The pandemic has changed so much in our world, not least of which has been a seismic shift in work culture, as many of us have spent the past year working from home. Although in many parts of the world we are still in the thick of the pandemic, the rollout of vaccines is allowing us to think about a return to some level of normality in the second half of the year. And so I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about what this means for PLOS as we do – or in many cases, don’t – return to our physical office spaces.

View of the sunset from inside a cave

The first key evolution in my own thinking is how we conceptualize and talk about our workforce model. In the past – and in my post at the start of the pandemic last year – I talked about “remote” working and employees. While this term correctly denotes that one person is physically separate from others, I’ve come to realize that we nearly always use this from our perspective as someone in the office with the embedded implication that we are a first-class citizen in the center-of-our-universe. This mindset usually assumes that the “remote” person is somehow less important and carries all the responsibility for communicating with the rest of the team. At PLOS, we’ve moved to talking about a “distributed” organization and teams: we all work together towards shared goals even though we are all physically separated. And because each of us is “remote” from the others, we carry equal responsibility to communicate and coordinate with the rest of the team. This feels like a critical shift in mindset for me, especially as PLOS hires new team members across the globe this year.

Nearly twelve months into our enforced experiment, the limitations and benefits of working in this way are much clearer. (Of course, we have to remember that there is a big difference between a functional, fully distributed organization and being quarantined with the stress and uncertainty of a global pandemic.) At PLOS, it’s evident that a hybrid model of distributed and office-based work is here to stay, supported by modern digital connectivity. As we look to the future, our starting point is to reflect on what we’ve learned over the past year: the vast majority of our work can be done successfully in fully virtual form (indeed, PLOS’s 2020 results are the best since 2013). Many of our staff have found that they like working from home (WFH) and are more productive, although it’s important for us not to underestimate the ways in which some, notably parents and women especially, have been negatively impacted. Plenty of independent research mirrors our experience and backs up the potential benefits of more WFH both for employees and organizations.

Over the past year, PLOS downsized its San Francisco office space by over 50% (this was already underway pre-COVID as we sought to access pools of talent without the cost-prohibitive constraints of the Bay Area). As we’ve been building out our new space, we’re taking the opportunity to update our Cambridge, UK space as well. We know, in both cases, that our staff do not want to simply return to how things were at the beginning of 2020. A staff survey last fall told us that:

  • Just 2% of staff want to be entirely in an office; 25% want to be fully remote and the vast majority prefer 2-4 days per week in an office. And we’re not unusual — surveys done since the start of the pandemic show that 75% of workers want their employer to provide flexibility of work location after the pandemic ends.
  • The most valued benefits of WFH were more flexibility to balance professional and personal lives, greater productivity, liberation from long commutes and yes, more doggy-care time!
  • The biggest challenges were managing home schooling, reduced opportunity for collaboration and workspace challenges/interruptions. And although we didn’t ask specifically in that survey, we know that many also feel depleted and exhausted due to COVID-19 fallout and isolation.

For the most part, our teams were able to adjust to working virtually quickly and about 40% felt they were just as productive, a finding backed up by many other surveys. (To be clear, my comments here are focused on the knowledge workers who make up the vast majority of our industry. The pandemic has of course had a devastating impact on many workers, especially those in low-wage jobs that cannot be done remotely.)

Fundamental to PLOS’s future will be much greater flexibility: there are too many personal and psychological factors at stake for a one-size-fits-all model. But while I personally will be one of those people who spends far less time in the office and fully supports this transition, I worry about whether the productivity and relative satisfaction this past year has been possible because of the social capital built up through countless conversations, meetings and connections before the pandemic. Will some of this erode over time with less physical interaction? Will collaboration be impaired? Can we mentor and develop our teams effectively? Answering these questions requires us to challenge our assumptions about how work gets done and the role of our office spaces.

Reimagining workspaces for collaboration

Pre-pandemic, PLOS’s office space looked like many others. Cube farms had evolved into open-plan, contiguous desks with the idea of both democratizing space and fostering collaboration by making people more visible. But in fact, the reverse appeared to be true: empty desks as many worked from home a few days a week where they felt more productive with those who were in the office isolated with headphones.

