Remote work is a two-way street
Summary
The remote-work divide between employers and employees feels more stark each passing week. Lest it descend into an adversarial relationship, I believe we must view this exchange as a two-way street.
We recognise that leaders must adopt a fresh mindset to support remote work. That doesn’t absolve us, employees, of our responsibility to do our bit.
Employees must empathise with the challenges and pressures executives face when pushing their RTO mandates. When we walk a mile in their shoes, we have a better chance at finding common ground.
Remote work evangelists must use their teams as petri-dishes. Experiment and refine your remote work approach to the point where the benefits are undeniable and impossible to let go of.
Most large companies are distributed by default. They have no choice but to adopt location and time independent ways of working, but this has a cost. Seeing their employees invested in solutions is likely to make companies more open to bearing these costs.
It’s been clear to me for the last year or so that most people want to work remotely, on most days. Survey after survey, however, shows a divide between employees and managers. People in power seem to prefer a return-to-office (RTO). Sure, you can be upset about it and disagree with it, but that’s a topic for a different conversation. The fact remains that increasingly, there’s a company view and an employee view about remote work.
There’s a sense of harmony when both these views coalesce. That sense of harmony isn’t exclusive to remote work; it applies to all kinds of decisions and stances. It’s just that remote work is such a universal phenomenon with widespread appeal. When management views collide with those of the employees, friction is inevitable. And that friction makes its way into work.
I’ve written earlier about the leadership mindset to support remote work. But in this post, I want to focus on what we all, as employees must do, to help remote work stick.
Walk a mile in their shoes
The layoffs of recent months should make one fact clear to us. Companies are not families. A for-profit corporation exists, well, “for-profit”. I have no squabble with that and nor should you. The sooner we adopt this hard, cynical, perspective, the sooner we’ll empathise with the fears and trepidations of leaders whose jobs are about maximising profit.
In times of stress, companies go back to what they know best. Are you surprised that the DEI scene is quiet today? There was so much outrage at George Floyd’s murder. Can you guess why there’s not even a murmur about Tyre Nichols’s killing? Doing things, just because they “feel right”, is easy in good times. In bad times, most companies prefer to be on auto-pilot. So if your company was always an in-person organisation, I wouldn’t be surprised if your leaders seek the security of those familiar ways of working.
Let’s not forget, most managers and executives are least savvy with the tools that enable effective remote work. In their mind, remote work is a compromise they make to keep their people happy. Most of these leaders have also had long careers. In a two or three-decade career, the years of pandemic-induced remote work feel like a blip. The normal, in their minds, is five days in an office. In comparison, two or three days at home and the rest in the office seems like a big shift.
And here’s a painful fact. You may believe that your employer is a knowledge-working company. But it may also be a real estate company. In my country, IT firms have built huge campuses and fancy buildings, to house their people. This is capital expenditure. What do they do with these facilities if no one uses them? There’s no one to sell them to, in a world that’s embraced remote work! So they see no choice, but to call their people back to the office. Otherwise, their assets remain idle and they foot the cost of maintaining an office and supporting remote work. This has a knock-on effect.
Many small companies look up to these behemoths. What they do, the industry follows.
In the services industry, clients work with different knowledge working companies. When the big boys tout the benefits of in-office work, these clients expect their smaller partners to follow suit. Remember, managers and executives, are the least remote-work savvy. So when a client pressures them to work from an office, they’ll be the first to capitulate.
Even if your company has leased offices, they probably haven’t gotten rid of their leases yet. To get favourable lease terms, smaller businesses often sign up for longer lock-ins. Which may mean that they’re stuck with a lease for some time. Do they leave this operational expense unutilised?
Remote work hurts the real estate industry. What’s the point of setting up office buildings if no one will work in them? Builders and realtors have their mortgages to pay off. Don’t be surprised if they’re lobbying hard through sweetened deals or “industry research”, to convince your leaders to return to the office.
I call out all these problems so we can empathise with the perspective of execs who bat for a return-to-office. Most execs don’t wake up each morning thinking of ways to screw their people over. Just like us, they have their challenges to deal with. If we want to work remotely, we’ve got to address the challenges they experience.
Make the benefits undeniable
On this site, we’ve discussed that the forces for change must negate the forces against it if the change has to stick. So if you and your colleagues care about the flexibility that remote work affords you, you must make the business benefits crystal clear.
To begin, take a hard look at how you work remotely. If you’re employing an “office in the cloud” pattern, chances are that you’re not as inefficient as you can be. Here are some symptoms that may point to a bigger problem.
Too many meetings.
Too many interruptions.
Too little time for deep work.
Most knowledge workers normalise the refrain - “it’s crazy at work”. It doesn’t have to be that way. This site is all about calmer, more efficient ways of working. But here are some ideas to help you build a remote team that’s far more productive than an in-person team can ever be.
Use the method stack on this site to find location-independent and time-independent variations to your work practices.
Build the skills you need to work effectively in remote environments. You may have to adapt some of your old skills to this relatively new setup. For example, remote-facilitation needs a new set of sensibilities.
Address the major criticisms of remote work. People complain about onboarding, coaching and mentoring as being weak spots for remote work. Show your leaders how to do this well.
Asynchronous work embraces documentation. That fosters easier knowledge sharing. How can you highlight this benefit to your leaders? Is this something they’ll be willing to give up?
Nothing speaks louder than data. What evidence can you show that proves remote work as being more productive than being in an office? How can you prove, using data, how people prefer to work? Does remote work positively improve your team’s diversity and your ability to attract the best people?
Instead of adopting an adversarial relationship with your managers, can you coach them to work effectively in a remote setup? Can you wire up systems to simplify their work?
As a team, you can’t change how the real-estate industry lobbies for change or how your company’s sunk costs affect its decisions. But you sure can influence your immediate team. Lift your remote work maturity. Show how working remotely can be a differentiate your company. Your team may feel too small to showcase data and insights, but remember that many experiments begin in a petri-dish.
While I speak of everything we must do as employees, I don’t for a moment deny everything organisations must do, to be location and time-independent. Every company, beyond a certain size, is a distributed organisation these days. This could be because they work with clients in different locations, because they have multiple offices, because they have a “hybrid work” policy, or because they’re remote. Once we get through this global slowdown, the war for talent will heat up again. To find outstanding people, companies will need to hire from everywhere. There’s no getting away from distribution.
To build resilience, companies will need to revisit their hiring attributes, so they can identify and recruit people with remote collaboration skills. They must train people so everyone, leaders and managers included, can operate in a location and time-independent manner.
The collaboration tools space is seeing innovations every month. Companies can’t leave their collaboration stacks stagnant for too long. They’ll need an agile mindset to adopt new tools, early and often.
But all this just highlights that remote work isn’t for free. To make these investments and efforts, profit-making corporations must see obvious benefits. And if you and I work at the grassroots of our companies, it’s on us to make those benefits visible and undeniable. That, to me, is the two-way street we must walk on.