Wading into the remote work wars

I have thoughts!

It’s the last week of school for NYC public schools (but aftercare ended last week, because of course it did), which is an appropriate time to dip in to the debate about remote work, because I don’t know how I could survive this week — or parenting — without it.

ICYMI: The remote work¹ war has been raging yet again, primarily waged through a series of pieces the NYT.

Round #1 was an op-ed provocatively titled: “We liked remote work. Then we looked at the data.”

The gist: Remote work makes people lonelier and more depressed — specifically, people who live alone.

I have a ton of quibbles with this piece.

First, seems like the problem is actually living alone — which I’ve done and LOVED, but can understand how that’s a challenge.

Second, as I’ll get into shortly, the way many companies transitioned into remote work was by force during COVID. They didn’t intentionally build a flexible or remote work culture, they just tried to translate their in-office vibes to Zoom and Slack. That’s not remote work in its ideal form.

And third: The piece places the onus on the workplace to fulfill the entirety of people’s social needs. Yes, work is where people get their most regular low-touch social interactions. But work cannot be your primary source for friendships. It’s nice to like your colleagues! But it’s good to have a life outside of it (and leadership should aim to build workplaces that make that possible.)

Round #2 in the remote work wars was a story about how remote work is transformative for working parents, both for how they parent and how they’re able to stay in the workforce in the first place. Obviously, I liked this piece.

There is no world in which I could survive or enjoy parenting without remote work.

As many of the parents in this story note — and still more in this Pew survey of working parents affirm) — it’s simply an impossible balancing act. We are never balancing, we are only constantly recalibrating. The world may demand two working parents in order to live, but boy is it not set up for two working parents to thrive.

And of course, as I’ve written about before: Return to office (RTO) mandates are a roundabout way to kick women out of the workforce.

Round #3 was an op-ed from experts Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott, laying out new research that shows RTO mandates are really about ego, not productivity.

“The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.”

Not surprising!

And while this is not chronologically round #4, I consider it the final blow: Per the WSJ: “Work From Home Is Here to Stay—Even if Some CEOs Don’t Love It”

“An average of 26% of paid, full days were worked from home in May, according to a monthly work-from-home survey run by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis. That is down, but not by much, from the 27% registered two years earlier.”

A notable finding that is the bat signal for me: A real generational divide. Younger leaders were less opposed to hybrid and remote work environments.

That’s my bat signal.

Remote/flexible work is major theme in my book, When We’re in Charge, because a new generation of leaders (generally speaking) do not adhere to the belief that work must be seen to be happening.

Many of us became leaders in remote work environments; others of us simply can’t afford to live in the same place our work might be physically located. (Housing Theory of Everything hits again.)

You should know: I’m a remote-work enthusiast.

I love it all: no commuting, more flexibility in my schedule, the time to quickly sweep up the seemingly unending amounts of dog kibble on the floor in between meetings, the ability to squeeze in a work out (or, more often, a couple minutes of TikTok-ing on the couch) in the half hour between when my kids leave the house and my first call of the day starts.

I can be physically comfortable in my environment. I get to spend as much time as possible with my family. I eat home-cooked meals more. Since I spend so much of my day on the phone, anyway, I can often take my calls while sitting on our balcony or out walking the dog.

I’ve been building and leading a diverse, fully remote team for close to a decade, in an industry known for burning people out hard and fast. I believe in remote work. I will go to the mat for it.

Remote/flexible work is good! It enables people to live where they want to live and have lives outside of work. It’s mission-critical for working parents and for many people with disabilities. It’s a core part of keeping women (especially moms and caregivers) in the workforce. It helps companies hire more diverse talent in all possible ways.

But I get why companies don’t do it.

Among other reasons (the sunk cost of real estate and the narcissism Grant and others wrote about earlier, most notably), it is objectively true that remote work is significantly harder for leadership.

Remote/flexible work can be isolating. It’s hard for more junior people. It’s more work for management. It can be expensive in other ways (travel, in-person gatherings, facilitators, etc). It can lead to days in which some staff are commuting to an office and then spending all day on Zooms with other people working from home.

The all-too-common boomer style of “management by walking around” has always been ridiculous, and it’s particularly laughable in the modern work environment. But at least that style had a logic to it — you could see people working, you could catch a problem before it metastasized, you could tell who was struggling just by watching them in the hallway.

In a remote environment, you lose all of that passive data. Which means you have to replace it with active intentionality. Management in a remote environment simply requires more of everything: more time, more communication, more clarity, more feedback loops.

