Don’t Bring Me Down
The debate about remote work carries on, fuelled mostly by dodgy opinion pieces or some rather skewed reporting in the media, no doubt placed to appease the powerful property lobby and rather edgy City officials.
An example of this was an article in Forbes that screamed “WFH’s staunchest proponents just dropped a bomb: Fully remote workers are officially less productive”, which purported to be reporting the conclusions of some recent research.
It’s another one of those ‘there’s so much wrong with this I barely know where to start’ articles, but I’ll be brief (besides, it’s behind a paywall and I can’t read all of it - although I have skimmed the research piece).
Measuring productivity is notoriously difficult
‘WFH’s staunchest proponents’ is a deliberately provocative framing. Besides, they’ve clearly never met Chris Herd
It’s one report, it’s not ‘officially’ anything
The ‘evidence’ is based on a comparative study of call-centres in one organisation, and an experiment getting two teams to come up with product designs. There are so many other explanations of how they got these results that it doesn’t really ‘prove’ anything, much less something that can be applied generally across all types of work in all types of industries. It’s just nonsense.
So it’s deliberately inflammatory tosh. But it’s also totally missing the point of ‘remote’ working.
It’s not about improving productivity. It’s not even just about improving people’s work experience.
It’s about improving people’s LIFE experience.
That’s why there’s not really a debate here. People have decided. They see the main opportunity here and they are taking it whenever they can.
All we’re debating now is what happens next.
Poker Face
My mate Dave Cairns has written a great post giving a very different perspective on this. Dave used to be a professional poker player and he uses the example of that industry and how it was impacted by the emergence of online poker, eventually transitioning from in-person, in-venue play to a much bigger industry driven by new and large cohort of online players.
Dave’s main point is that the in-venue side of the game hasn’t been destroyed by the (now much bigger) online side but has been enhanced and had also grown.
However, he also makes a really interesting point about how the old in-person players just got outperformed by those who started online. These ‘arrivists’ developed a whole new set of skills and infrastructures that made them much better and left the ‘old guys’ in the dust.
He points out that online players embraced e-learning and online forums as a way to improve themselves, whilst the establish players relied on their small circle of felllow players, in-person chats and books. They simply couldn’t upgrade their skills as fast.
He also points out that online players built their ‘business’ differently, building up more slowly and de-risking their path, whist also pursuing adjacent opportunities that gave them multiple income streams and built-in resilience.
I’ve never really thought about remote working being a way for people to improve their abilities and create more options for themselves before. Now I am thinking that developing the ability to be good at remote working (and I’m using this as a catch-all for any work pattern that is flexible in place and time) could actually become a super-power for employees.
Seems to me this is another reason why it is a major plank of the future of work.
Revolting Children
Just to balance things up, having talked about a bit of skewed reporting, my friend Andrew Horder invited my thoughts on a dodgy opinion piece in this Linked IN post.
Not only is this in the ‘there’s so much wrong with this I barely know where to start’ group, it’s also in the ‘Oooh, this remote working is bad for you, you’ll get lonely’ group of fake concern.
The title is “Remote working is like a dating app: isolating, joyless and bad for us. Yet still we stay home”
It’s the usual collection of cherry-picked studies, unproven causal links, examples of individual experience being extrapolated to everyone and lack of alternative perspectives.
The writer states, “They suffer, but refuse to go into the office.” Apparently, we need to be saved from ourselves and pushed back into the office for our own good.
Feeling sufficiently patronised yet? Well, at least it’s consistent with usual Parent-Child relationship the bosses like.
This article is evidence of a false narrative that remote work inevitably leads to loneliness and we need to be in offices for social connection.
I’m not ignoring the problems that can arise from remote work, if it’s poorly implemented (which it often is because organisations are still figuring it out). It presents different challenges, which we need to master.
However, loneliness is a societal problem and proposing working in offices as the solution is an admission of that societal failure.
Besides, it is a poor solution because:
The commute is a draining experience that impoverishes people physically, emotionally and financially
Suggesting people look for friends in the random collection of individuals their company has decided to drop them into is somewhat sub-optimal. Many people have little in common with their coworkers and establish only superficial relationships. It’s not unusual for them to merely tolerate them, or even actively detest them.
Offices are not oases of humanity, they are often more like a nest of vipers that have been stirred with a hot poker. Bullying and passive-aggression are practically hallmarks of office life.
They are hostile environments for any minority, by which I mean women, people from ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, non-cis gender and carers. And people who are neurodiverse. Or fat. Or ginger-haired. Or wear glasses. Or ‘look funny’. Or don’t drink. Or … well, I could go on. Actually, it’s a hostile environment for everyone except those who are deemed ‘normal’.
Workplace isolation is not only (rather disgracefully) a ‘thing’ but was, before the pandemic, one of the fastest growing problems seen by HR.
When I entered the workplace 40 years ago, it was a social space. Work required frequent in-person interactions with your coworkers and you had time to build relationship and friendships. In the intervening years, it has been de-humanised and the space and time for relationship building has been stripped out, all in the name of efficiency, profitability and shareholders, the holy trinity of neoliberal economics.
Sending people into offices to find connection is like sending someone to Sahara for drink.
That’s why people don’t go.
Go Your Own Way
I do think people, and organisations, are finding it challenging to adjust to the new work environment and methods. That’s understandable, that’s the nature of a transition. We have to unlearn the old as much as learn the new, and that can be the harder part.
I know myself how ingrained our habits, assumptions, beliefs and worldview can prove to be, even when you are trying to make a change that you want and know is beneficial.
A sign of this, I feel, is that people spend half of the time they save from commuting doing more work. I entirely get that the temptation is to do a bit more to cut the backlog and maybe get a bit ahead of things but it’s flawed thinking. The problem is that you have more work than hours, address the issue of the work and treat the hours as a firm boundary.
However, if you are blending your work with other things to get the flexibility you want, that becomes hard to police. So maybe you need to think about what ways you are working that are unproductive, and things you are doing that are just pointless time-sucks.
It’s a more pro-active mindset, rather than being a passive acceptor of whatever is spewed onto you by the corporate machine and doing your best to clear up the resultant mess. Cut out the time you are wasting fannying around and stop doing the stuff that is clearly pointless. It means pushing back, against yourself as well as your organisation. It means, dare I say, being a bit more Pirate.
I guess the choice is go back to the office and be treated like a child, or work in a remote/hybrid/distributed way and be treated and behave like an adult. Me, I always went for the latter.
However, I also did way too much work in my own time and it wasn’t worth it. Back to Dave and his poker playing chums. Compress your work day, be efficient and use the time you’ve freed up to work on yourself, whether that’s your skills, other business opportunities, your health, your relationships - or just enjoying your brief moment on this wonderful planet.
And with that, I’m off for a beer and a barbecue. Have a great weekend.