The images invade my mind, in faded color, another time. English policemen in groups of three with bulletproof vests and submachine guns. Multi-lens security cameras in huge black domes attached to the asbestos-lined ceilings staring at me like an army of HAL 9000. The cameras make an eerie buzzing noise when they rotate and follow me, at least I think they do. Hard to tell because I have trouble breathing. My chest feels too heavy, like somebody is pinning me down. I had my first panic attack in the spring of 1989 – at Heathrow airport. That’s post Lockerbie UK airport security – still pre 9/11 tough. But for a thirteen year old Swiss teen coming from the vast openness of glass-walled airports that was enough. I didn’t feel guilty, I was not afraid of being captured like a criminal. I just felt watched.
Some years later – my first serious job – I was trained as an Internal Auditor and experienced the other side. “What do you do if you find any non-conformity?” The elderly professor does not get an answer from the rows of mid 20s professionals in what they think is business casual. “You put it into your audit report. Do not enter into any discussion with the auditee. They will only try to justify.” First I was watched. Then I was trained to watch.
The Board Room Version: Control in the office is a topic since Taylorism. RTO is only the newest version of a game that is based on the same unverified assumptions. McGregor’s Theory X shows us that controlling management isn’t a way to deal with passive employees — it produces them. Foucault describes the perfect prison, the Panopticon and we see that offices have become exactly that — visibility as management tool, internalized controls. 42% only come to the office to be seen. Bernstein & Turban study open offices — face-to-face interactions get reduced by 70% — the opposite of the intention. Mintzberg would describe RTO as administration, not strategy. Office or home is the wrong question. The right question is for which kind of work are we designing.
Control is not my favorite topic, nevertheless an important one, in view of the history of work. Since industrialization the company has given the worker – especially the office worker – an identity in the form of status and title, a biography of self realization in the company, in the work. A great part of our lives is the career within the company, by the company. Then we have to swipe a badge each morning at the entrance.
The most persistent control mechanisms in modern business start well-intentioned, dressed as science. F.W. Taylor at the beginning of the last century started to meticulously analyze office workers’ tasks. Just as he had done on the shop floor decades before, office work was now considered inefficient and ripe for optimization. Everybody was doing it in their own methods, with their own knowledge. Taylor studied it and extracted the most efficient version from what he saw workers doing. Sounds familiar? The special sauce of Taylorism – because at the time the thing caught on like wildfire and became a movement – is that he took the knowledge he gained and created instructions for management. This was intentional and part of the approach: Knowledge had to move away from workers to management, and with that the control over the work. I see myself so much in this. In my early work I would constantly find faster and easier ways to do work, first my own, then other people’s. Seemed logical or I always said, I’m just too lazy to do it inefficiently. The idea was the same. The difference is how he used the knowledge afterwards.
Taylorism took on some bizarre forms. System, a 1900 magazine inspired by the movement had articles on how to lick envelopes and stamps most efficiently. But besides the bizarre, the ideas were not villainous. They were based on a mindset we still recognize today.
It comes down to how you see the people doing work – both administrative and operational – in a company. You can either think that people cannot take responsibility for company goals, need to be managed in what they achieve and how they work. Or you believe workers can orient themselves towards a clear goal. On their own, because they are intelligent beings.
Now, I’m going to use a term a lot of you already know – but keep your hands off the LinkedIn post creation button because it is more nuanced than you think. In 1960 Douglas McGregor wrote the “Human Side of Enterprise” coming up with the famous Theory X/Theory Y concept that explained the mentioned mindsets. People need to be taken by the hand – Theory X – or people just need to be pointed towards the finishing line – Theory Y. Sounds easy, right? Well the labels are simple, the assumption underneath is not. For management that means that Theory X is about control, and Theory Y is about enabling. And everybody thinks they are enablers, right? We are nice managers after all. Point is that the basic assumption is much more important than whether you are nice or mean. See you can be really nice and still think that you need to hold people’s hand constantly. I certainly did that a lot in my managerial roles – and with my kids too. Handholding remains a controlling management style — just the soft version.
At least we are not the hard version. They use pressure, punishment and command. So that would be really bad. Well eventually it doesn’t matter, both produce the same end result with people. The hard version can produce compliance outwards, but inwards it will create resistance that will lead to avoidance, defensive behaviour and eventually passivity. Same for the soft version of Theory X. People who are constantly being guided and steered eventually will only work if you tell them to. Again passivity.
It is the method producing passivity or even resistance. That is not something like human nature. But management will then read it as such. The method is working in a loop. Management is reaffirmed of their belief that people need to be controlled because they are passive. And so the system reproduces itself, another self-confirming death loop. Theory X does not merely describe passive employees. It produces them.
