Please permit one more set of observations that draw upon insights from the recent global pandemic. After all, pandemics don’t come around so often that we can afford to ignore the impact points of that much global disruption. Let’s learn from it as much as we can.
Speaking of learning, the New York Times recently published an editorial calling attention to the evidence of educational learning loss due to the pandemic. It is frighteningly significant. Researchers posit that the school closures that took 50 million U.S. school children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may be the most damaging factor in the history of American education, setting back student progress in math and reading by two decades. Turns out remote learning was just not as good as in-person classroom instruction. And that’s just one measurable impact point. Add to this reality the increase in overall absenteeism, declined national overall school attendance, expansive mental health difficulties, and a general increase in the sense of alienation and isolation experienced by today’s youth. Paints a pretty dismal picture, huh?

We are fortunate for two realities: one is the emergency funding from the Federal government that has been directed toward State governments to begin to mitigate some of these disruptive consequences for young students, funding which by the way may run out soon; and secondly, there is thorough and ongoing research and study that is focusing on the array of problems caused by the pandemic for our entire educational system. The thinking is, the more we learn about what was lost during the pandemic, the more likely we can help students recover from this catastrophic disruption in learning. And that’s what leads to some reflections on the office workplace.
Beginning in the Spring of 2020, many office workplaces closed, and a wide range of company staff began working remotely. That condition persisted for many months through some ebbs and surges of COVID-19 outbreaks and evolving viral strains. When the worst of the pandemic appeared past, workers began to return to working in offices, but as we all know only too well, the pattern for that return is both uneven and not at all settled. Some have even come to believe that not working together in offices at all is actually a better configuration for business going forward.
While it appears there has been extensive study of our educational system surrounding the learning decline from remote school sessions, has there really been enough study around what was and is still lost through working away from offices? There seems to be the assumption that if people were able to stay home, logging into corporate networks and communicating via digital tools (both online and video based), then there was really no loss in corporate effectiveness or worker growth and performance. It feels like we were so enamored by the rapid transition to working from home in emergency circumstances that we may be ignoring the range of impacts that might have occurred and that we may only be discovering over time.
For example, some commentary has surfaced of late that suggests that newer and/or younger employees have felt limited by a lack of face-to-face interaction with co-workers in the workplace. They are missing opportunities for more spontaneous, day-to-day mentoring or even knowledge transfer, and some are concerned that their opportunities for promotions and company advancement may be limited by reduced time in the office. In educational settings this deficit has been identified as a skill development disruption, a loss of the chance to learn from others in unstructured interactions and a limitation on the opportunities to form relationships that could become key to growth, development, and advancement.
Another potential loss from the disruption of working together in offices is the communication effectiveness of both individual and group meetings. Prior to the pandemic, it was clear to most people that workers often brought uneven and varied communication skills to their work environment. Some were outgoing and readily engaged in group discussion, perhaps creative debate, and maybe enjoyed a high degree of collaboration in the workplace. Others might have been more inclined to introverted interaction patterns, preferring listening to speaking, and perhaps even finding it extremely challenging to speak up and advocate an idea in a group setting. What has been the impact of remote working, video meetings, and large-group digital interactions on those different groups of people? Anybody really studying this with any rigor beyond intuition and assumption? They are in the educational sector, and they are seeing a slowed social skills development among students who need more in-person class time.
The point here is that the office workplace likely needs the same sort of careful and thorough research and analysis that is being applied in the education sector. Similar to our young students in schools, the workplace underwent and continues to undergo a massive disruption. Our ideas about work, its role in our lives, and the processes and places where it takes place are forever changed. How is that reality being thoroughly and deliberately studied and understood, and what insights are being generated? And what are corporations, consultants, designers, and industry leaders going to do with those insights to ensure that we learn from what has happened to and around all of us?
Facile hunches and knee-jerk solutions are not going to help us create workplaces that support new models of work, new organizational structures and cultural forms, new ways for people to creatively and effectively generate the sort of outcomes we desire from our work. Solid research and critical thinking will. We need to truly learn.