We’re all tired of takes on working from home, back to the office, and remote working, aren’t we?

So now seems a good time to bore everybody even more with my thoughts after four years of exclusively remote working.

Remote working works

Here I am. I’ve worked from home for four years, and business has been good. Satisfaction levels have been high all round, mine and the clients’. I’ve also worked for long stretches from different time zones far afield. It’s all fine.

There’s very little I can’t do over an internet connection. And companies have been happy with me doing it that way. They get good results, and don’t need to provide anything such as space, or even much attention.

I can get more done, frankly, because most of what I do needs concentration, and offices are distracting.

I consume a lot less. I don’t need special clothes for work. We use the car so much less it’s a question these days whether we even need one. A lot of things aren’t duplicated because I spend my life in two different locations with different needs. If a company cares about sustainability, they should care about that.

And personally, it’s made me happy. I can walk with our son to and from school, and be there to talk with my wife while I work. I can go and see the frogs in the pond, and be there when robins decide to hatch babies outside our back door.

Remote working doesn’t work

So where’s the nuance?

First, the big one. If I laid bricks, or assembled machines, or cleaned floors, or performed surgery, or packed boxes … none of this argument would ever happen. I’d go to work at the places those things need to happen. The endless-seeming arguments about whether WFH should be a right, or are ruining a generation, all ignore that they don’t even apply to most people.

I do “deep work” on computers, by which I mean I use my brain on abstract tasks, not physical ones and not social ones. What’s more, what I do is not a core function of the companies I work for – I improve things, not work on the daily duties. So arms-length, undisturbed, is ideal for me. That puts me in a small minority.

If you have to do things with other people, or physical objects, you are not like me, and what works for me won’t work for you. You may have other reasons why remote working is great for you, or it may not work at all. But whatever, I can’t say you should be like me.

We don’t understand each other

And this is why I think we argue so much.

It’s not just that it’s downright disresepctful to people whose work involves physical tasks that we argue over the right to work anywhere. It’s that we so easily assume that we know what other circumstances are. Not just in public discussion, but even within companies.

A manager’s work is indirect, for example. They may be responsible for work like mine, but their job is not to do that work. So their tasks are easier if everybody is in the same place. They can coordinate, they can see what’s going on, they can do the thousand little things that keep the work flowing well. It’s easier in an office. Meanwhile, if they are managing work like mine, everybody reporting to them would be better doing their work at home. The manager’s incentive is to structure things so that the workers are actually less productive, because that makes them more productive themselves.

That leaves aside, of course, power structures, micro-managing and all the other things managers are accused of. This is even a good manager with the best intentions.

### We can’t see what’s going on

I am also convinced that one of the great unacknowledged truths of modern work is that a lot of people don’t even know what good work is, or how to tell.

So we use proxies, of which the most basic is simply presence. Without that, how do we know what value someone is bringing in return for what the company is paying them? Ideally we know, obviously. “Pay by results”, everybody says. In the real world, though, “results” may be ambiguous, and those proxies, the things we look at because we can’t tell results, are misleading. They lead to software that pretends to be moving a mouse, unnecessary calls, paperwork nobody reads or needs to read.

And remote work makes that painfully obvious. If someone isn’t there, you can’t measure anything that doesn’t matter, and you may find there’s nothing left to measure. That’s awkward all round, because nobody wants to be asking what someone is even employed for.

Asking why someone is employed sounds harsh, and it is harsh, because those “results” often don’t depend on a single person. Everybody in a department may seem pointless by anything you can measure, and yet that department needs to exist.

It’s these questions, I think, that are the biggest reason why organisations decide it’s easier simply to demand that everybody works in an office, with known and manageable exceptions. It’s not that remote working doesn’t work (in the cases where it does), it’s that it’s too difficult to know.

So is it all over?

The pendulum is going to swing for a while, I’m pretty sure. Covid led to a boom in working from home, and people discovered what was possible. Then, as it ended, companies were confronted with these disadvantages.

My belief is that is must work eventually, though. The advantages are too great, and the people and companies who find ways around the problems will win as a result.

What does it take to make remote work successful?

I talked about the kinds of work that can and can’t be done remotely because I think that’s the core of the issue. Things that can be done remotely should be done remotely, because it’s more efficient that way.

Sometimes that means roles need to change. Some of what people do can be detached from the in-office part and made less immediate. That can be a slow process as people move around, if needed.

I’ll come back to that, because I’m convinced there will be a generational shift in how business is arranged, and this is only part of it.

As a remote worker myself, there are practicalities I’ve noticed in the meantime.

