4 Years Later: How Remote Work Brought Much Needed Change To The Broken Office Model

As horrible as it is that millions of Americans lost their lives due to the covid pandemic, the lockdown that led most companies to develop remote work environments, also helped to reset, retool and rethink business operations and, in doing so, brought about long-overdue changes to many work environments.?

6 months prior to covid, my employer had been a very Los Angeles-centric company.? No one worked from home or remotely.? Unless you were a sales executive, you were expected (read here: required) to report to our office in the west end of the San Fernando Valley.? Because we are a small business (fewer than 250 employees at the time) and we were all in the office, we didn’t have an organized cadence of executive leadership meetings.? ?We only met collectively when it was deemed necessary to meet.?

On March 11, 2020, in anticipation of the California Governor’s executive order to shut down all non-essential businesses, our executive leadership team (roughly 12 of us) met in our conference room.? Organized at the urging of the company’s owners, we met to discuss how we might be able to remain operational with the impact a forced closure would impose.? At the time, we had more than 220 employees and most of these were call center employees who worked in an office, requiring access to our inbound/outbound phone system.? We learned in that pre-covid meeting that fewer than 20 of us even had company laptops and there were fewer than 15 remote licenses for people to work from home.?

Do the math.? We were doomed.?

A forced shutdown of our office was posing a serious threat to our ability to stay in business, not to mention that the entire world – including our clients all over the US – were being forced to have these same executive level conversations about how to survive a nationwide lockdown.?

Prior to covid, in the fall of 2019, we had long-since outgrown our office space and had arranged with our landlord to annex space in the building next door for 40+ employees to move so we would have space for all the growth we were experiencing in Q4 2019.? With the annex, no longer would our scrappy, little start-up have to put tables against the walls for a new hire to sit, without any plan of how we were going to keep facilitating this phenomenal growth.? We also were ending a relationship with an outsourced call center and taking our call center operation from 9-to-5 to 24/7.? We had just signed a lease and finished remodeling a space in Las Vegas and had just opened this new location in January of 2020.? With the goal of filling a 75-seat, 24/7 call center, we already had approximately 35 employees arriving daily to our Las Vegas location when the City of Las Vegas shut down on March 17, 2020.?

By the weekend of March 13, our IT team had accomplished what seemed impossible just 2 days earlier: securing hundreds of rented laptops as a temporary solution for what we believed at that time would be a “temporary situation”.? They purchased enough vpn licenses for everyone to begin working from home, regardless of their position.? We spent much of March 16 and 17, deploying instructions and inventoried equipment so that our Woodland Hills employees could begin working from home, even a couple of days before California actually went into lockdown.

Before I go any further, I must own my historical hypocrisy.? Throughout my (almost) 30-year HR career, I have been a vocal opponent of work-from-home.? With the exception of sales positions, I had never seen anything resembling a successful remote work arrangement. ?In previous companies, when someone would say they were working from home, I presumed they were relying on everyone in the office to get their job done while they did anything other than work during their remote workday. ?To those former co-workers, I’d like to apologize now.?

Although I was part of my current company’s executive “think tank” to keep us operational, I was of the initial belief that we would only be home for a couple of weeks, at most.? In fact, I was one of a small handful of people at my current company who continued showing up to an empty office every day because, in addition to not having enough space conducive to work from home, the idea of moving things around at my condo seemed daunting for what I believed would be “temporary”.? Each day, full of my pretentious belief that I was “essential” enough to be on the roads while the rest of you law-abiding citizens stayed home and observed the lockdown, I went to the office.? I was elated that a 9-mile LA commute that had previously taken at least 45 minutes, was now a 13-minute drive, door-to-door.? I was living in commuter heaven!!! ?

But by March 24, the same day a teenager in LA County died from covid-19, I’d come to the conclusion that we were going to be away from the office for more than just a couple of weeks.? As the head of Human Resources, I had a responsibility to set a better example for my team and the company-at-large.? Begrudgingly, I started working from home.? Limited on space, I set up a folding table in my living room.? My spouse – also working from home by this time - had already laid claim to the bedroom as a workspace.? My elderly mother, who lives with us, was somewhat banished to her room during my work-day – especially when I was on zoom calls, something that was a new concept for everyone in our company at the time.?

As March turned into April and April turned into May and May was heading into June, my spouse – a mental health professional - returned to an office, since LA County had declared mental health professionals “essential”.? But “non-essential” office places and schools were still closed in California.? With my spouse now removed during the workday, I had the opportunity to move my folding table to the bedroom and finally allow my mother to freely move around the condo during work hours.?

And that’s where things turned ugly for my own mental health.?

The realization that the future of returning to the office and my “normal” life was delayed indefinitely, hit really hard.? I’m embarrassed but feel it is important to admit to my tears, outbursts, profanity, and anger.? The lockdown had pushed me to my emotional limits and the aftermath of this emotional breakdown was an exhaustive depression that lasted several days, even resulting in me being too physically ill to work. I should also add here that my spouse and I had spent a year planning a wedding that was scheduled for June, 2020, and we had to make the decision in April to call off our event and forego a good deal of the money in deposits, due to the pandemic.? All of these factors combined became too much for me mentally.?

After a couple of days of not feeling well or being in a good place mentally, it was suggested that I try to get into action and take the steps necessary to make myself as comfortable as possible for whatever period of time I would have to continue working from home.? The company had graciously offered to let employees borrow office chairs, tables, and desks to use at home.? I decided that, if I was moving into my bedroom to work, I wanted the furniture to match the rest of the room.? So I made a personal decision to purchase my own sit-stand desk in a suitable color and, as I was now saving money on gas to commute, I started spending on other accoutrement to make my space at home more work friendly.? My desk faces a floor-to-ceiling window with a beautiful tree outside that features squirrels and birds all day.? As I live near a public park, I have people walking past my window toward the park every sunny Southern California day.? As I began to make myself comfortable, I started feeling more at ease.?

