Remote Work Isn't Ineffective, It's Just Different

Someone who has always cooked on a gas stove and then switched to electric will decry electric stoves as an objectively inferior solution. Conversely, someone who has always cooked electric and then tried to cook on gas will decry gas stoves as an objectively inferior solution. Setting aside the shockingly volatile social media landscape around this issue, the lesson here is one of familiarity. These are both perfectly viable solutions for getting heat into a pan, but they require different techniques to get you to the same place. If you try to apply the techniques used cooking on a gas stove to cooking on electric, you’re going to have a bad time.

This is the case with remote work and office work. One isn’t implicitly better than the other, but they do require different techniques. If you’re experiencing friction in a remote or hybrid team, the odds are high that you’re just trying to use the wrong techniques to build your organizational system. This is the core problem with many claims about remote work’s alleged ineffectiveness. By neglecting to look at organizations through a systems frame, it’s easy to believe that specific techniques are the only solution available. That is, that gas stoves are the only option to cook food effectively. Instead, you must look at the system and the needs it actually has. Once identified, think broadly and deeply about how you can resolve those needs in certain contexts and with certain constraints. To torture the metaphor one last time, an open fire is a delightful technique to cook food when out camping, but applying that technique indoors will lead to a visit from the fire department. Think critically and choose wisely.

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In this post, we’ll take a look at some common needs working in a white-collar office job and explore how different techniques can be used for each situation. Having worked successfully both in-office and remote for many years, I’ve learned a few things about how to address common gaps. We’ll also touch on some of the unique benefits enabled by work flexibility that can be billed as employee perks to attract talent.

Information Sharing

Crossing Silos

Advocates of an office environment will claim that there is improved information sharing compared to remote work, specifically citing the “water cooler conversations” or “after meeting chats.” Water cooler conversations are typically short exchanges of information, such as a problem you’re having or a project you’ve started. These exchanges are incredibly valuable to an organization, because they help expose gaps in the formal communication mechanisms.

The error here is thinking these are ends in-and-of themselves. That is, “You can’t have water cooler conversations when there is no water cooler.” That’s obvious, but are water cooler conversations some implicit good? No, absolutely not. They are only useful as a technique for sharing information across typical boundaries and silos. If you have no water cooler, you need to address this need with another technique.

There are a few options here, the ones I’ve seen most often being sync meetings and adhoc notifications. I’m generally against sync meetings, even in the office. The cold hard reality is that people largely wait for their turn to speak in these meetings and don’t really engage consistently. We’ll get into meeting engagement in another post, but I think we can all agree this is more-or-less true. Doing these meetings over video conference only adds a layer of disconnection.

Instead, try adhoc notification mechanisms. Create a place where teams can send high-level notices and updates, such as a Slack channel, email list, etc. If you’re starting to explore a particular problem space, send a notice. If you’ve delivered something of high value, send a notice. If you need guidance on something others may have already solved, send a notice. This fully replaces the need for water cooler conversations, and actually performs the function better. It’s not just two or three people who all sit near each other getting the information, it’s dozens of people across the company. Managers, product managers, and senior engineers can watch these channels casually, looking for anything that needs their attention.

During my time at Amazon, this was used to great effect. First, it was interest mailing lists. By subscribing to lambda-interest , you’d get notifications about things happening with AWS Lambda. Later, this moved to Slack, but the function remained largely the same. These mechanisms have been critical for me when trying to keep tabs on what’s happening across an organization of that size.

Diving Deep

The “after-meeting chat” is another technique that is often cited as necessary. Reflecting on my experience with them, these chats were almost always deep dives into some specific area. Maybe someone brought up the need for encryption in a meeting, but wasn’t sure how to do it. You stay with them for 10 minutes afterwards to share your experiences.

There’s absolutely no reason this can’t be done remotely. Slack’s Huddle feature is perfect for quick chats like this, and I use it all the time. The only difference is that it requires hitting a button instead of awkwardly standing around a meeting room. You should encourage each other to be available for conversations like this, as they are critical to the “riffing” cited by certain executives. If people on your team are not making themselves available, this is a performance management problem, not a process problem.

