Is Remote Work… Working?

We live in interesting times. Everyone reading this went through the same very strange black-swan event at the same time. You know exactly what I’m talking about. This event affected every aspect of our society, and personally affected each of us in profound ways, but I want to especially focus on the effect on work.

One consequence of the Event was that many of us were entered into a mass experiment with remote work, whether we liked it or not. Every office in the world shutdown for a period of time. Some reopened and some didn’t. Many companies that reopened their offices are still struggling to convince workers to work in them. Those businesses that didn’t reopen their offices became “remote” workplaces overnight. Many companies find themselves somewhere in the middle — they want to return to office work, but they off-shored roles and hired people around the globe during the “experiment” so returning to a regular in-office work environment is not so simple.

Remote work has some benefits. It provides more time at home, which can be a boon for those caring for families. It reduces commute time which is often seen as a waste. Many of us experienced these benefits, although experience was colored by circumstances — whether you lived in a comfortable home with your family, or a small cramped apartment in the city that was never intended to become a workspace.

But remote work also has a negative side. It makes communication far more difficult. Work quickly turns from a collaborative experience where empathy and behavioral cues are crucial, to a completely impersonal one where workers take tickets off a task queue and work independently. If we never interact with our colleagues, or only do so through a Slack channel or an email thread or an automated pager system, it is far easier to view them as a cog in the machine, not a fellow human being, with a predictable affect on company culture. Workers slowly get the sense that they are replaceable, and don’t collaborate or help one another. Throw in a round of layoffs, or even just the threat of job loss, and this effect becomes compounded. It takes a lot of management skill to combat this inertia toward isolationism.

We are now four years, four months, and seventeen days into this experiment. There are now professionals in our workforce with more than four years of work experience who have never known a normal in-person work environment. They learned how to behave in a professional environment while working on their laptop in their bedroom. They have never sat at a colleagues desk and walked through a problem together.

My question to the reader is… is this working?

Are we producing the kind of society that we want to live in? Are things trending in the right direction, or are we stuck in a feedback-loop where things are going to get worse?

Society has gotten noticeably more socially maladjusted since the Event. You can see it in how people treat customer service, and the rising rates of violent outbursts on airplanes.

I also see it in the workplace. I see a shift toward mistrust, fear, and anti-social behavior. We are now training an entire generation of workers to avoid one another.

I attribute this shift to the embrace of isolation during the pandemic years. Being distant was typically seen as rude before the Event, but years of being forced apart trained us to view one another with suspicion and lack of empathy. Not being able to see a full human face for years at a time probably didn’t help either.

From survey data, it appears that the average American worker wants nothing more than to work from home. But I think there is something like Stockholm syndrome happening here. We were forced to “work from home” for a period of time, being assured it would be temporary. And for the last four and a half years, we have done so amid an environment of unprecedented economic insecurity. I began my own career during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and I don’t remember it being nearly as terrifying. Those with permanent homes have now been fearfully huddling inside them for four years, four months, and seventeen days, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Of course, they don’t want to leave home.

Politicians will debate, but to the average person on the ground there is no doubt of the cause. Economic stimulus to prop up the economy following the Event led to inflation, causing rents and property taxes to double; then to combat inflation, anti-stimulus measures led to layoffs, financial crises, and business growth slowing to a crawl. Now housing costs are high while our job prospects are slow, whereas just four years, four months, and seventeen days earlier, the situation was reversed.

The aura of anxiety is palpable. Everyone is afraid of losing his job. Everyone is watching out for number one. No one wants to take a risk on anything. Funding has dried up. Nothing has been invented in the last five years. Even popular culture seems to have stagnated. Where is the next Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad? Where is the next punk rock or New Wave? Cities that were growing before the Event now appear to be shrinking. Everywhere there is a sense of malaise and stagnation and mistrust and rage.

We are all remote workers now, fighting over the same scraps, in an environment where we cannot afford to stick our necks out. Remote work has opened a can of worms. Off-shoring and automation are now threatening to eat away at the core of white-collar jobs that were bolstering the consumer economy for the last fifteen years.

I am a hopeful man. Always have been. Always will be.

If human folly broke American work culture, then human ingenuity can repair it.

People have always wanted to get together. It is a natural human desire. Everything worth inventing was created by people working together in some capacity, and it always involves risk.

Only history will tell what comes next. I hope for an American economy that more resembles the days before the Event. I want to get together with other people to work on problems. I want the instant positive feedback that comes from someone liking your idea, or hearing the excitement in their voice when they find a solution, or feeling the camaraderie of solving a difficult problem together, in the very same room, breathing the same air. I want to gather together in a conference room to view a demo in person. I want to go to Chili’s for lunch.

Work is much more than an income stream. It is a vital part of life. We need work to make us into the people that we want to be. Is remote work cutting it?