At no point do I assume or recommend that remote work scenarios are perfect or even a fit for every organization or type of work. There are simply some types of work where you just have to be physically present to perform the job – this book assumes this is the case. More critically and germane to the points and perspectives in this book – from a culture and leadership perspective, there are some organizations that, for any number of reasons, are not suited to or would not find remote and distributed work scenarios appropriate.
Organizations with intrinsically high levels of mistrust between leadership and employees, or old-school managers who claim they trust their employees but don't feel comfortable unless they see them working, will have to deal with these attitudes and cultural issues before they can see gains from remote distributed work scenarios.
This chapter will discuss some broad reasons that may stack up points for or against the long-term adoption of remote work scenarios. I’ll review contemporary research and literature that examines the pros and cons of retaining remote work models beyond the general end of the Covid-19 pandemic and summarize some of the findings. The intent is to look at both sides of the discussion, but not to be unbiased – this book is unapologetically about and in favor of the possibilities for successful remote distributed working scenarios.
Remote Opposition
In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when almost any company that could was working in a remote model, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, was widely quoted as saying that Netflix teams would return to physically working in the office 12 hours after a vaccine was approved (he later qualified that remark to something more realistic). The general takeaway from this statement and various articles that quoted the information is that Hastings and his Netflix culture are not fans of nor a good fit for long-term remote work (Kelly, 2020).
The reasons for Hastings’ opposition are not as important as the basic fact that the cultures that exist in many organizations will resist or are simply not conducive to a remote distributed work model. A quote from famous management consultant and author Peter Drucker, repeated countless times, notes that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Remote distributed work models are no exception. It is even possible for a changing culture to evolve from one that supports or is foundational to remote distributed scenarios to one that rejects or limits the potential of remote work.
Remote Distrust
As I documented in earlier chapters, CloudCraze had been built from its inception as a remote distributed company. Fast-forward to early 2015, a year and a half after its acquisition by a Chicago investment group. The new CEO had changed the culture rapidly from the original remote distributed-first culture to a culture that valued having butts in the seats of the downtown Chicago office unless your job required you to be on the road or was a regional position.
In this new culture that put a premium on face time in the Chicago office, the CEO’s distrust of the remote software development team grew for reasons that were particular to this culture and leadership style. He could see the outbound sales team smiling and dialing from their bullpen across the room, but he could not see the software development team that (with a few exceptions) were remote and distributed across the country. When one senior architect (note – this was a guy that the CEO had personally brought into the company when it was acquired) decided to move from a location on the METRA line to a country location closer to family, the CEO was furious, assuming the move was solely so that this architect could avoid coming into the office.
Such is culture and the tone that can be set by leadership. The emerging distrust of the development team’s remote distributed model caused some morale issues and confusion within the remote development team. The coda to this example is that CloudCraze was ultimately acquired by Salesforce in 2018. Salesforce has a robust culture of remote work that was made even more so during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Salesforce expecting over half of its workforce to remain in a remote and flexible working mode (McLean, 2021). Things have likely changed for the better at CloudCraze, now known as Salesforce B2B Commerce. As Global Workplace Analytics put it, “the sweatshop and typing pool mentality has to be abandoned” (2021).
Culture
We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience. As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be key.
Microsoft subsequently implemented remote and remote hybrid work options that enable employees to choose working from home, change locations, or do a hybrid of in-office and remote work (Dickler, 2021).
I was already testing what the culture would allow at Madison College prior to the pandemic. Our IT department had moved out of the main campus and across the street to temporary digs while our space underwent a year-long remodel. I was encouraging my leadership team and all of the department to try out Teams for remote collaboration to avoid running between buildings for meetings or driving in for a single meeting. This practice was beginning to take hold, and then the pandemic hit.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges and universities like mine to test and adopt remote ways of working. As the pandemic began to show signs of a projected end, college leaders were revisiting work models and culture in preparation for a post-Covid scenario in which far more people will be able to work remotely some or all of the time if their specific jobs allow this. At the most senior leadership levels (in academia, this is usually the president or chancellor's inner circle), this includes the actions of successful adopters and supporters consistently lobbying leaders who are less willing to embrace a permanent move to the availability of remote work. This lobbying is far more effective with examples of positive outcomes and benefits.