The Rest

Any mechanism based on a meeting remains more-or-less the same when working remotely. Weekly or monthly updates are usually meetings. Sprint ceremonies are usually meetings. These are just as easy to do remotely as in-person. Encourage people to turn their cameras on during meetings to help with communication. We’ll get to that topic later.

Raw Productivity

Ultimately, we all have work to do. Write code, write design documents, meet with customers, look for candidates on LinkedIn, etc. This is all work that requires some degree of uninterrupted focus.

Modern open office floorplans, which I’ll address in another post, are probably the greatest sin committed against this need. People need to focus, and in order to do so they need workspaces that allow them to focus. Typically, this means noise cancelling headphones everywhere. Why are we building office environments that are so harmful to productivity that people feel the need to isolate themselves anyway?

Working remotely is clearly better in this instance. Employees are empowered to build workspaces that enable them to work most effectively. They can have as much cleanliness or distraction as is necessary. For me, I need to fidget when thinking, so I have an array of fidget toys on my desk that can make as much noise as I want. My cat also sleeps nearby, so I can get some ear scritches in during a stressful meeting. Empowering employees this way is absolutely critical if you are aiming to support a more diverse workforce. We’ll get into diversity in a later section.

Collaboration

Collaboration is the trickiest area for remote work. In-office advocates will rightly point out the power of whiteboarding sessions. Getting people in front a whiteboard together to brainstorm or work through technical designs can have a great effect, but that’s not the only way to collaborate. Let’s look at the needs that the whiteboarding technique addresses:

• Live feedback

• Diagramming and writing

• Broad input

Live feedback and broad input can be achieved with virtual meetings. The real challenge virtually is with diagramming and writing.

Virtual whiteboards exist and have been very effective for me, but ultimately what I’ve found to work best is shifting to a more asynchronous collaboration model inspired by the Japanese business practice of nemawashi. Nemawashi is, as defined by Wikipedia, the “informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project by talking to the people concerned and gathering support and feedback before a formal announcement." Have one or two people take an initial pass at the design, then share it out to collaborators for feedback. Your collaborators can take some time to review it, really think it through, then send you any changes they think need to be made. Update the design and send it back out. Do this until you have some broad agreement. If there are any sticking points between collaborators, you can schedule a short focused meeting to address that point.

I truly believe this model is better for collaborating on all manner of work. It enables deep thought on the topic, encourages feedback from everyone, and ultimately produces a better product. Companies like Amazon have been doing this very thing through their narrative process long before remote work was common; where someone writes a narrative document, gets it reviewed, updates it, gets it reviewed, and so on until there is agreement. This approach comes with the benefit of being self-documenting as well.

Team Building

Lack of connection to your team is another issue that comes up. The traditional team building techniques, such as lunches, events, and happy hours, are just not possible remotely. You need to take a compeltely different approach to team building when working remote, but it is completely possible. You can have human connection when remote.

Cameras on, folks! I know this is controversial, but I’ve never really understood the disdain for cameras in meetings. If you were in the office, you wouldn’t be able to hide behind an off switch. Having your camera on enables your team to see your body language and facial expressions, which are both critical components of human communication. Disembodied voices are for airport announcements. If you’re in a meeting, turn your camera on. It’s essential to how humans communicate. If you get self-conscious staring at yourself, most virtual meeting tools support turning off your own camera display.

In the office, teams rely on happy hours, game time, and so on to try to foster communication. Even before remote, this was getting less and less popular. My team had a standing happy hour starting around 3PM on Friday. Most people just showed up for the free food and left at 3:30PM for a start to an early weekend. This kind of team event is low effort and does nothing substantial. This is made even worse when it’s remote, because no one wants to sit in front of a camera doing nothing for two hours. Instead, invest in team events such as virtual escape rooms, or multiplayer games. We did Jackbox and Among Us on my team a few times, which were great experiences. These types of events are good because they are drop-in and people can come and go as needed. If anyone of you play video games, play them together. The key thing is to get people tackling problems of some kind together. Nothing builds community and trust like going through something challenging together, even if it’s just a game.

