When thinking about the “should you force employees to come into the office on the basis that it’s a better environment for junior employees to learn and progress in?” debate, Mandy Brown reminds us to not inadvertently used some idealised version of what an office actually is as our yardstick.
The mistake from here is assuming that offices are naturally better at building those kinds of social and supportive structures.
…there’s a kind of mythical office that remote culture is being compared to, a place where everyone is welcomed, where collaboration and support is easy-going and automatic, where everyone is always whiteboarding or talking in the hallways.
It’s kind of astonishing to see how much this presumed office utopia has become implicit, given we have literal decades of satire about offices as locales of poorly lit, soul-sucking, isolated work, where you are more likely to be abused by your boss than sponsored by them.
It feels to me like a good number of cognitive errors can be avoided by thinking hard about what the appropriate - usually meaning realistic - baseline to compare something to actually is.
An example from our recent past:
Don’t compare any potential harms of “getting a Covid vaccination” against the potential harms of “not getting a Covid vaccination and everything else about your life remains the same”. However miniscule the risk of getting a Covid vaccination is - and for the avoidance of doubt it appeared to be extremely low for the vast majority of people - it’ll always come out worse in that comparison.
Instead a much more appropriate comparison is to consider any risks of “getting a Covid vaccination and less likely to thus get Covid” against the risks of “not getting a Covid vaccination and your increased likelihood of then contracting and/or transmitting Covid”.