We assume and get confirmed people cannot be trusted to work on their own. So we start to design systems to control their work. Knowledge as we saw with Taylorism is one form of control, where people work is another. We enter the world of the office. Offices had many forms since they existed. From the smallish counting houses of the 1800s as described in Melville’s Bartleby or Dickens’ Scrooge, where everybody was together but status was in the space and the furniture they got, to the bullpen of the office factories of the early 1900s mixed with private offices only for the executive class.
There were many experiments. Robert L. Propst genuinely studied how people worked in the 1960s and created the Action Office, a line of office furniture meant to liberate the office worker from sitting and being constricted to one fixed workstation. Unfortunately that was too costly and when value-engineered became what we today know as the cubicle, the cage of the office worker. There was Jack Nilles’ telecommuting experience in an insurance company in the 70s. Telecommuting was the idea to take workplaces closer to home, into smaller office spaces to avoid commuting – remember 70s first oil crisis. The concept worked but was cancelled promptly because managers were uneasy about work they could not see. There were non-territorial offices, the Chiat/Day experiment, nobody had a fixed workplace in the office building, you even got your laptop and cellphone only in the morning when you arrived at work. It failed of course too, imagine the effort and chaos of finding equipment and room each day. And then we had Covid. The largest – unplanned – experiment regarding workplaces. All office workers suddenly had their office at home. And that ended with RTO – the return to office mandate. There were many more. You can read about them in Nikil Saval’s “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace”. But the thread running through all of them is the same.
It always comes back to visibility. The counting house was the same room, the bullpen was one big office space, the cubicle was an easily observable prison cell. Whenever visibility was broken up as in the remoteness of the telecommuting, the chaos of the non-territorial office and the absolute disconnect in the home office, management always pushed back.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote a great book about the general topic of control – I had to read it years back for seminars on the philosophy of law – called “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” in 1975. Interesting for us is his analysis of the Panopticon. In the 18th century an English legal reformer – Jeremy Bentham – wanted to make the prison system more efficient and humane. He proposed a circular prison where one central guard could potentially observe all prisoners while the prisoners could never know whether they were actually being watched. If you are not picturing Guardians of the Galaxy then you are probably thinking of your own glass-walled offices or your open office spaces. Everybody is visible, everybody can be watched. Because this is not just a prison design. It is also a management philosophy.
Visibility and knowledge are the most prominent opportunities for control. Now, who does the controlling. We already said this is not per se villainous. If we look at Theory X we can identify three different types of management. We have what I like to call the clueless manager. He is the one who genuinely believes that people need to be directed and work needs to be visible. That is probably the norm. It is just an assumption — but an assumption never verified and with consequences.
Then there is the signal manager. He is very well intentioned, probably thinks of himself as a Theory Y kinda guy, but he communicates still in Theory X. He is the one who says – and believes – he wants to help you but still will enforce control policies like RTO. But there is a gap between message and system. Remember Schein’s espoused values, the values somebody tells you and the basic assumption that you experience in a company. That’s exactly this at the individual manager level. And I guess you also remember what is more important to employees’ perception. It’s the basic assumptions. I used to belong to that group for a very long time during my career.
Finally the third type of management is the deliberate actor. These are the people who exactly know what they are doing – controlling, pressuring – and think that’s exactly what is needed. We don’t like these, but they are real. It’s the 25% – or more since who likes to identify themselves as a bad actor – of executives in a 2024 BambooHR survey who said they’d hoped for voluntary turnover coming with their RTO mandate. So we still have these kinds of managers – sucks I know – but as said the other Theory Xers are also bad news.
The signal managers by the way were created by something called the Human Relations Movement. Interesting story, please bear with me: It started with the Hawthorne studies in the 1920s. Western Electric, a large electrical manufacturing company, funded a study at their Hawthorne Works plant trying to find a connection between light levels and productivity of factory workers. Well turned out there was none. But they found that being watched – by the researchers – actually had a positive impact on productivity. It was then coined as the Hawthorne Effect. Out of this the psychologist and management theorist Elton Mayo developed that social factors — attention, belonging, being seen as a person — matter more than physical conditions. Born was the Human Relations Movement. Sounds humanist, right? Not if you then use the workers’ humanity as a management tool. Then it just becomes a soft control mechanism. It’s the carrot, not the stick. Actually the basis for the whole thing is anyway shaky because a study in 2009 found that the original Hawthorne Effect was likely overstated.
