False Promise of Post Pandemic Remote Work

10 Nov 2024

AI Disclaimer - generated using prompts to Claude for structure

The False Promise of Post Pandemic Remote Work

The narrative around remote work has become muddled since the pandemic, with a peculiar moral panic about returning to offices that ignores both reality and hypocrisy.

The Manufactured Moral Duty

There’s a strange attempt to frame office attendance as a moral imperative. This argument falls apart when you consider:

• Office work is not manufacturing or essential services
• The same executives demanding returns are happy to outsource actual production to exploitative conditions
• The battery components in your EV or laptop are sourced in conditions we’d never accept for ourselves
• The moral argument conveniently ignores the environmental impact of commuting

This selective morality reveals that return-to-office mandates are less about ethics and more about control and real estate investments.

The Race to the Bottom

The push for office returns represents a form of race-to-bottom thinking:

• Companies compete to show who can be “most present”
• Workers are pressured to demonstrate commitment through attendance rather than output
• Real innovation in work practices is sacrificed for performative collaboration
• Other people tolerate worse and longer commutes

The Failure Default

The push to return to offices reveals an uncomfortable truth: it’s often the default option when organizations fail to develop better ways of working. Rather than investing in the skills and systems needed for effective remote work, many companies retreat to what they know—even if it never worked particularly well in the first place.

The Office Design Paradox

If we’re truly meant to work in offices, why are they so consistently poorly designed for actual work? Most offices feature:

• Open plans that make concentration impossible
• Too few meeting rooms for “collaborative work”
• Inadequate quiet spaces for focused tasks
• Lighting and acoustics that hinder rather than help
• Desktop setups inferior to many home offices

This infrastructure failure suggests that even before the pandemic, we weren’t really thinking critically about how to optimize work environments - PeopleWare is over thirty years old

“As long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space, it’s not worth improving anything but the workplace.” - Excerpt From: Tom DeMarco. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition

Remote Work: A Skill, Not a Location

Effective remote work requires specific skills that many organizations haven’t invested in developing:

• Clear written communication
• Project management discipline
• Self-direction and time management
• Digital collaboration fluency
• Boundary setting and work-life integration
• Calling out opportunties where in person communication is the most effective

The rush back to offices often masks a failure to develop these crucial capabilities.

Moving Beyond Presenteeism

The pandemic exposed how much of office culture was about presenteeism rather than productivity. Many organizations simply moved this dysfunction online, resulting in:

• Constant Slack availability requirements
• Ridgid ceremonial meetings
• Always-online status pressure
• Exhausting digital performance metrics

The Real Future of Work

Progress requires moving beyond simplistic office-versus-remote debates to focus on:

• Measuring actual outcomes rather than presence
• Developing genuine distributed work capabilities
• Creating purpose-built spaces for different types of work
• Implementing systems that support both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration
• Async working is neither underrated or overrated it allows us to be precisley somewhere else
• Acknowledging that some work isn’t bound to location
• It’s not a zero sum game
• Kick starting a race to the top where good practices are copied

The moral panic about office returns reveals more about organizational failures than worker productivity. True innovation in work practices requires honest examination of our assumptions and biases about where and how work happens best.

Environment Drives Culture - Culture Drives Brand.

Previously noted since 2015 Remote-First-Culture Remote-First