Management & Leadership News South Africa

Dear Office, it's not your fault...

Dear Office,

It's not your fault.

I know, I know, in the last four months you have been accused of almost anything: you were told you were an inefficient place to work from, an enslaving place, a place where the majority of people do not want to return to. But it is not your fault.

The reality is that you were just an expression of the managers you once housed. These self-proclaimed leaders gave you the unfair and impossible task of inefficiently tracking people’s performance by making you nothing more than a place where employees had to show face for a specific amount of time. You were just treated as a place for people to go to coordinate work, but your physical bounds were never meant to represent the bounds of human thought, of what people can achieve when given the freedom to excel.

It got to the astonishing level where people were using “9-5” to mean “work”. But what they really meant was “this very specific amount of time I have to sit at a desk with my boss looking over my shoulder”. And all of this happened just because a bunch of controlling managers decided that time spent on a task was the best way to track people’s quality of work, so they chose to force people to spend a defined amount of time with you every day, assuming that time and deliverables were inextricably linked.

How many times did you see in front of your incredulous eyes yet another intern spending the whole day stuck at the desk working on a presentation? And all of this because his manager may walk past to nod in self-appreciation and think: “You are working long hours, you must be a good employee. And I must be a great leader.”

And then, all of a sudden, you were gone. And these “great” leaders were left in a tailspin, incapable of driving and motivating their teams remotely. Incapable of leading, because leaders they had never been.

Dear Office, it's not your fault...
© tiero – 123RF.com

So what’s your future? What can you look forward to?

Well, there’s quite an exciting and bright future ahead, if you ask me.

First of all, you will be the catalyst of a leadership revolution. You will be creating the next generation of leaders by teaching them to delegate, motivate and empower employees to strive for excellence by their own means, to deliver according to their own lifestyles, as opposed to being forced to adapt their lifestyle to the work environment and practices.

Furthermore, you will finally reach your intended objective, your dream: you will be the place for brainstorming, ideation, creation and human connection. A place where people look forward to meeting their colleagues, having a coffee, talking, brainstorming, without the ticking clock becoming the essence of people’s work day. It will probably be a very specific day of the week each week and you will see people coming in armed with their pens and notebooks and not with their laptops, as you well know that there are far better places to concentrate and get work done on your own.

As someone once said: “An office is a very dangerous place from which to view the world,” and I know you couldn’t agree more with it. You’re our greatest place for people to meet, ideate, brainstorm and change the world and I can’t wait to see that for you.

You deserve it.

Good luck.

Enrico Ferigolli
Co-founder and co-CEO, Bottles

About Enrico Ferigolli

Enrico Ferigolli is the co-founder and co-CEO of Bottles
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