Why Corporate America is Beginning to Feel Like Pleasantville

I remember watching Pleasantville all the way back in 1998.

And I feel like I am watching the same movie on replay in Corporate America.

Brief Pleasantville Recap:

For those unfamiliar with the 1998 movie sensation starring Reese Witherspoon as the daring, gregarious teen Jennifer and Tobey Maguire as her nerdy and dutiful brother David, let me briefly summarize the plot. Jennifer and David argue over what to watch on TV. David wants to watch a 1950s Leave it to Beaver-esque sitcom known as Pleasantville. After breaking the remote, they call the repairman (Don Knotts) who brings an odd replacement, sending them into David’s favorite 1950s sitcom. As Jennifer (now Mary Sue Parker) spreads her 1990s ways, the town begins to wake up, moving from boring black and white to vivid color. The townspeople freak. Terrified of the change, they hold on to their old ways, discriminating against and persecuting those who don’t want to go backwards (sounds eerily like America circa 2024).

Spoiler Alert: Everyone ends up in color and lives different, better, more fulfilled lives. Jennifer even decides to stay in Pleasantville and gets serious about books and college.

Covid showed us a new distributed way to work, and yet we are still holding on for dear life to “Pleasantville” (RTO).

Thankfully not all of us.

Those of us who have seen firsthand and researched the benefits of flexible and distributed work models know that eventually most businesses will move in that direction (if they haven’t already). Some amount of geographic flexibility just makes sense, especially from a financial perspective. Looking at a 2020 study by of US Patent and Trade Officers (USPTO) who were able to work from anywhere (complete geographic flexibility), there was a 4.4% increase in productivity yielding an additional 132 million dollars a year in profits vs. in-office colleagues (Choudhury et al. 2020). From a real estate perspective, the USPTO saved an additional 38.2M, and the business also boasted an impressive 2.75M annualized reduction in hiring costs (Choudhury et al., 2020). When I first uncovered this data while writing my thesis, I felt warmth in my heart and color coming back into the world.

We simply cannot afford to keep working the old “Pleasantville” way long term AND most of us don’t want to! McKinsey’s 2023 Women in the Workplace report showed that “over 90% of women reported wanting to work flexibly and that percentage was even more pronounced when speaking to women of color and members of the LGBTQIIA+ populations.” We are tired of daily microaggressions, and working from home, even in the hybrid setting cuts down on the amount we face. And, it isn’t just women. According to a recent Forbes article over 98% of people report wanting to work remotely some of the time, and more men than women are currently working remotely. Humans are nuanced, work types need to match our diverse needs and encourage inclusion.

Not to mention, nearly all knowledge work takes place on the internet—meaning that for knowledge workers, work is already distributed. Office work just puts a physical building as the centralization of power, but we all know that even in an office, the majority of our days are spent typing, speaking, and/or looking at a screen. According to Atlassian, a recent study on the first 1000 days of their distributed work model, Team Anywhere saved workers an average of 10 days per year spent commuting (over 500 million minutes), and the company reduced office space needed by half. Productivity remained consistent and “over 92% of Atlassians LOVE the way they work.”

No one is saying there aren’t advantages to some in-person days, but cluster hybrid, where all individuals come together for a brief period of time, and intentional gatherings are more effective ways to culture build, then mandating people come back to the office a specified amount of time.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, check out the work of Dr. Nick Bloom, Annie Dean, Brian Elliot, Erin Grau, and Dr. Gleb Tsipursky.

For now, some companies will continue to operate in the black and white ways of pre-Covid work, and the cool thing is that we can vote by choosing where we work!

To improve team communication and effectiveness in this new era of hybrid and remote work, book a consultation here!