WLP252 What’s Going On: The World Embraces Remote Work
We have a special guest for today’s What’s Going On episode, as Tim Burgess from Shield GEO joins us while Maya is away. As well as employing their own globally distributed team, Shield GEO help companies around the world to employ people from anywhere. Not surprisingly a very detailed discussion followed, so we’ve split the conversation into two this week, with some thoughts about online events and conferences coming your way as a bonus episode tomorrow.
Recording on the 6th November 2020, we bring you a range recent publications which have caught our attention.
5.32 Home, office, or hybrid?
Tim joins us from the other side of the world to share the Australian perspective, where remote work has taken off in a big way, and no one wants to go back to the office - commuting distances and wasted time are a big disincentive, and people have done well without it. This article The commuters who don't want to return to the office illustrates how women in particular feel less rushed and time pressured, when they don’t have to travel to work outside the home.
This may be far from a universal experience though with many parents finding the idea of returning to the office a blessed relief from homeschooling, and there are real dangers from disproportionate gender impact of lockdown on domestic responsibilities, as well as a potential sellers market for employment opportunity, in a grim economic future - again, very unevenly distributed.
Business Insider Australia point out that Dutch civil servants now get $2 a day to cover coffee and toilet paper while remote working — and you should ask your boss for the same, a financial institution says. Or as Tim put it, the costs a business saves by not providing an office, are really costs then shared across the team, so this is a fair point of view.
This is now law in parts of Europe, with new law in Spain to ensure boundaries, and this from Switzerland: Companies must pay share of rent for employees working from home - but it is complicated by questions of whose choice it is to work from home, and whether it’s saving money for either party directly, not information that enterprises are typically transparent about.
21.50 Research and publications on the future of work
It’s great to see work from anywhere entering the academic discourse with featured articles in Harvard Business Review from Prithwiraj Choudhury, and we love the uptake of this particular turn of phrase. The Nicholas Bloom 2015 study still gets quoted, to remind us that when people choose to work from home, productivity goes up - but choice and autonomy really matter.
The article also mentions one of our favourite subjects, asynchronous communication, so it’s great to see this getting a broader airing. ShieldGEO have explored this in depth given their deeply distributed nature, as bringing people together across timezones makes synchronous connection challenging and high stakes - so they value this time and make the most of it.
This article was shared during Helene Jewell’s session at the IAF England and Wales conference, about sign language for the Deaf community on video conferencing A good reminder of the lost nuances for all when we translate a 3d face to face experience into a 2d one on-screen, and how technology can help to level the playing field, but only when it’s deployed intentionally. Microsoft Teams in particular has made great strides in this space, but they can’t help people depending on reading the whole room visually - when you reduce that visual input down to a single window on a screen.
36.41 Surviving 2020
This article Keep Your Weary Workers Engaged and Motivated relates intrinsic motivation to the way we’re working through a crisis now, a valuable lens for understanding employee behaviour and wellbeing. It’s hard to fit all this to a 4 point model, but as a framework it's a good starting point, which makes important points about leadership and intentional communications too (though we don’t like the term “overcommunication”, when what is really meant is adequate and appropriate to circumstance).
Another recent paper Tim found goes deeper still, Interpersonal connectivity at work: Being there with and for geographically distant others - Ella Hafermalz, Kai Riemer, which explores the impact of telemedicine (another huge focus for remote collaboration 2020, that has much to teach us all about communication over distance, and bridging empathy with action and service delivery).
Knowledge workers tread similar balanced lines of effective communication and will find many parallels, the way we bring our whole person and experience to each interaction, but within our professional role constraints. A good reminder to be mindful of the other person, as well as what we’re trying to accomplish with the interaction.
So that’s What’s Going On, and do join us tomorrow for the events and company news section of this conversation. And do keep your feedback coming, we really enjoy it - please contact us, or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas, or if we can help you with our training, coaching, and facilitation services during these challenging times.
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