Knowledge Work Is Not Where You Sit

Senior executives often ask: how do I know my team is actually working when I cannot see them? The question reveals more than they intend. Drawing on Drucker's 1959 concept of the knowledge worker, Bernhard Kerres argues that knowledge-work productivity depends on four factors — purpose, social support, responsibility, and trust — and none of them depend on physical location.

Published 2020-11-17 by Bernhard Kerres

A question I get often, particularly from senior executives whose teams have moved partly or fully out of the office: how do I know they are actually working?

The question reveals more than the executive intends. It assumes that productivity depends on observation. That you can see whether knowledge work is happening if you watch it closely enough.

You can't.

You could, in a factory. You could see someone adding a bolt, welding a joint, mixing an ingredient. You could measure what came out at the end of the line and divide by hours worked. That world has not gone — but it is not the world most senior executives are now leading in.

In 1959, Peter Drucker introduced the term knowledge worker to describe a category of work that was about to change everything. To assess the productivity of a knowledge worker, you would need to monitor their thinking. That has never been possible. It is no more possible now than it was then.

What we know now — from decades of research that did not exist in 1959 — is that the productivity of knowledge work depends on four things, and where the worker is sitting is not one of them.

Four factors that actually drive knowledge-work productivity

Purpose. People need to see meaning in what they do. Not in the corporate-mission-statement sense — in the connecting-this-task-to-something-that-matters sense. This requires leaders to stop telling knowledge workers what to do, and start explaining why it matters and how their piece fits into something larger. The hardest part of leading knowledge workers is resisting the urge to specify the how.

Social support. This is one of the most underrated factors in business research. Social support means that there is a stable group of people around the worker who provide emotional support — and occasionally a hint or a piece of content that unlocks a problem. This is far away from what most companies call teamwork. It is closer to what good agile units have always quietly built. It is also what well-functioning friendship circles provide between colleagues. Either way, it is independent of physical location.

Responsibility. Knowledge workers, particularly experienced ones, need to be given real responsibility — not just delegated tasks within tightly defined parameters. This pays directly into purpose (because it makes the work feel like the worker's own) and into trust (because it signals that the leader believes the worker can carry it). For leaders, this means: do not specify how. Specify why, set the constraints, and step back.

Trust. The fascinating thing about real trust in the workplace is that it is multi-directional, and it is given on an adult-to-adult level. You cannot only give trust. It also has to be received and taken up — which requires a relationship in which people see each other eye to eye. This is something a leader has to build deliberately, in conditions where they cannot observe the worker minute-to-minute. The good news is that the conditions where they cannot observe minute-to-minute are exactly the conditions where this kind of trust gets tested and built.

What this means for the location question

Knowledge-work productivity depends on purpose, social support, responsibility, and trust. None of these depend on whether the worker is sitting in the office, at home, or in a café in another country.

What they do depend on is leadership style and organizational culture.

A leadership team that has not built any of the four — that has substituted observation for purpose, presence for responsibility, and surveillance for trust — will see productivity collapse the moment the team is no longer in the office. They will, predictably, conclude that the home office is the problem. It isn't. The team's productivity was always being held together by the manager's eyeballs. Remove the eyeballs and the structure collapses, because there was never any real structure underneath.

A leadership team that has built the four can, in many cases, encourage co-workers to work from any place that gives them positive energy and opens their minds to creative work. A few companies have abandoned offices entirely on this logic. The early evidence on those companies — agility, profitability, growth, talent retention — suggests this is not a marginal effect.

The question to ask is not how do I know they are actually working. The question is am I leading in a way that makes the four factors real for the people I am responsible for.

If the answer to that second question is yes, the first question stops mattering.

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If you are leading a team through a transition in how and where work happens — and finding that the conventional wisdom about productivity does not match the reality you are seeing — that is a conversation worth having properly. Reach me at bernhardkerres.com (https://book.bernhardkerres.com/meetings/).

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About the author

Bernhard Kerres trained as an opera singer before joining Booz Allen Hamilton as a strategy consultant, then moved into CFO and CEO roles at two listed European technology companies, and served from 2007 to 2013 as CEO and Artistic Director (Intendant) of the Wiener Konzerthaus. Today he works as a leadership coach, executive advisor, and keynote speaker. He is a PCC-certified ICF coach, holds an MBA from London Business School, and was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art. He is the founder of RolePlays.ai, an AI platform for practicing high-stakes leadership conversations.