In designing our new space in San Francisco, we’ve tried to rethink the role of our communal office space now that our teams are increasingly undertaking focused work elsewhere. Many of these shifts aren’t new, but they have been turbocharged by the pandemic. Increasingly, the physical office will be an add-on to virtual work where teams come together to collaborate, determine direction, and make decisions. Our workspaces increasingly need to support the kinds of interactions that can’t happen virtually; for PLOS, those will be collaboration, socializing and learning. As a result, over 50% of our footprint will be devoted to open, informal team-oriented spaces with soft-seating and collaboration rooms. (The remaining space is a combination of hot-desking zones, a kitchen area, and a “library” with both desks and soft seating for quiet work.)

The biggest challenge is going to be how to make a hybrid (i.e., mixing office-based and distributed) model work. To create the best, rather than the worst of both worlds, we will need to collapse the boundaries between being physically present in the office and out of the office. No one wants to return to videoconferencing that involves a group around a table with one or two others looking on from a screen and unable to participate! We will definitely continue to all take calls on our own devices, even if we’re physically present in an office, so that everyone is communicating in the same way. Strong communication will be key, optimized across regions and time zones, with written communication as the backbone of everything. All communication will require adaptation for distributed teams: nuanced in-person communication doesn’t necessarily translate online. For example, within our executive team, we’ve agreed when we use text, Slack, email, and phone as well as out own personal communication preferences.

But while new tools will be part of the solution, they’re not the full answer. Success is going to require a cultural shift, including re-envisioning processes and reconstructing them in different forms digitally.

We’ll increasingly need to think of our workspaces as not merely physical but also a digital/virtual space. We’ve been experimenting with new tools – such as virtual whiteboarding – and we’ll need to accelerate this work and move these to standard practice fairly rapidly. But while new tools will be part of the solution, they’re not the full answer. Success is going to require a cultural shift, including re-envisioning processes and reconstructing them in different forms digitally. It will also likely require new roles in our organizations and especially in our people teams.

Culture and social bonds

Workspaces are not only a reflection of the work itself but also of the values and culture of an organization. Although we’ve learned and appreciated new things about each other (I for one love the interruptions from children and pets and the ways in which they humanize us), lack of physical interaction has undoubtedly made important aspects of our work more challenging. Our experience over the past year suggests at least four key areas:

  1. Brainstorming and complex problem-solving. While tools such as Zoom and virtual whiteboarding have helped, most of our teams report this as a challenge. This is especially true when spread across time zones from the UK to the US west coast, an issue that will become more challenging as we expand global presence through 2021 and beyond. It seems inevitable that we’re going to have to shift a culture built on phone calls and meetings to one that is more comfortable with asynchronous communication and team work.
  2. Integrating new hires. There are a couple of elements to this: onboarding new hires to “how things are done around here” — our vision, history, processes, and culture; and sharing knowledge about the work itself. We’ve already flagged a need to overhaul our onboarding and the first of these feels easier to solve to me (for example, through video). In all likelihood, we’ll need to improve both documentation and the accessibility of documentation (currently strewn across a number of systems). I also suspect that onboarding has been particularly hard for those who are more junior in their careers and who haven’t yet built strong social and professional networks. While there’s work for us to do internally, this seems like an area in which SSP could play a meaningful role with virtual peer-to-peer networking opportunities.
  3. Fostering and deepening relationships. This is perhaps the one that I worry about most – how will we ensure that people don’t feel socially and professionally isolated and disconnected? In particular, it seems likely that interactions with those you don’t work with regularly will suffer, as will casual social interactions. These “weak ties” have been hard hit during the pandemic and both positively impact organizational performance and employee engagement and happiness. We’ve had small scale experiments with the Slack Donut app that have been popular, but it’s an area that needs more attention. And knowing that teams benefit from coming together at least once a year, we’ll need to think about how to plan – and budget – for that.
  4. Performance evaluation and compensation. Evaluating performance fairly is challenging at the best of times and has been all the more so over the past year. In particular, we need to be cognizant of the uneven burden placed on working mothers and of making inaccurate assumptions about people’s ability to “show up”. (This article has some helpful tips.) Related to this – and an issue I don’t think we’ve yet satisfactorily resolved at PLOS – is compensation. Organizations such as Facebook are choosing to pay workers differently depending on the cost of living for the communities where employees choose to live. But this is a complicated question and the answer likely depend on your overall compensation strategy and goals for moving to a distributed team. (I found much here to inform my own thinking about compensation.)