  1. I need well-defined things to achieve, so that everybody involved in what I’m doing, including me, knows when I’ve done them. As a consultant and developer this comes naturally, because I’m engaged to do specific things and one side or other writes them down contractually, but sometimes retainer work comes close to what an employee would experience and the detail needs to remain in that case too. What works well is a task list, as software developers know. If someone has a ticket for a thing to be done, the team or company knows whether it’s done or not.

  2. Time is important in a different way, and the biggest priority is working in ways that don’t tie people to each other’s schedules. The efficiency of remote work is lost if one person is dependent on another’s time. Again, software developers know this because they’re used to separately-running processes – when one process needs to wait for another, the speed of an application plunges, usually. The same applies to people. Some implications are: meetings and calls are a last resort for when otherwise waiting would happen anyway, everybody needs more than one task, documentation needs to be communal and continuous, communication should be non-time-based. The way this works for me, practically, is that I have several things to work on. As I do them, I record what I’ve done where others can see. If I need something from someone, or they need something from me, we let each other know, and if we can’t proceed until we get it, we switch to another task. Where we need to discuss and make a decision, we arrange to talk.

  3. That leads to the fact that the work and the work around the work are different and need treating separately. In an office this is rarely obvious, but for remote work it needs to be. More of the actual work can be done, at the price of being much more conscious about the things that are not directly the work. The documentation of what is done is one of those. But the most important is the decision-making and organisation. For me, that’s usually the part of a project where I work out exactly what is needed, and understand the needs and wants of the people I’m doing it for. That is a fundamentally different type of task, in most cases, and there is no way around needing to talk to people, often at length. So it needs scheduling differently, blocking out, and being very intentional about it.

What does that imply needs to change?

What I’m sure of is that you can’t take an existing job function or department and simply send everybody home.

In software development terms, that no more works than expecting an old-style monolithic application to run on a modern system with multiple threads and scaling. It needs a re-think and a change of architecture.

I happen to have found a particular role that exemplifies the strengths of remote work. It’s task-based, abstract, non-core, not requiring instant responsiveness to other inputs. It’s an outlier, frankly, ahead of the curve in a direction I’d bet other roles will go in future. Yet even so, as pandemic restrictions recede in companies’ memories, I find they’re slipping back into the habits of thought that says they want a dedicated person always available and on site, just because that’s what they know how to deal with. Which is a bit sad.

The future, I think, is a more atomised way of working, and there will be winners and losers from that. But companies will win. It’ll be like when they discovered outsourcing.

Work that can be done by people like me will be separated out. I can do for several companies now what I used to do for only one, and they all benefit as a result. Other kinds of work can benefit from the same kind of flexibility even by dedicated staff. What’s needed is just a way of organising more by tasks that need doing more than by people who need managing, which is a mindset shift. In the best cases, people become self-organising, which boosts their satisfaction and mental health apart from anything else. People who are not suited to it, though, will lose out.

Management, in particular, becomes a completely different job, in ways that people who have learnt their management roles in offices will find jarring and maybe impossible. Some parts of what they do need reinventing, and others will evaporate completely.

I think that will be a slow process, as different types of work find ways of achieving it. In the meantime, everybody will need to be clear-eyed about what doesn’t work yet.

Doesn’t that pull the rug out from under all of us?

I see people issuing dark warnings about all this, and saying we shouldn’t wish for it.

Essentially it turns a lot of well-paid jobs into “gig work”, because that’s where the efficiency comes from. Some people will do very well from that. Others will trade security for uncertainty, and still others will find they can’t adapt at all. For many of us, the autonomy makes life worth living, but that won’t be everybody.

Others say … this starts with letting people work from home, but it progresses to having people compete for their jobs with the whole country, and ends with jobs done more cheaply from abroad.

Maybe. If so, I don’t think we’ll be able to stop it. But my experience is that those warnings are overblown. I’m remote already, and most of my work is local (except when I’m abroad).

If my work can be done by anybody from anywhere, I need to be worth more than the people who can do it cheaply. And that’s only fair. But being local often is worth more, all by itself, as call-centre operators have found. The same applies for me. Part of what makes me worth what I’m worth is that I understand my clients, and understand them quickly. That is, in a loose sense, cultural. I know how things work around where I live and grew up, down to how businesses do things and the laws involved.

There is no reason why I shouldn’t get work, for example, from the USA. I’m British, so I speak the language, and there’s a lot of work I could do. I work for UK companies when I’m in East Asia for chunks of time, and they don’t mind the distance, so I could equally well work for English-speaking companies anywhere.

They tend to prefer people who know them better, that’s the thing. British people find it easier to work with British people, Americans with Americans, and are willing to pay accordingly — as long as the specific person does the work well. That’s part of all this. It may not remain so.

That’s all part of the nuance, though. The key, while it all shakes out, is to look squarely at what works and doesn’t work, and why.

We’ll adapt.