About one-third of remote or hybrid employees report their organization's culture has changed since starting remote work… most say for the better. Employees who report that culture has improved since starting remote work are 2.4 times more likely to report high employee engagement (Wiles, 2020).
Remote Innovation
In California’s Silicon Valley, where culture and innovation are inextricably linked, some venture capitalists believe that the culture of innovation is hard to recreate virtually. One concern is that in-person, ideas are quickly hashed out in front of a whiteboard and either improved or discarded. Some leaders question whether that can be done with the same speed and rigor over Zoom and with whiteboard software.
They may have a point, but the fact is that plenty of organizations did this type of remote innovation and collaboration successfully before and during the pandemic and will continue to do so. Successful and innovative companies will be those who can find and develop talent and culture while providing the best of the flexibility and options that remote scenarios offer (Baron, 2020).
Another area of innovation comes from IT. Organizations traditionally built around on-premise and in-office work experiences may find that they can rethink their spending on systems and subscriptions that were designed around this experience as more of their teams spend some or all of their time in remote distributed work scenarios (Silver et al., 2020). The flipside of this, of course, is that IT will need to innovate in different ways to support their colleagues who are now working and collaborating remotely while also improving their own collaborative efforts as a remote and distributed IT department. In my own organization we are referring to this as the “digital workplace.” The premise is that, assuming a person has a device appropriate to their role along with sufficient and reliable broadband Internet access, the appropriate digital experience should be available to them no matter where they are working or learning.
Culture Matters
Despite virtual happy hours and game nights with his new co-workers, trying to socialize with people he has never met in person is “really awkward.”
In addition to the relationships and the social component, creating relationships with potential mentors can also be more challenging. It is critical to understand that these relationships are not impossible to create in the remote setting. Rather, there are challenges that must be acknowledged and planned for (Dickler, 2021).
I know from first-hand experience that a group of people in a physical workspace who fight through a problem together and deliver a project together form the culture of the team, and these experiences form the building blocks of an organization's culture. This does not mean that successful culture development in the remote distributed scenario is impossible – it can and has been done successfully, and more organizations will find their way to establishing and building their cultures in remote distributed settings.
Intentional Culture
The key to successful culture development in the remote distributed world is to be intentional about it. To successfully build and extend a remote distributed model beyond its pure necessity during the pandemic, leaders must be intentional about maintaining what is good about the existing culture as they transition to a remote distributed or remote hybrid model. They must also see it as an opportunity to change things that were not good about the culture and accept that the culture will evolve – change is inevitable, and it is often forced upon people and organizations – as we learned in 2020.
I've discussed the ways to be intentional about remote culture earlier in the book. The key point here is to assess your current organizational culture as a pro or con to remote distributed scenarios in your particular situation and organization and determine if it is an impediment, or if in fact, remote will help improve the culture. You may have an important and singular opportunity to create a new and improved culture based on a remote distributed workplace and organization.
Productivity
The Covid-19 pandemic provided a global laboratory for experiments in the productivity of remote workers, teams, and organizations. Formal studies and anecdotal information provided plenty of support for the idea that remote workers were highly productive. The potential for productivity gains alone is a good reason to extend and enhance this model. When combined with flexibility, work/life balance, and overall increased job satisfaction and improved employee retention that comes with this, the support for extending and building upon remote work seems obvious.
Meetings ≠ Productivity
Many of the arguments and experiences around productivity during the Covid-19 pandemic had to do with how people experience remote work. Because many leaders and workers had no experience in a remote scenario, days rapidly became filled up with video conferences. While this initially helped to bridge the gap and change from an all-on-site model to remote distributed models (and likely made people look and feel busy), ultimately, this led to burn-out and, for many, declining productivity. As in any situation where one is booked in meetings during an entire day and has no focus time to complete heads-down work, one feels unproductive and exhausted.
