to have a virtual art exhibition soon… We’re doing pretty good, even though I have yet to meet all of them face to face live.
We work together on innovative digital products with great success without the need of physically being in the same meeting room.
At my previous engagement I worked along teams and stakeholders in China, from our office in Milan, Italy. I occasionally had to fly there, but the reason for that was mostly “political”, not really because it was needed from a project standpoint. Once COVID-19 hit Italy, in early 2020, we started working from home, so we were now remote as much as the teams in China (just in the same time zone). During this time we’ve been able to come up with incredibly complex projects and innovative ideas based on cutting-edge technologies, all while working from my bedroom and with the complication of not being able to take advantage of many tools for collaboration (Slack, Figma and basically anything relying on third-party’s servers) due to company policies.
Nowadays, I don’t waste 2–3 hours of my life waiting for trains being late, riding these overcrowded pieces of junk, and getting to work already tired and stressed and back to home freaking destroyed by the commute. I have enough time to bring my daughter to school and then go for a run, without worrying about getting late at the office, I can go to pick her up any time if needed. I own my schedule and my time in a way that I’ve never experienced before.
I’m way less stressed, more productive, I have more time to learn and improve my skills and I enjoy a better quality of life for myself and my family as well.
The push to innovate comes from people, their attitude, their will and yes, their talent. When you have that it doesn’t matter if you’re working in a big open space with hammocks and slides, in a cubicle or from a home on the beach sipping piña colada (#lifegoals). We now have the tools, the technology and, most importantly, the right mindset to work from anywhere, even asynchronously.
I don’t see myself wanting to go back to an office anytime soon. But I’m wondering if you had a different experience and the office was the facilitator of something excellent you achieved in terms of innovation, that couldn’t happen otherwise. Let me know, I’d love to hear that.
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