WLP314 What’s Going On: Presenteeism, Async Privilege and the Meta-Office
In this What’s Going On episode, Maya and Pilar cover a small set of articles all related to the growing danger of presenteeism at work. Recorded on 17 October 2022.
The first article we cover is Remote workers are wasting their time proving they’re actually working
This reflects a lack of trust both ways: being “seen to work” as a way of monitoring productivity, and feeling like we won’t be valued if we are not “seen”. This is so widespread that there’s an app for that! The mouse jiggler. Makes us very sad…
Even if we saw during the pandemic that people were more productive than before, in the office, "85 percent of bosses say hybrid work makes it hard to be confident that employees are being productive." But also people might feel like they need to be present, without any evidence that this is the case.
But: is the hybrid set up more conducive to presentism in remote workers?
The worse thing is that they’re turning “visible teamwork” into a way of showing they’re working, rather than as a way of staying connected and aligned… If there’s no psychological safety, then we feel like we need to be seen to be trusted…
Maybe in the hybrid or remote world, management needs to make explicit that people are not expected to be seen.
“About a third of all workers said they feel more pressure now to be visible to leadership than they did a year ago, regardless of their work accomplishments.”
At the end of the day, presenteeism is nothing new…
09.10mins
What is new is the term “async privilege”. There’s a reference in the Vox article to a study carried out by Catalog and GitLab that reveals a culture of digital presenteeism in many organisations.
“74% of C-suite execs able to work on their own timetable, compared to 24% of junior staff””
Maybe the privilege comes from the trust that the organisation has placed in you through your role.
As we said, none of this is new. Remember Maya’s article back in 2017? Now that I’m Remote, Can You See How Hard I’m Working? (By the way, you can grab our favourite blog posts from around that time in the ebook/paperback/audiobook “Thinking Remote”, though the context has changed, actually, the principles still feel relevant.)
13.30mins
There are many reasons for monitoring employees, for example how people are moving around a physical office when you have a new workspace, could that stress you? Even if the reasons for monitoring are good, they might still have negative effects.
The article looks at data from decades ago, and doesn’t really extinguish whether people were working in the office, online, at home, etc. But we might find that being monitored when you are at home could feel more invasive…
Going back to the online space, there are pros and cons to having access to live data as to how your people are engaging with internal communications online, such as the analytics provided by platforms like Microsoft 365.
19.45mins
FInally: Microsoft and Meta partnership brings Office 365 apps to the Metaverse
Who wants to have a meeting in VR, through MSTeams?
For an async advocate this is a little bit of a downer… More emphasis on meetings?
And, when we don’t need the bulky headset anymore, does that mean we’re going to be logged into our computers all the time, to simulate we are in the VR office?
That’s the end of using remote work to design new ways of working… Or are we being too old-fashioned? It might actually be quite nice to feel like you’re “going somewhere” for a meeting.
The avatars will be able to mimic our facial expressions - which Zoom is already looking at through their animal avatars. Here’s Pilar:
Finally, we hope that this technology does not mean we don’t look at different ways of collaborating and rely on good l’fashioned meetings, but in different kinds of spaces.
On the flip side, will we be able to send our avatars to the meetings to be visible, while we do something else?
29.00 mins Community news
Hello to regular listener Igor and congratulations for making flexibility a core element of his team’s identity, and hello to Richard for introducing a potential guest.
Do let us know your opinion on all of this! We’d love to hear from you. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/contact-us
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