Working From Home, Going To Mars And The Enterprise Crew

Yet another Work From Home debate (YaWFH)

As a child, I spent many of my afternoons watching the popular 90s TV sci-fi series Star Trek: TNG, marvelling and giddying with excitement over humans exploring our galaxy in a starship called Enterprise with a sole purpose to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where nobody has gone before. Set in a distant 24th century, the Enterprise is automated, powered by an AI and can fly itself—bar for refuelling on Dilithium crystals, of course. It has a complex sensor array and can launch probes that survey space anomalies and space bodies. Yet, the Enterprise has a crew, a big crew, part Federation officers and scientists, part families. The Captain and Bridge officers command the ship, a kind of executive branch, follow orders from the Federation and often frolic around space only to stop when they stumble upon something interesting to explore. And explore they do, in person, which is made incredibly painless by using a nifty teleporter. The expeditions, however, usually go a bust resulting in high drama and thrills—it wouldn’t be a great TV show otherwise. Sometimes the away team suffers heavy injuries only to be patched up just in time by the ship’s AI doctor for the in-person debriefing board room meeting equipped with a direct video feed to HQ on the other side of the galaxy. (radio signals, really?) Luckily, the AI doctor is on call to prevent any death-by-PowerPoint incidents. So, it’s easy to get excited in this century for a human expedition to Mars.

What does this have to do with ways of working? As much as we don’t have to send humans to Mars or build Enterprise-like starships to explore the galaxy because we already have robots to do it in our place just as well, we don’t have to commute to work or conduct work face-to-face full time because we already have the teleworking options to perform the work remotely.

As human species, we congregate, affiliate and behave appropriately when we trust in, have loyalty to, and membership in an organisation. We physically present ourselves and exert presence, influence and control in-person. It is often said that, if you are not seen or heard in the office, you will be passed for a promotion or reward. The organisations we work in embellish offices with cultural artefacts, slogans, mottoes and symbols. Edgar Schein defines these in his first level of the three-level model as the surface manifestation of organisational culture level or culture’s most accessible forms which are visible and audible behaviour patterns and objects.

In the Covid-19 pandemic, the visible and audible behaviour patterns and objects became obscured. In one company, an employee who had been interviewed and onboarded online experienced the company’s culture only through the company’s laptop and was flabbergasted upon experiencing umpteen branding visuals and sheer physical grandness of the office building when they came in for the first time one year into the job. Thus, it is germane to think and insist we come into the office, expose, accept and internalize cultural signals and do work face-to-face to build trust, loyalty, membership, upkeep engagement and consequently improve performance. Even so, we insist on visibility to monitor and control.

Yet, this is incredibly myopic. Students in an Organisational Behaviour course at a UK university annually partake in a behavioural exercise where they are divided into groups, blindfolded and given geometric objects in their hands to sense-make the colour and identify the number of shapes and compete with other groups for the fastest time. After a short confusion stage, people quickly heighten their non-visual senses, receive messages from their group members and deduct all the attributes with surprising accuracy and speed. In ways, this suggests teams can perform just as well without visual cues, e.g. mannerism, mimicry. Thus, exerting visual physical presence might be viewed as a cultural exercise and less significant for collaborative work.

In the 60s, we sent humans to the Moon so a western tribe could send a specific message to an eastern tribe. Conversely, nations will spend billions to send humans to Mars to have a limited user experience (how much of Mars can you really experience through a spacesuit), high probability of injury or death, the promise and display of high (national) cohesiveness, might, power and control, high cultural artefact signalling, high-tech industry economy activity and novel scientific experiments. This is despite the highly advanced proven robot (rover) technology and computer simulation capability we have at our disposal. Similarly, organisations will spend billions to get workers into confined expensive downtown offices, establish a high-performing culture, signal cultural objects and invest in high-tech industry sectors such as autonomous cars, whilst we could be connecting to the office remotely with communication and remote collaboration technology just like the people at ESA or NASA connect to and do work with robots on Mars or astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station.

This is the point of the starship Enterprise. Even with the AI ship automatisation, AI doctor and robot exploration, the Federation and crew chooses to zip through the galaxy and risk their lives, not because of any grave external pressure, but because of the vast resource availability and lack of work--they have litterally nothing to do back on Earth where robotization and AI are omnipresent. Neither is true for the 21st-century worker.