Ultimately, our workplaces are complex ecosystems and it’s not always going to be easy or obvious to figure out how to recreate what makes them work in virtual spaces. I think that the fact that our leadership team is fully distributed will help – most of us are not located in either San Francisco or Cambridge. If we were, I think we’d be at greater risk of our center of gravity being pulled there and a sense that office-based employees were somehow advantaged by more face time. I’m also very mindful of the fairly extensive research documenting the ways in which hybrid and distributed working can deepen disparities, especially for those without the support, space and connectivity to work from home effectively. But the experience of this past year has given all of us new insights into what we most value when it comes to our work and our time. We have an opportunity to reimagine the ways in which we work that can be more agile, cost-effective and productive and that also create a better experience for staff across our organizations.

(If you’d like to take a deeper dive, I can recommend this recent New Yorker piece and this Harvard Business Review collection, in addition to the referenced links through this piece. There are also fully distributed organizations who generously share their practices and learning, such as Trello and Gitlab.)

Alison Mudditt

Alison Mudditt

Alison Mudditt joined PLOS as CEO in 2017, having previously served as Director of the University of California Press and Executive Vice President at SAGE Publications. Her 30 years in publishing also include leadership positions at Blackwell and Taylor & Francis. Alison also serves on the Board of Directors of SSP and the Center for Open Science.

Discussion

9 Thoughts on "Emerging from the Pandemic: The Future of Work is Now"

Thanks, Alison, an excellent post, have you/PLOS given specific thought to if there are significant extra costs to employees who work from home (heating/energy, and here our cable company just threatened to increase internet bills if we go over data plans, mmm), perhaps some of this is offset by the lowering costs by not traveling into the office … but an interesting question/thought on how this is really affecting our carbon footprints, as well as productivity, psyche, wellbeing, etc

That’s a great question, Adrian, and one we don’t yet have a long-term solution to. We gave all staff a stipend to help with WFH set-up last year and we plan to make longer term decisions about the kind of support you suggest as part of a compensation review this year. Right now, we’re thinking that this will be some kind of monthly stipend. Also agree about the environmental benefits – see my answer to the comment below!

How does increased remote working impact on your Environment responsibility?
Reduced travel could reduce emissions, especially non-essential long-haul travel between your offices in San Francisco and Cambridge UK. This can easily be replaced by Zoom meetings, etc. Reducing commute time could also reduce vehicle emissions, depending on the vehicle.
However, increased use of servers will increase your emissions from web hosting, unless your cloud storage is powered by renewables. Is it?
What about conferences? Reducing conference attendance will significantly reduce damaging emissions from flying.

Hi there, I’m not sure if distributed working increases our environmental responsibility – I think that’s always been there – but it definitely increases our ability to have a positive impact on our carbon footprint. Less commuting is definitely a big one, even though many of our staff use public transport in the Bay Area (or cycle in Cambridge!). We’re also looking at other changes – for example, I’ve visited our Cambridge office once a quarter but will now probably go twice a year for a longer time. And our Board meetings have been in-person three times a year – we’re now likely to do two of those remotely. So yes, I think you’re right to identify not only opportunities but responsibilities for all of us to change behaviors.

Some of those extra costs of homeworking in terms of heating/lighting/bandwidth can be claimed against tax in many countries.

Really great article Alison. It’s absolutely a glimpse into the future…which is HERE in fact.

Thanks, Alison! I especially appreciate your sharing of the internal survey data and your focus on language. Back when I first started working “remotely” at Cell Press, I tried to eschew the term. We adopted “offsite” (which still assumes that there is a primary “site”) for a while, but I found myself gravitating back toward “remote” since it was the term that others were most familiar with. Now I tend to favor “virtual,” though I do like the concept of a “distributed” organization.

This is a great article Alison. I have been working remotely for many years now. But, when I first was working remotely, I was the only one not in the primary office and it was very difficult as you are not part of the culture or know the little things discussed in the office. It is much easier working in a group of sales people when everyone is remote. The manager has to be very good at communicating to the group and the group to the team. There is added cost to working from home. Not only internet, phones (I have a soft phone but it isn’t the best), heat, electric and in the US office expense was removed from the tax benefits. I do worry about relationship with your co-workers when you don’t have a chance for the casual conversations. I have been at my current job since April 2020, yes started during the pandemic, and I know almost nothing about the other 25 people who work here. We will need to see how this new normal will be for future work/life balance.

“I also suspect that onboarding has been particularly hard for those who are more junior in their careers and who haven’t yet built strong social and professional networks. While there’s work for us to do internally, this seems like an area in which SSP could play a meaningful role with virtual peer-to-peer networking opportunities.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately too. Pre-pandemic, SSP looked into creating a virtual peer network program, but we ultimately found that the overhead on volunteers outweighed the enthusiasm for the program. It may be time to revisit some of that work.

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