Pretending otherwise — or just doing it without putting in the actual set-up work it requires — is what makes leaders look naive and gives the “get back in the office” crowd ammunition.

It’s not for everyone and (obviously) not for every job. But those who dismiss it out of hand (or, ahem, call it “white collar crime”) are missing the pros, and more importantly, missing that flexible work, whether in location or time or both, will be part of any company that wants to succeed moving forward.

I wrote a lot about how to do it right (and what I’ve learned from doing it wrong) in When We’re in Charge, to the point where when I tried to pull out some of the best tips, I ended up having something like 20,000 words long.

So here’s the gist: Remote work is kind of like TikTok.

Seriously. Consider that the remote office is analogous to TikTok or any other algorithmically defined social media platform — each person’s experience of it is structurally the same, meaning we’re all swiping up or down, but simultaneously, we’re having fundamentally different exposure.

(For example: I’m hypothetically somehow stuck on a series of clips of snake eggs hatching while you’re watching people do home renovations.)

In an in-person office, everyone enters the same physical space, shaped by the same norms — people leave for lunch, or use headphones, or show off pictures of their pets in their cubicles, or whatever.

The office decor gives a sense of how the organization defines itself — cool, or formal, or bro-ey, etc. The forced proverbial watercooler interactions with people you might not otherwise collaborate with have some work benefit and some social benefit and help dictate what the vibes of the office are.

In a remote team, there is no lobby to shape how you feel when you walk into the office. There is no shared space beyond a Slack team or comparable chat system — few people have the same experience of a day; there is no common “someone microwaved fish in the kitchen” story to bond over.

My experience of my workplace is wildly different from that of any person on my team, based fully on whom we interact with and the one-to-one or one-to-few communications we’re on.

The task as the leaders is to be explicit about what shared experiences or behaviors can rise to the top of everyone’s metaphorical office FYP — what does the “office algorithm” embrace, and what does it reject?

So to torture the metaphor, as the boss, you’re the office programmer. You have to be intentional about what you’re writing into the culture because if you’re not doing it deliberately, it’s happening anyway — just not the way you intended.

An example here: Celebrating each other is really important to me for any team I run. So at Run for Something, we have something called the “Fionas,” named after Fiona the hippo at the Cincinatti Zoo. (It was my cofounder Ross’s idea, go with it.) At every all-staff meeting, three people are named the Fionas for good things they’ve done; at the next meeting, they name three new people as the Fionas. It’s extremely cheesy. It’s also really important that we have a bottom-up/lateral-out way of highlighting people doing great work.

As you define the algorithm, you have to be extremely pedantic. (It’ll be annoying.) But get nitty-gritty. Define what “on time” means in your rules around punctuality, what “prompt” means in your expectations around responses, what “asshole” means in your “don’t be an asshole” code of conduct. What the organization is, and what it’s not — all of it goes on paper or Google Doc.

This can feel silly with a small team or in an informal work environment — I chafed against it at first because it can feel like process-process bullshit or like you’re infantilizing grown-ups who should know better.

But it’s absolutely necessary, especially if your team grows. If you don’t, everyone is set up to fail.

I have lots of examples of how to actually do this in my book (including great guides to icebreakers, codes of conduct, #Celebration channels in Slack, org value-setting, and more). Get the whole thing if you’re interested.

If you do it right, remote/flexible work can be transformative.

For you! For your team! For your bottom line! For your family, kids, friends, community.

I come back often to my guiding question:

What would be possible if things didn’t suck?

Specifically: What might it open for you if your work didn’t suck your spirit dry?

What kind of parent, partner, citizen, neighbor, person could you be if you had the time/space/energy to give to those roles the same way you (probably) have to give time/space/energy to your employment?

What would it feel like to have more agency about how you spend your days?

That’s what this debate is really about: Agency and autonomy.

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When We’re in Charge is my leadership book for millennials and gen Z trying to do things differently. Pick up a copy in any format you’d like — hardcover, e-book, or audio book (narrated by yours truly) anywhere you get books, including Amazon or Bookshop.org or literally anywhere else. If you have Spotify Premium, you can listen to for free right this very minute. It’ll be out in paperback in September.

1. I’m going to use “remote” as a term to encompass all the varieties of the state of the office — workplaces that are entirely online/virtual, workplaces that have an office but include a few days of working from home (aka hybrid), and workplaces that are primarily in person but have a few members of the team working remotely — really, any combination that isn’t 100 percent in person 100 percent of the time.