Another reason why brute force is not really required anymore for Theory X is something Foucault described as internalization of control. See, in the Panopticon the really devilish thing is not that the prisoners are watched all the time. But that there is a possibility that they are watched and they don’t know when. This constant uncertainty causes them to behave as if they were watched constantly even if they are not. The control gets internalized. Same thing is happening to you in your open space office or at least 42% of you. Remember the BambooHR survey on RTO mentioned before? 42% of employees said they show up to the office only to be seen. Panopticism makes behaviour visible. Bad management mistakes visible behaviour for real performance.
I know BambooHR is not the most scientific source for a study, let me redeem myself by telling you about one published in the oldest scientific journal: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, first published in 1665. Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban studied employees transitioning to more open office architecture. I think you have all heard that the main reason management gives for open offices is to increase collaboration between employees. Well guess what. The study showed face-to-face interaction decreased by 70% while digital interaction increased. It had the opposite effect of what was intended. People did not collaborate more when made visible. They withdrew. Headset on, email sent, privacy found in their laptop.
Out of my own experience I see two problems here. Genuine collaborative thinking requires a quiet space, not open-space noise and chaos. In addition we who facilitate workshops and meetings have experienced that a clear time frame is also required. Nobody can continuously collaborate for eight hours, we just don’t have the cognitive capacity for that. This also applies to coaching and mentoring. The cardinal rule among professional coaches is that sessions need to be purposefully planned. Unplanned, they either don’t happen or happen badly. Companies also bring up informal exchange — the coffee corner conversation, the chance encounter — as reasons for presence. Planned, purposeful exchange serves those goals better than hoping that proximity produces them spontaneously. Because we are professionals, we want to do better than hoping.
To make this a hundred percent clear — presence is not the enemy. Some work requires a room, a table, and people in it. And remote work does not automatically solve this. Plus surveillance software can turn the home office into a digital panopticon the same way as open offices can. Onboarding, learning and culture are always important topics to be considered. But what is important to remember is that the issue is not the building. The issue is the assumption underneath. The question is not office or home. The question is what kind of work we are designing for. And more importantly — what kind of humans we are designing it for. And who gets to decide.
This comes down to something fundamental and I am happy to introduce one of the brightest and at the same time hardest – at least for me – management theorist to read: Henry Mintzberg. In his book “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning” he explains, well, that. Strategy and Planning, how people have done it, that it is not the same and how it should be done properly – at least the strategy part. Essentially, planning is administration projected into the future. Strategy is not the plan itself, but the pattern that emerges from decisions, learning, adaptation, and action.
What’s interesting for us is how he would analyze this situation: A policy – like RTO or moving to open offices – can look like strategy because it is formal and measurable and enforceable – but it may only be the planning machinery based on an untested assumption. A policy can formalize office attendance. But it cannot formalize trust, culture, creativity or useful collaboration. And you cannot call badge swipes culture. You see that very well if you compare the planner voice and the strategy voice.
P: “How many days do people need to be in the office? Who will track it? What are the rules?”
S: “What kind of work requires presence, and how do we design for it?”
Planning turns strategy into administration. That can be done after we have the insight. But it’s dangerous instead of insight.
And it’s not like we don’t have insight. We don’t need to rely on untested assumptions. We have more than a century of experience with office work. Taylor studied work excessively. OK, he screwed up what he did with the knowledge, nevertheless it’s there. Mayo observed how workers tick. Propst was obsessed with office furniture and setup, tried out stuff, failed, tried again, failed harder and left us the cubicle. Nilles proved that telecommuting worked, the grandfather of Remote Work. We have the European Bürolandschaft. Chiat/Day made two attempts, beside the chaos office, they also built a kind of work village. We have at least two years of Home Office experience gained with lots of pain and sorrow. Technology practically adapted in weeks, not months or years it usually takes.
All this knowledge, this experience is available. None of it is consulted to learn what could be done. How work could work better. Why is that? Some of these experiences were too expensive, yes. And the environment is changing so fast, that some evolutions are hard to endure. But these are only Sachzwänge. They are hurdles to be overcome, not show stoppers.
Yet we are still sitting in office factories that are worse than actual factories nowadays.
Control has become that important to business — important enough to prohibit us from finding a way of working that is actually humane. All of it based on an unverified assumption.
Sometimes I think we should maybe be a bit more like Bartleby: “I would prefer not to.”
I think there is more to explore — and perhaps more to refuse.
You should have an opinion on this one: LinkedIn
Don’t just take it from me, here is some good stuff to read:
F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911
Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 1933
Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975
Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, 1994
Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, 2014
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener, 1853
And the data:
BambooHR, The New Surveillance Era: Visibility Beats Productivity for RTO & Remote, 2024
Ethan S. Bernstein & Stephen Turban, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2018