Amazon’s recent announcement that all knowledge workers will be required to return to the office 5 days a week is already generating enormous pushback.
Checkout this Forbes article, encouraging Amazon to walk back their plans…
Forbes article Why Amazon Should Fold its 5 days in office card by Dan Pontrefact.
Amazon is looking to put the WFH genie back in the bottle. In his article, Pontrefact posits that Amazon hopes to encourage more collaboration and doesn’t trust workers to be productive without visibility. The solution to these problems seems obvious – everyone back to the office 5 days a week. Amazon is the 500 pound gorilla of tech, so they may be able to make it work, but it is certain to have costs. The research shows that hybrid schedules retain employees and keep productivity high.
So is 5 days the best answer to the question of collaboration?
In our Designing Your Life workshops, we spend some time on the process of question generation. “How might we…” is one of the tools that helps us ask better questions.
We focus on framing and then rewording, shifting perspectives, and asking other versions of the question – reframing – to open up the space for new ideas. In Idea Flow, by Perry Claybon and Jeremy Utley, they talk about this process as generating a portfolio of frames. This Framing and Reframing cycle exposes underlying assumptions, sheds light on constraints, and results in more and better ideas.
Reframing is crucial to generating more ideas, but it is also hard to do, largely because we don’t get a lot of practice with it. Without honing this skill, we fall into a critical innovation trap…
We anchor on a single solution.
Often the solution is the first one we thought of. This solution looms so large that it blocks out our ability to ask a deeper or more productive question. I’d argue that Amazon might be stuck at “How might we force folks back into the office full time?” when the underlying needs might yield much more interesting questions.
Let’s imagine that Amazon IS anchored on 5 day return to office as the only solution to a host of needs:
- We’d like our workers to collaborate more effectively
- We’d like greater productivity
- We don’t trust that our workforce is working hard enough
- We need to use these office buildings for something – they are expensive!
- We would like greater innovation
- We need to reduce our workforce to save cost (and this will result in natural attrition so we don’t have to do more of the hard job of laying off)
- We miss the old days of being in the office
Every one of these needs could lead to a host of interesting questions. Let’s use “How might we…” to ask more questions:
- How might we encourage collaboration between individuals and teams?
- How might we encourage people to get to know each other as people so they will work together more effectively?
- How might we force employees to interact outside their silos?
- How might we incentivize collaboration?
Notice how all these questions have a slightly different spin as we play with wording? One answer to these questions might be a 5 day in-office work week, but I suspect a host of other answers jumped to your mind, from bonuses for joint projects, to social events, to cross-silo presentations. Reframing, this process of looking at problems from different perspectives, yields more and better questions, which in turn yield a wider suite of ideas.
Taking it one step further, what would it look like if Amazon invited its employees to co-design and come up with ideas around a suite of questions generated with these underlying needs? I suspect the 5 days in office solution wouldn’t have risen to the top. And moreover, I suspect some other ideas that both met the company needs and had broader employee support might have been generated.
– Kathy Davies CEO, DYL Consulting
