COVID-19 has had a deleterious effect on our world as we know it.

First, it sent sharemarkets into a downward spiral, then it put countries such as Italy into lockdown, and forced the cancelation of festivals such as SXSW (something the author of this article was going to attend — bummer!).

Oh, and who can forget ‘toiletgate’ — Australians, embarrassingly for me, stripping grocery stores bare of necessities such as toilet paper, hand sanitiser, pasta, rice and Vegemite. I have since warmed to the southern European institution that is the bidet!

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A Forced Experiment

However, COVID-19 has also forced many high profile companies to enact remote working procedures — companies such as Box, Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all telling employees some variation of “work from home”.

This forced experiment is in many respects a long overdue one.

In fact, I recall thinking to myself that I should have been working remotely most of the time as early as the late 2000’s. Then, I worked for the likes of Ernst & Young, and even back then, over a decade ago, I used remote-access VPN with two-factor authentication to log in to our team’s centralised files, my email and our instant messaging platform to communicate with colleagues.

The capability was there, but the culture was not keeping pace.

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From Algorithmic Work to Heuristic Work

Today, most leaders and managers (they are not the same thing) still conflate hours worked with output, and presence with productivity.

They do this despite the fact that the industrial revolution ended one hundred years ago and the nature of our work is no longer that of packing widgets into a box.

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In a time when we are paid a premium to actually think creatively and to solve complex problems— heuristic work that requires us to harness focus and mental energy, as opposed to the algorithmic work from the days of yore — conflating presence with productivity makes no sense at all, and can actually be incredibly counter-productive.

As I wrote for Harvard Business Review in The Case For The 6-Hour Workday:

Heuristic work requires people to get into the physiological state of flow, coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975. Flow refers to the state of full immersion in an activity, and you might know it best as “the zone.” A 10-year McKinsey study on flow found that top executives are up to 500% more productive when they’re in a state of flow.

but…

Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance, with research by Adobe finding that employees spend an average of six hours per day on email. The average employee is being interrupted 50–60 times a day, and 80% of those interruptions are not important. Employees are in a constant state of distraction and hyper-responsiveness.

And as Adam Grant points out, “like most humans, leaders are remarkably good at anchoring on the past even when it’s irrelevant to the present.”