For those workers for whom remote meant they were able to work on a schedule more suited to their natural rhythms and find the solitude that enabled them to concentrate on heads-down work, productivity clearly went up. Anecdotally, the software developers, database administrators, and security engineers in my IT department all reported higher productivity and higher levels of general job satisfaction when they were able to go to a completely remote model due to the pandemic's forced remote work scenario.
This was not the experience of my leadership team. Until we adjusted work routines to account for and reflect the differences in remote versus on-site meetings and working, my leadership team felt unproductive and burnt out, precisely because many substituted meetings for heads-down work time so that they would be perceived as busy and therefore productive. Whether physically in a workplace or working remotely, getting past the idea that "meetings equals busy equals productive" is critical, and even more so in remote distributed scenarios.
An article in The Economist notes that executives who spend on average 23 hours per week in meetings can increase their productivity by cutting this in half, partially through ascending to the higher levels of autonomous work as described in Chapter 6 – this means planning fewer meetings and assuming and enabling more asynchronous work to increase productivity. The pandemic experience and the evidence make a strong case for productivity opportunities among leaders in remote distributed scenarios (Bartleby, 2021).
Remote Can = Productivity
Data from major global organizations that shows teleworkers up to 40% more productive.
Up to two-thirds of employers reporting increased productivity with teleworkers.
Commute time often turns into additional work time for the organization and people working from home spending a few more hours each week in productive work.
Companies as diverse as a global credit card company and a computer manufacturer reporting productivity gains of up to 45% from remote workers.
Increases in employee autonomy through greater asynchronous work models and fewer geographic barriers to collaboration also increase opportunities for innovation and collaboration (Global Workplace Analytics, 2021).
I’ve shared my own observations of sustained and increased productivity in IT settings. Much of the literature I read as part of my job supports this and provides further evidence and expectations of improved productivity and increased morale through remote work. Other CIOs have seen similar scenarios and expect this to be the case for the long term.
At Carnegie Mellon University, CIO Stan Waddell noted that remote work scenarios and support are now part of long-term planning since Carnegie Mellon discovered that remote workers are “effective and aligned to the mission.” Waddell and Carnegie Mellon also found that the use of data obtained through various campus systems and infrastructure assists in determining where to allocate resources, whether further to support remote work and productivity in that model or to reallocate resources to the areas of physical space seeing increased use as a result of the change in the overall model. This same data assists other institutions and their leaders in finding ways to support productivity and efficiency. According to Waddell, these advances in productivity and supporting technology are here to stay (Wood, 2021).
Travel and Productivity
The Covid-19 pandemic put a tremendous dent in travel of all kinds, and business travel was no exception. As someone who has spent a significant part of my career doing business travel, I have something of a love-hate relationship with it myself. Business travel does not always equal productive time. Even though for over three decades we have had amazing and constantly evolving tools to enable the business traveler to be productive while traveling, the nature of business travel and the time and energy it consumes also takes away from productivity.
Forced to stop or curtail business travel, some organizations and their leaders realized that they did not have to get on planes to close deals or advance their projects. One executive claimed that they closed $2 billion in deals over Zoom calls after the pandemic forced a stop to their previous practice of getting on a plane to close much smaller deals. Many organizations saw the stop to business travel correlate to productivity and more work/life balance along with the sudden and massive decrease in costs associated with business travel. These outcomes demand that organizations carefully think about the possibilities before returning to business travel as usual (Matyszczyk, 2020).
Bill Gates asserts that business travel will likely reappear at 50% of what was typical prior to the pandemic as organizations assess actual results achieved through virtual meetings against the lower business travel costs seen during the pandemic (Gates, interview, 2020). Against that viewpoint, some airline CEOs maintain that video conferences can never replace face-to-face meetings. Interestingly, through 2020 and early 2021, these same airlines quietly reconfigured their flights and routes to favor leisure travel in the face of extended declines in business travel.
