A new survey of 500 bosses found that 90 percent split their time between the office, flexible workplaces and home, with only a tiny seven percent working from a central office location five days a week.
Thankfully, according to this research by International Workplace Group, bosses are more likely to be in the office than not.
There was though, two percent saying they spend five days a week at home. These two percent really are a different breed of entrepreneur! Who do these bosses think they are, The Wizard of Oz, hiding behind a curtain, pulling levers rather than dealing directly with their team?
Yes, this small band of bosses are the extreme, but they’re part of what appears to be a wider and growing trend of arms-length, lead by video call entrepreneurialism, which can only be doomed to failure.
Hybrid working, working from home, and the four-day week, are all disastrous for business. However, in the past it’s always been a case of the tail wagging the dog, but it looks like the dog’s now fully got its teeth into this commercial suicide.
Firstly, no business really thrives on a ‘do as I say, not do as I do’ approach, so any boss that takes the WFH route will, of course, have their troops do the same and will soon be saying WTF when the firm comes crashing down round their ears.
And for those who suggest having the boss and their employees under the same roof is all about control, that’s not the case. Owners’ ideas, drive and entrepreneurial talent provide the direction to drive a firm forward, but it’s the team they work with that are the engines that propel the business to success.
And a great way to do this is through face-to-face collaboration. No amount of new technology will ever be able to replace it. We’re interactive beings that, on the whole, thrive from working together. After all, that’s why it‘s called a ‘company’.
Working together stimulates new ideas, gets decisions made quickly and helps people gain new skills and experiences from their colleagues, which improve their career prospects and contribution to the business. Just ask any apprentice.
Remember, once the new government has its feet firmly under the table and it gets all its flagship announcements out of the way, like its massive housebuilding programme and new green energy plans, it’ll soon return to one of the central issues that hold them up – the lack of skilled people.
People can’t be effectively trained and be taken into a company’s culture if they are doing it alone staring at a screen on their kitchen table or in the local Costa Coffee.
There is so much more value from developing people by working directly with them, and that, of course, includes bosses who can share their experiences, promoting a shared vision for the business.
Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to have more Wizard of Oz bosses with a Dorothy mentality that ‘there’s no place like home’. For me, that’s scarier than any wicked witch!