From the perspective of the company, the most vital thing you can do is to arrange offsites or conferences. Use all that money you’re saving on rent, leases, property tax, subsidies, maintenance, HVAC, and more to bring your teams together two or more times a year. It’s expensive, yes, but it will foster a sense of community like nothing else. You can get meals together, brainstorm, run lecture workshops, announce big initiatives, have cross-organization planning sessions, and so on. Events like this contribute to resolving pretty much every gap in remote work, and will accelerate your business and build your team. They are a great return on investment and also serve as a great employee perk to advertise, because who doesn’t like an all-expenses paid trip to different cities?

Work Flexibility

Remote work is itself a technique for your organization that comes with its own benefits, the first of which is flexibility.

Flexibility in work is one of the largest benefits to remote work. People need to get to the doctor, go to the bank, take a pet to the vet, handle a home repair, and so on. These are things that exist regardless of where the person works, but are so much easier to handle with remote work.

In the office, your employees’ only option is to take time off work to get things done. Even if they take a partial day, the office may be nowhere near their vet doctor, so they are commuting even more than usual. By enabling employees to work remotely, you empower them to balance their work and their life needs far more effectively.

A home repair could mean working 6 hours and dealing with the repair for 2 instead of taking a full day off. A couple of years ago, I had my home’s plumbing completely redone. It took several days with several plumbers. If I were mandated to be in the office, I would have had to take the days off, which would have meant no productivity for my employer. Since I was working remotely, I could keep working and just check in on them every couple of hours. It was actually beneficial for my employer because I was still working and still delivering to meet deadlines.

Child care is another great example. Working remotely, you can drop your kids off at school and pick them up on time, saving the cost of after-school care or babysitters. Is your child sick? You can keep an eye on them throughout the day while still getting work done. A child being sick may not mean a client meeting is cancelled.

These are major perks for employees that also benefit the employer because their workforce is more predictable and consistent.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

I won’t pretend to be an expert on DEI, but I do my best. That said, I’ve seen the benefits that remote work can bring to organizations, and they cannot be overstated. Remote work is itself a technique to improving diversity.

Neurodivergent individuals may suffer from open office floor plans where distraction is high and social interaction is a constant consideration, but thrive when able to work in a space suited to them. Motherhood no longer precludes a woman from working, because work flexibility empowers her to do both. Those with medical conditions, such as the 15% of the population with IBS, are able to continue working without fear of no bathroom being available when lightning strikes. Those with mobility impairments don’t need to be concerned with crossing several streets to get to another building for a meeting. These are all benefits to improving the diversity of your workforce.

You can even enable diversity in your workforce in unexpected ways unrelated to the traditional protected classes. Remote work enables a geographically and culturally diverse team that can bring in new opinions and perspectives. For example, I worked for a team whose primary customer base consists of homeowners with a mind towards securing their property. I was shocked to discover that I was one of only a few people in my department who owned a single-family home in a city with one of the highest property crime rates in the country. How are you going to truly understand your customers if no one on your team is actually in that situation? How will people living in secured apartment buildings and condos understand the needs of someone who owns a single-family home? They can’t. They’re just making educated guesses. By enabling diversity of where people live and work, you can empower your business to understand customers in ways that were previously impossible.

If you’re serious about DEI and not just using it as marketing on your website, supporting remote work is imperative. Diversity is good for your business and for your employees.

Conclusion

Remote work isn’t ineffective, it’s just different. If you’re trying to use the same techniques as an in-office organization to run a remote team, you’re simply doing it wrong. You’re going to have friction and rough edges. Embrace remote work and learn the techniques needed to manage a distributed organization. Rather than lamenting what’s been lost, dive deeper and find a way to replace it or improve it.

The burden is on you, the employer, because employees absolutely will leave you for someone who embraces more flexible work options. Do you want to be left behind, fighting your employees, or do you want to lead the charge by applying systems thinking to your organization, doing the hard work, and building a talented and diverse workforce that gives you a competitive edge?

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