Image: Fridgehenge / Stonefridge was created by artist Adam Horowitz, in Santa Fe, Mexico in the 1990s. It was removed in 2007. Photo Credit: Brian K. Edwards

In June 2021, after a long period of remote working, Apple called back its employees to the office for three days a week, starting in early September. But the employees pushed back.

This isn’t the first time employees didn’t want to return to the workplace. In 2013, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer faced strong criticism from the business world and employees when she put an end to remote working.

Marc Anderssen, a U.S. entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer who I met briefly at Singularity University, said in a recent article, Technology Saves the World, that the most profound technology-driven change of all is geography and its bearing on how we live and work.

“For thousands of years, until the time of COVID, the dominant fact of every productive economy has been that people need to live where we work. It turns out many of the best jobs really can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. It also turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere and still be just as productive as if they lived in a tiny one-room walk-up in a big city.” He adds ”This is, I believe, a permanent civilizational shift.”

Separating your physical location from your work has become visible to the mainstream thanks to the pandemic. It has been the lifestyle of many peripheral, experiential people, including me, for decades. However, all these conversations overlook an important angle – the context in which we work and its transformative power on us. In addition, the pandemic remote work experience was short and mandatory. So, the conclusion we draw from it may not be very accurate.

Working in different contexts would transform our behaviors, thoughts, and even values. Starkly phrased, we are not refrigerators. We cannot be plugged in at different locations to do the same job but still have the same attitude towards our work, our companies, and even to each other.

Different contexts bring new perspectives and new challenges for both employees and corporations. We all need to understand these dynamics well and design things accordingly.

Therefore, the societal shift that Anderssen calls for may not happen as early as we think. Some people might go back to cities and workplaces.

Here are a few insights I accumulated over the last 10 years in remote and hybrid working models – working in three different continents surrounded by many “peripheral” workers – which can explain our relationship with the context we work in.

We are not refrigerators! Context matters!

We are not refrigerators. We basically cannot be plugged in somewhere in the world and work exactly the same way.

For example, if you work in a small town by the sea, you can go to the weekly farmers market, talk to local people, witness life in surrounding villages, feel the changing weather and proximity with nature. You can leave your home and screen and discover the aromas and colors, and so on. This may sound romantic but this is exactly what happens when you live in a small town or rural area.

This can lead to you thinking about why you need to make that much money, or why you need to work this much.

But what is meaningful in the context of a town can be completely meaningless in a city. In the city, everything reminds you of competition, the big vision of the business world, and economic growth. So, you keep working more and earning more.

Of course, there is a vision in a small town as well, but it is substantially in a different direction from the one you have in a big city.

Is this something big corporations can embrace with their vision today or can they even survive within it? This is what Apple is facing.

You are the outcome of your interactions and your lifestyle

In 2009, I sold my car because I needed to be on the streets to observe people, experience interactions, and see the built environment more as a creative person. This decision made my life uncomfortable at that time. In addition, I moved to a neighborhood where people’s output, as well as problems, were centered around creativity. In 10 years, this decision gave rise to many successful creative works in my life.

In town, the variety of interactions and options are drastically less, meaning outcomes may change in a direction that you may not want.

That’s why clusters and coworking spaces are critical, as collective intelligence is more critical than your own intelligence, especially in this century.

Some people say the internet brings the whole world’s knowledge and opportunities to you and you don’t need physical interactions. This was also the argument for so-called Massive Open Online Courses 10 years ago. I even had a discussion with Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Peter Diamandis of Singularity University at NASA Ames Research Park in 2013 where they argued that MOOCs could replace the university experience. It didn’t. While Udacity turned to corporate education and MOOCs are growing in popularity, people still want to go to university for real-life interactions and experiences.

For sure, the dynamics are different now, especially with COVID. Almost everyone is now open to the possibility of remote staff. However, there needs to be a new way of socializing to compensate.

You shouldn’t ignore the substantial effect that the type of intelligence you build with people you physically meet has on you. Where you are may not matter for what you do now, but still matters vastly when forming your future possibilities.

Company efficiency, individual vs team efficiency

Building a company culture is a major task, as we all know. But imagine how you build this culture with new people joining a company remotely.

There are some companies, such as Automattic in San Francisco, which is fully remote, that have come up with solutions. But in my experience with MATUROLIFE, building the working cultures remotely is highly challenging.

MATUROLIFE consists of 19 business partners in 9 countries, where my company GEDS leads design functions to design and develop smart products for older people, in a remote work environment where people meet in person every 6 months for 2 days.

We overcame this with our design management approach, but I was also part of the executive board, therefore I was able to execute our approaches.  We came up with a dynamic design management approach and kept using new tools at every stage. This is the way that corporations can also proceed if they can.

As we all know, individual efficiency and a team’s efficiency are not the same things. You may be very efficient in your small town by yourself but overall the team of people in several towns may not be efficient at all. That’s exactly why corporations call back their employees to the workplace.

Is efficiency or innovation more critical?

In the 1990s, IBM began a remote work scheme. In 2009, the company had 386,000 employees of which 40% were off-site. However, In March 2007, it called back 2,600 employees in the marketing department.

At that time, the question among the business community was whether or not people were more productive at home. Today, we know that team efficiency is more important than individual efficiency.       

Today’s question is different, therefore. Do people innovate from home or in the office, when they are interacting? From a strategic design point of view, interaction is key. However, whether this interaction has to be in person still needs to be investigated.

Some people need to be with their colleagues

During the pandemic, we did a persona analysis for changing employee needs in order to understand what could be the new working models. Based on this work, I can say that for some people being with their colleagues is critical and this is how they socialize.

Basically, some people need to go to the workplace and cannot work from home for any number of reasons. Therefore, they either need a new form of socialization or they simply need to go back to their workplace.

Anderssen is full of accumulated knowledge that he cannot finish for even years on an empty island. He’s probably tired of city life and his place in San Francisco. But he can afford to leave the city and work almost anywhere.

It’s also certain that people don’t want to be confined to the office either. We all want to be freer to create a better work-life balance. The question is whether corporations can follow this demand since their current modus operandi doesn’t match the new requirements of remote working. They need a substantial change, similar to what we experienced in our MATUROLIFE project, where we had partners in nine countries.

In order to afford remote work, we should be aware that this is not just a physical move that requires financial capital. It requires emotional, social capital as well.

We should all know that this is a collective action. Again, plugging in another city like refrigerators is not the perspective. Both corporations and individuals should take it slowly and understand the contexts better.