9
OPINION
Success from anywhere
“W ork from home” became a necessity with COVID-19. Then evolved the idea of “work from anywhere” – whether that be home, a local café, or other workspace. If we can establish trust, clearly communicate what winning looks like, and have a unifying mission and vision, we will never need to limit our success to any location.
Even as we work through the half-hearted attempts to bring our people back to the office, the organizational development and talent attraction and retention idea that I believe will stick is “SFA” – success from anywhere. What is SFA, and how can we make this work, especially among “back to the past” forces within us that have very likely already cost us in terms of missed opportunity and preparedness for our inevitable future state? Let’s leave the resistance to SFA aside for a moment because even the skeptics and the naysayers recognize the competitive disadvantages of not offering some type of work flexibility in this employee-driven market – hence the half-hearted and tempered calls for a full return to the office. We’ve been on a path to distributed work in the engineering and architecture space for a long time,
especially for those of us desiring to be “practice centered” versus office or geographic location based. The model that will best deliver the deep expertise and innovation that clients are demanding and optimize our internal talent development and workload management is decentralized and distributed, and this shouldn’t be limited to just full- time traditional employees. If we’re willing for good, valid, and strategically sound reasons to have talent from different company- logoed offices work on different projects for different principals and managers, what’s the difference if they’re sitting in a home office or local co-working space as long as the work is getting done? And there’s the rub: the questioning about whether the work is getting done.
Peter Atherton
See PETER ATHERTON, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER AUGUST 8, 2022, ISSUE 1452
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