Opposing Viewpoints
There are plenty of people, pundits, consultants, and leaders who point to data and experiences that contradict claims of heightened productivity and improving cultures with remote work models. There are strong and successful organizational cultures built around on-site/in-person work and strongly held beliefs supporting concepts that nothing can replace in-person collaboration and face-to-face relationships. There is doubtless an element of truth to every one of these examples.
What Are You Guarding?
In many cases, there is also something to protect. I could not help but wonder, as I wrote this manuscript, how many of the examples and predictions against remote worker productivity came from organizations with holdings in commercial real estate. If remote work takes off as many hope and predict, the world of commercial real estate will have to adapt.
I made reference earlier to the example of electronic medical record (EMR) software giant Epic and their massive, fanciful campus in Verona, WI. CEO Judy Faulkner invested millions, if not billions of dollars, in this campus – there is no doubt that she wants to see it used, and increased embrace of remote work models at Epic certainly would not achieve that utilization.
A July 2020 article from consulting giant McKinsey & Company struck a generally negative tone regarding long-term remote working. Referencing now famous examples from Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's famous edict ending remote work and similar scenarios from HP and IBM, the McKinsey article illustrates downsides of remote work coming to outweigh the advantages in the experiences and opinions of these very large organizations.
The McKinsey article further illustrates some very valid examples of the negative aspects of remote work situations. Discussing how in-person work alongside coworkers helps to build critical ties, reinforce the culture, and enable various social interactions that form the framework of the company, the writers also caution against allowing two separate cultures to emerge – the on-site culture and the remote culture (this is what began to happen at CloudCraze after the 2015 acquisition, as discussed earlier in the book). While illustrating the challenges, the McKinsey team describes a variety of scenarios we accept as typical while working on-site and notes that the wise organization and its leaders will be mindful and intentional about re-creating these opportunities in remote settings (Alexander, De Smet, and Mysore, 2020).
Onboarding Can Be Challenging
Onboarding and assimilation, along with mentoring new employees can certainly be more challenging in remote and distributed situations. Without the automatic proximity of new coworkers to answer questions and provide assistance while also mentoring new people in practices and cultural norms, onboarding can be downright daunting.
One colleague of mine had to onboard several employees during the pandemic. The nature of the work – clinical research – made onboarding that much more challenging. Without existing processes to ensure new people got what they needed – everything from their laptop to building access and hands-on instruction of clinical practices – this onboarding experience was less than optimal. Discussion and analysis of this specific situation yielded some opportunities for improvement and application of remote work, but many aspects of this and similar jobs must be performed in-person and are best learned by watching another experienced practitioner.
As discussed in earlier chapters, the onboarding experience and tech support practices must continue to evolve to ensure that remote workers have what they need to be effective and to provide an experience that is the same as they would have in the office or on campus.
Innovation Challenges
Innovation in certain areas and fields is doubtless more challenging in remote scenarios. One example comes from technology hardware development. It is challenging for a group of engineers to pass around a prototype while examining and debating the layout of circuitry without physically holding this prototype and being in the same space. Remote collaboration platforms have yet to solve for this tactile experience.
The sense that a lack of spontaneity seen in remote and distributed environments compared to on-site colocated could impact creativity and innovation is a real concern. One engineer notes that their profession is not necessarily geared toward preparing presentations for scheduled online meetings as opposed to debating technical ideas in person. Some tech workers express the sense or assumption that presentations require more polish when they take on the feeling of a broadcast or a webinar as opposed to a whiteboard discussion or run-through of a slide deck with a small group in a conference room (Baron, 2020).
Collaboration Challenges
The whiteboarding experience is considered by many to be a centerpiece of collaboration , especially in technical environments. The stereotypical vision of a group of technical people gathered around a whiteboard and a conference table debating and illustrating, or sometimes simply staring at what is already on the board while deep in thought, is a vision that many associate with collaboration. Remote work scenarios introduce potential challenges to recreating this experience.
