A Cautionary View on Large-scale Remote Work
Large-scale disruptive events are like a hard reset. They make us rethink our most fundamental beliefs and assumptions. One such event in the last century was the Great Depression — it fundamentally changed how politics and business are weaved in the fabric of America. More recently, the pandemic is another such hard reset that’s catalyzing changes of even larger magnitude in all of our lives. At a micro level, the pandemic is making us rethink how we live, work, travel, and manage our relationships, while at a macro level it’s seeding reshuffling of wealth, changes in social policy, and reordering of economic priorities across the world.
A forward-looking report from Mckinsey predicts that as we move from the year of disruption to the year of transition, more than 50% of businesses are rethinking workspaces and reskilling their employees, including the industries that traditionally relied on workers being in physical proximity of one another. If we triangulate these predictions with the skyrocketing valuations of companies like Zoom and increasing reports of mass relocation, it’s easy to conclude that large-scale remote work will be our modus operandi going forward.
However, we should be cognizant that our mental biases make us really bad at making these kinds of projections. Paraphrasing the end-of-history illusion: we are bad at predicting what will happen to us in the future. This is because we can’t picture ourselves changing over time and the improbability of change makes it even harder to predict why it will occur in the first place. Simply put, changes always seem predictable in hindsight but are hard to predict in the future. While the end-of-history illusion mostly applies to people predicting events in their personal lives, I think the central tenet of this theory is still applicable to the situation we are in. We just don’t know if we can work remotely for a long time without letting it affect how we perceive others.
Also, looking at only one side of the argument could be dangerous. We are confident that business travel and commuting are some of the most wasteful activities in our professional lives, so remote work and virtual conferences seem convenient. But a few minutes of commuting helps us transition gracefully between home and work. Business travel adds a human element to cold business matters by literally bringing humans from different geographies and backgrounds together. How these subtleties (and lack thereof) affect our productivity and empathy is still unknown.
So then, what issues could resurface the need to physically go back to work?
Psychological effects
We haven’t fully understood the psychological effects of prolonged detachment from people, from a space that we share with others who don’t look like us, and from external sources of creativity. The pandemic is not just signaling productivity drops among workers, but it’s also signaling lower tolerance and higher stress levels. One of the reasons is that the difficulty of hearing/interpreting messages over video calls makes it easier to draw more negative energy from benign remarks — energy that was once easy to sidestep.
Measuring quality
How do we measure when things aren’t working well? Simply running surveys on employee productivity isn’t enough. And attrition is a lagging indicator. How do we measure the impact of reduced productivity when we expect employees to be available for longer? Even harder would be measuring the impact of reduced trust among team members. The quality of our collective work is far more important and harder to measure than quantity, and by the time changes in quality get reflected in the quarterly results, it’s probably too late. We need to improve the instrumentation of quality and happiness metrics.
Business impact
Every few years, new small businesses disrupt, if not upend, existing large players, for example, Uber disrupted taxis and Airbnb disrupted hotels. It’s not unimaginable that, in the next few years, a local startup disrupts large companies that have adapted to large-scale remote work, primarily because the local nature of its workspace unlocks high levels of productivity and creativity among its employees. Large companies usually do not pivot quickly, so reversing large-scale remote work especially with a geographically dispersed workforce could be a tall order.
In summary, I’m cautiously optimistic about the future: optimistic because the technologically uninitiated companies are now adopting technology to the benefit of their employees, and cautious because a total lack of connection with our colleagues, with other humans, may actually make us… less human.
