What do we all think about the idea of a substantial portion of the workforce moving to permanent remote working?
I’m going to begin with my conclusion. The rise of remote working has been unavoidable, allowing many businesses to continue and people to remain employed. At first people were surprised how well it worked and some said, “This is great, why don’t we just pivot (I love the word) and never go back to the office?” Next to staff costs, real estate is the biggest expense for most businesses and I’m sure, from the C-suite, it is enticing to imagine a world where these costs are slashed, and some people are just personally attracted to it.
But this is the pre-vaccine pre-effective treatment world and it will end. Some are imagining a radically changed workplace style but I suspect that any changes will be incremental and limited, though for some, flexibility in the workplace can be life changing.
If you want to know about the advantages and disadvantages of remote working, go to this Google search There are tips and best 5 advantages and disadvantages, some from the employer perspective, some from the worker perspective. It’s a pretty deep rabbit hole. But, I’m not seeing too much actual personal perspective, how remote working actually works for people, though the New York Times recently published a series of letters, How Working From Home is Working Out ( or Not)
But first, does the term “remote working”, as a goal, bother anybody else?
Remote:
faraway
distant
far
far off
far removed
dim and distant
isolated
out of the way
outlying
off the beaten track
secluded
in the depths of …
hard to find
lonely
in the back of beyond
in the hinterlands
off the map
in the middle of nowhere
godforsaken
obscure
inaccessible
cutoff
unreachable
far-flung
in the backwoods
lonesome
in the backveld
in the platteland
in the backblocks
in the booay
ungetatable
in the sticks
jerkwater
in the tall timbers
Barcoo
beyond the black stump
lone
unapproachable
irrelevant to
unrelated to
unconnected to
unconcerned with
not pertinent to
inapposite to
immaterial to
unassociated with
inappropriate to
foreign to
alien to
extrinsic to
It just sounds a little sad, and maybe it is. I’m not remotely working.
So what are my bona fides to weigh into the conversation on how the modern workplace might be evolving.
I’ve been responsible for tens of thousands of square feet of work environments of all types. As architects we’ve been working in the open plan “benched” environments that the tech world has “invented” since people sat down at desks. I can hear millennials groaning,”Settle down boomer.”
I started, when hardly anyone was doing this, working remotely thirty years ago, a company of one in a back yard garage, in the era of AOL dial-up internet. Computers came with 5 meg hard drives and floppy disks. I sported a gray Motorola brick phone and faxes, you remember faxes, still had the rolls of shiny paper.
What were the benefits?
- No commute, no commute, no commute. For me that was huge.
- I adopted the mantra, “overhead is death” and kept my fixed costs at a minimum.
- I was connected to my community. I was there, where I lived. I wasn’t the dad who showed up late to the school event in a suit with his tie in his pocket. I drove the kids there and to the doctor and swim team practice and to my daughter’s first middle school dance.
- And finally, it worked and I enjoyed a 30-year career.
But is it for everybody? I can only speak from my own experience.
Here are the things that made it work really well for me.
- I spent at least a third of my time out of my office with clients, at sites at meetings. And another third of my time on the phone. When asked what her father did, my young daughter said, “He drives around California and talks on the phone.”
- I started in the garage but moved to spare bedrooms. I always had a dediated space and the house was quiet.
- My business, project management, was two thirds coordinating interactions and one third heads down quiet work
- Was it an advantage that I could easily go back to work after dinner or weekends?
- I needed a team to do my projects but didn’t have the usual employer/employee relationship. We worked as an team of associated experience professionals each responsible for their work and their own finances. .
- I had very frequent project meetings that included my colleagues and clients. For decades we had standing weekly breakfast or lunch meetings with no specific agenda. All of this resulted in long friendships with my colleagues and clients. A zoom meeting over cocktails just isn’t the same.
- I had five or six projects at any one time so there was varied and interesing work.
This resulted in an efficient “office” environment, an engaging professional life and effective coordination of our work.
What are the challenges of remote working?
- In my final position as an architect, I ran projects with teams, sometimes a dozen people, all in the same big open plan space. At least a couple of times a week, I took my morning rounds of observation, encouragement, teaching and learning. It could take all morning and it was indispensable. At other times, there were informal interactions among team members and with staff on other teams as teams were often shuffled. A creative team thrives on all of this and office planners have been working for decades to make this work better.
- Today, I hear less about encouragement and teaching, than about holding team members accountable, and tracking computer time. In an era of remote working this possibility for spying on workers sounds like a dystopian nightmare waiting to happen.
- I think the current success of remote working is built on historical personal connections which will slowly fade. What will this look like when you onboard a lot of new hires? Will there be two classes of staff?
- This success is also built on skills and training already in place and ongoing projects. How can you learn or teach or initiate new projects at a distance?
- How will this impact age and sex discrimination? Race and economic status discrimination? Upward mobility in the organization?
- How will this impact general advancement, in office vs remote workers. Like people gravitate toward each other, who will be invisible and get left out?
- What will be the basis for evaluation? It will certainly be different.
- Will the boys club relocate to their video game and VR silos, no “girlz” allowed?
- And that’s just staff. How will this impact relationships with clients?
Zoom sucks
There are a lot of good Zoom parodies, another deep and delightful rabbit hole. They’re funny because there’s so much truth in them. In just these few months Zoom is starting to drive everybody crazy. One friend laments the Zoom mirror.
Even before the pandemic, in the Bay Area, it was getting so difficult and time consuming to move around to meetings, people started adopting Zoom. I rarely found that satisfactory and encouraged more face to face meetings
So let’s break down the average meeting. What is being missed?
- Getting there transition and “thinking” time
- The informal pre-meeting cannot be over-estimated.
- Getting a sense of the room, being able to engage or step away.
- Participants find it hard to participate.
- Presenters are not seeing reactions of others.
- Informal post-meeting wrap up, even more important than the pre-meeting
More than once I’ve been in the room with a group getting a remote presentation. The presenter worked through their material and wrapped up, feeling successful. In my room there was eye rolling, side comments and a post zoom discussion missed by the presenter. Next time I demanded that the presentation was face to face. I’m not sure we can overcome the disadvantages.
We recently set up a meeting of four people in separate places, as a conference call rather than a Zoom meeting. It worked every bit as well as Zoom and I could trim my toenails too.
This is something that is still playing out. Please, if you have your own observations, comments, ideas, opinions or stories, share them and I will include them in a follow-up post.