Collaboration tools and platforms have made tremendous advances in helping remote workers and teams collaborate effectively. Long before the pandemic, these tools enabled organizations like CloudCraze to run successful meetings and working sessions with teams distributed across the United States and across the globe. During the pandemic, the purveyors of these tools accelerated the pace of development and innovation to add more and more capabilities to enhance collaboration between workers who had no choice but to work remotely. These enhancements will enable remote workers, teams, and organizations to continue this collaboration as remote and remote hybrid workforce models expand.
One area of collaboration that is more challenging to recreate through technology platforms is sometimes known as passive collaboration. When we set up meetings with an agenda and with the intent of solving a problem during a specified period of time with pre-distributed artifacts and subsequent meeting notes, we are engaging in active and planned collaboration. The tools and platforms that have been in place for decades and saw rapid evolution during the pandemic are very good at supporting active collaboration.
Some argue that passive collaboration is as important if not more important to innovation. This takes us back to the whiteboard scenario, as well as invoking those references from previous chapters to unplanned and serendipitous encounters with coworkers in physical spaces that sometimes lead to “a-ha” moments. There are some who contend that the same tools which are effective at enabling and supporting active collaboration are less so at fostering passive collaboration. The very fact that a Zoom session must be planned in advance takes something away from the opportunity for unplanned or spontaneous collaboration happening because of people occupying the same physical space or sharing the same whiteboard at different moments (Shroff, 2021).
It is critical for leaders planning to extend their remote workplaces to consider hybrid meeting spaces that leverage technologies and platforms to recreate, as much as possible, these unplanned and passive collaboration scenarios. Earlier in the book I described how as of this writing my team and I were reimagining the final design for our remodeled spaces. One of our challenges and important objectives is creating hybrid meeting rooms that can support scenarios where people both on-site and remote are able to collaborate effectively in active and passive ways. You will find a plethora of technologies and platforms to consider when designing this capability into your remote distributed or remote hybrid workplace and culture.
Teaching and Learning
Having taught for decades in both classroom and online settings, I would be the first instructor to express a preference for certain types of classes to spark lively dialogue and engagement in-person versus online. One Carnegie Mellon instructor teaching a class on innovation noted that the first semester of remote instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic had a very different feel compared to previous semesters. The instructor felt that students did not seem as collaborative as they did in previous semesters of in-class instruction, and that the lack of out-of-class collaboration had a discernable impact (Baron, 2020).
The Covid-19 pandemic forced me to teach a number of classes and seminars online that I would ordinarily teach in-person. Through different formats and different platforms, I found varying levels of participant engagement, and with one particular group of technologists from the banking industry, I found it nearly impossible to spark engagement in the remote scenario. Given a choice, I prefer teaching these particular groups and seminars in-person.
However, many instructors have leveraged and will continue to leverage technology to overcome the lack of physical presence in a classroom. As with meetings, the technology to support different modes of instruction that do not rely on physical presence has long been in place, and it evolved rapidly during the pandemic. At my college, innovative instructors were experimenting with virtual reality (VR) classrooms well prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Further investment and exploration in virtual reality technology enabled these instructors to recreate courses for nurses and emergency medical technicians as well as respiratory therapy technicians that previously were only taught with hands-on instruction. Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and hybrid classrooms will continue to provide evolving options for instructors at all levels of education to provide rich and engaging learning environments to remote distributed students and classrooms.
Theory X Workers
Sadly, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the greater autonomy that comes with remote work is too much of a temptation for people who lack discipline and dedication. This supports the Theory X concept that we discussed earlier in the book – the belief that people naturally avoid work and must be closely supervised and coerced to get it done. During the Covid-19 pandemic, some organizations and leaders doubtless experienced situations where newly remote workforces resulted in decreasing productivity, and scenarios where accountability and discipline declined (Levitt, 2020).
