Remote Work

I was reading through this week's Economist (4/21) magazine and saw the article "Unlike everyone else, Americans and Britons still shun the office". As someone who worked remotely 1-2 days per week from the mid-2010s and was 100% remote starting in early 2020, I've got a perspective on working remotely. What caught my eye from the Economist was the penultimate paragraph because it hit home:

Maybe, then, the problem with working from home is not its economic impact, but its social one. Put simply, Americans do not seem to be making the most of the time they are no longer spending on their commutes. Socialising and volunteering are both now less common than in 2019; meanwhile, people spend more time “relaxing” and playing video games. All told, the average American spends half an hour longer alone than pre-2020.

Using the commute time

I definitely experienced this issue when working remotely. My "no-longer-commute" time went to additional childcare in the morning (my spouse could take over later) and the afternoon indeed went to either additional working hours, video games, or TV. Compared to commuting to / from the office, I might even be staying away from people more because I'm not "out of the house": if I'm coming home from an office 30 minutes away, it's not that different in my mind to go somewhere other than home instead: I'm already "on the road".

It's not all bad: having a 0-minute commute (I work from my detached garage so I do actually leave the house) means that I can help out when an urgent issue comes up, and if I lose track of time I can wrap up my work and get home within a few minutes--most of the time is shutting down my computer.

Overall remote work impact

In July 2020, my company told everyone in my office that they were canceling the lease on our building and effective September 2020 we were all 100% remote permanently. (So pick up your stuff before then!) We had maybe 120 people in the office, most or all of whom had been hired when we had a production site locally in the city (and the office was overflow space from the factory). Since the factory had closed in 2012-2013, the main thing keeping the site open was that it was far cheaper to keep us local than hire our replacements elsewhere. In 2020, since we were all remote anyway, why keep the site open?

My standard "joke" is "given the choice, I would have preferred to work 100% remotely. It just would have been nice to be given the choice."

As it was, I was lucky: I'd been with the company over a dozen years at that point, and so already had a good feel for how the company worked and a wide network of people to go to when I needed help (and the social capital that they would help me). In addition, most of my responsibilities were based on web conferences and emails anyway: I hardly interacted with a lot of people in my office when I was there. If I had been newer to the company or had more people doing the same thing locally (where I'd want to talk often of "are you doing things this way too?"), I'd have been in bigger trouble.

Hybrid

With people joining companies all the time (hopefully) and needing to learn the process, them being onsite is far more effective. Where I think we run into problems as a productive society is that downsizing offices for hybrid work fails to get the benefits from either 100% remote work or 100% onsite. If management sizes an office building for (say) 50% of people to be in any given day (everyone is working from home roughly half the time), that means that tons of people will never meet! The Monday/Wednesday/Half-Friday people will never see the people on the Tuesday/Thursday/Other-Half-Friday schedule. So do you bring in everyone from a department at the same time (for functional expertise) while their internal customers and suppliers are at home? By product team so people never see their direct managers, just their customers?

Unfortunately, although I think that hybrid work has advantages, the "ideal" hybrid job is one where I am remote part-time but everyone else is on-site 100% so that whenever I go in I can find the people I need. That doesn't work for more than one person.

Conclusion

I'll be thinking more about how I spend my non-commuting hours (assuming I get another remote role). I do look forward to some level of in-person interaction; it's very easy to reach people now through a host of different methods, but none of them are serendipitous like seeing someone in the cafeteria or the elevator. Those can be the most rewarding conversations.

If you have any comments, please reach out to me at blog@saprobst.com or this page is cross-posted at LinkedIn and you can leave a comment there.

Extremely-remote videoconferencing