Broadly speaking, this viewpoint is heavily influenced by the nature of your organization, its work, and your workforce. Without going deep into examples, there is no question that there are types of work and work cultures that, for various reasons, have a reputation for people seeking the most possible compensation for the least amount of work. The danger lies in assuming this is the case for every person and every organization. If you work or lead in an organization like this, your problems existed long before remote and distributed work became a necessity and then a long-term option. You may not be in a position to realize the potential benefits of remote work, and pragmatic leadership demands that you honestly assess this before attempting to extend or implement a remote or remote hybrid work model.
My former software architect John, while a rockstar developer, also tended to use our remote distributed work environment to push the boundaries of what was acceptable regarding availability and responsiveness. I never learned to appreciate the game of "where's John?" when he was late for a client call or went off the grid for 36 hours at a time. You, too, may have a John in your remote workforce. Should that stop you from deploying this model? No, unless your organization is made up predominantly of people with this tendency. Again, this speaks to a hiring and culture problem as opposed to a remote versus on-site issue. If this is the case for you or your organization, fine-tune your hiring practices and give careful consideration to the type of culture you want to create before moving forward with your remote work model.
Theory Y Workers
Conversely, optimistic views of the post-pandemic world of work are a boon to people who are or believe in Theory Y – that work is a natural human endeavor and that people want to work for various reasons, including their own satisfaction and self-expression. Sometimes the skill set underpinning successful remote work is a natural thing where people can and do find their own personal rhythms and optimal ways of working. In other instances, new employee training and onboarding in remote scenarios will need to evolve to include techniques and best practices for remote work. Institutions like mine will need to add remote work etiquette and remote work micro-credentials to the curriculum .
Work in the 2020s: Remotely Different
This book has taken an overall optimistic tone about remote work and a presumption that as the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 subsides in 2021 and organizations have the option of returning to their previous normal, most will not resume exactly as they were. The possibilities presented by remote distributed organizational models are too compelling to ignore. Technology, and a greater awareness of how unpredictable our world is, will combine with evolving flexibility and a greater understanding of the nature of work in the 21st century. This means that remote work and combinations of on-site and remote teams and organizations are where it's at for the foreseeable future. As leaders, we will learn, evolve, and bring the best from ourselves and our colleagues into the post-pandemic world of work.
As I reflect on the topics discussed in this book, the crucial elements that emerge are all about people. As a technology and project management leader, I've long lived by the maxim "people, process, then tools and technology." The approach to remote and distributed work is no exception. By focusing the majority of our energy on people and everything necessary to support them, we will find that we can and will design processes that accomplish this and select evolving tools that effectively support the people and the processes.
Many organizations and their leaders will need to change, and plenty will struggle and even step away from the challenge. In some cases, a long career of literally overseeing people while they work will be too much for some leaders to move away from, and that will be the tipping point for them to move on. Some organizations will find that their culture or the nature of their work or workforce is too resistant to the possibilities of remote and distributed work for various reasons.
The things that enable organizations and leaders to build the best teams and deliver the best outcomes will remain the same: hiring the best people, building trust and relationships, and focusing on positive cultures and supportive environments. These things are constant no matter what type of work environment we are in or hope to design. The technology and practices that we have discussed throughout this book are only supporting pillars to the core elements of people, trust, and positive cultures.
Leaders and organizations that successfully navigate the transition from a primarily on-site environment to a mix of remote and on-site, or even an all-remote model will find that motivation and success will sustain and advance progress. The examples provided by companies such as CloudCraze, Automattic, Collage.com, Basecamp, and countless other companies provide both inspiration and models for successful remote organizations and cultures. As I worked to wrap up this chapter in February 2021, I came back to it as two highly visible companies – Salesforce and Spotify – both announced that the concept of work as something you do versus a place you go and a specific time in which you do it are permanently emplaced well beyond the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. They join the ranks of organizations globally who learned through the pandemic that remote work options are an important component of their overall operating model.
In assessing and determining what is indeed remotely possible, I hope you find the ideas and information described here helpful and use them to make the coming years and the evolving global workplace productive and enjoyable for yourself, your teams, and your organization. It will be different, it will be challenging, and it will be remote.