Within a week, I started to realize changes I’d never experienced before in my professional career.? Suddenly, I was becoming more productive than I’d ever been in my time at this company or at any other company previously.? It certainly wasn’t that the workload had decreased.? We were still hiring 15-20 people every week at that time and as the HR saying goes, “more people, more problems, more work”.? But the ability to focus without needless chit-chat and socializing was allowing me to accomplish 10 times more in the day than had ever been the case in an office environment.? I was able to start my day as early as 7:30 am instead of spending the time showering and getting ready before spending 90 minutes a day in roundtrip LA traffic (and did I mention I only live 9 miles from the office?).?

While I was settling into this “new normal”, so was the rest of our company.? Rather than continuing to spend on the annexed office space in the building next door, the decision was made to return the space to the landlord.? By the beginning of 2021, we would exercise similar options to close the briefly open Las Vegas office and we began to further downsize our San Fernando Valley office footprint. ?We continued hiring and would hit over 400 employees by the end of 2020, but the challenges of office space that our growing company presented were no longer a daunting challenge that was prohibiting our growth or creating unnecessary misery and lack of appeal for candidates we were recruiting.?

We all quickly started adapting to technology tools like Teams, Slack, Monday, etc.? While I feel most of us are barely scratching the surface of what these and other technologies will be bringing to our work productivity, the implementation of these tools has been a serious game changer to productivity and even to the connectedness of our remote work culture. ??

For a company that never had organized executive meetings, we now have a weekly meeting for Senior Executives to touch base, connect and discuss what is going on in our company.? And frankly, I know so much more about what is going on in the company while sitting in the corner of my bedroom than I EVER knew when I was sitting in a private, glass office where I often discovered key, critical information by happenstance or the casual word-of-mouth in the breakroom.?

Southern Californians may recall the great pre-pandemic heat wave of 2019.? Our office power went out and it was 120 degrees, making it even hotter once there was no air conditioning for the office.? Our server room was put the test by the heat wave.? Employers all over Southern California were allowing employees to go home and suffer the heat rather than to stay in buildings where there was no power and no a/c.? Of course, for most of our employees, since we were exclusively an “on-site” work environment without work-from-home accommodations at that time, being sent home meant not being able to work.? Serving our national clients was more cumbersome from home back then.?

Prior to covid, our LA-centric executive team would worry what a natural disaster – such as an earthquake – could do to the continuity of our business with our hardwired servers that were in the office.? There was a lot of talk about contingency plans, but we were all so busy (and there was so much chit-chat and socializing that wasted everyone’s work time) that no official plan was ever developed and certainly nothing ever implemented.? More than covid, a serious natural disaster in Los Angeles, would have crippled the business.?

Since that time, the transition to remote work has done for us what we never did for ourselves.? We are now cloud based, yet more secure than ever. As 50% of us now live outside California, with our resources scattered across the country in various states, one natural disaster will never deliver enough of a blow to shut us down.? Early on in the pandemic, this was put to the test with Hurricane Sally in the Gulf of Mexico.? While we have occasions when personal internet hiccups will take 1-5 call center agents or others out of commission for internet repairs, the threat that our entire business nationwide will be disrupted and unable to perform is significantly less than in the days of being exclusively an “onsite” operation.?

And remember the days when the flu or other viruses/infections would spread like wildfire thru your office?? That seems to be a thing of the past in remote work environments.? So much time off and productivity was affected by the spreading of germs and viruses every year.? Pre-covid, I remember the judgement that many would hold for the person who came to work sick, exposing the rest of us, because they either could not afford to miss work (had no additional paid time off) or didn’t have the ability and access to do their job from home where they could more reasonably convalesce.? Parents of school children would have to stay home to care for kids who were too sick to go to school, impeding their ability to work as well.? Worse, some parents would bring their sick children into the office, exposing everyone.?

In our LA-centric days of yore, we were limited in our hiring efforts.? Being LA-centric, most qualified candidates who were more than 25 miles away were not interested in an exhaustive commute that might force them to spend more time in their car than they spent waking hours with their families during the week.?

As we continued our explosive growth in 2020, our hiring efforts expanded well beyond the reasonable commuter boundaries of our office.? Frankly, with the downturn in available workers during 2021 and 2022, if we had not offered a remote work environment and if we had not hired outside of our 25-mile radius of the office, we probably would not have been able to stay in business with so few available candidates unwilling to commute to the west end of the San Fernando Valley.? As Covid is mostly behind us now and there seem to be more candidates applying for positions, some in the LA labor market are willing to work a hybrid work style.? However, there are significant limits in the caliber of talent we can hire when we restrict ourselves to only those who are willing (and able by distance) to return to an office.? ?

There’s more….

For much of my HR career, I’ve worked for tech-related companies that were challenged to remain relevant and compete with the “googles” and “facebooks” of the world in hiring talent.? I recall a naivete from 2000 to 2016 in convincing employees to enjoy their work environment more by offering cool, hip, fun things to keep Gen X’ers (and even younger professionals) in the office for longer hours, engaged in work.? Free lunches, happy hours, snack counters, video arcades, billiard tables, gym equipment, yoga classes, ping-pong, air hockey, in-office “margarita Mondays”, lunchtime basketball tournaments, showers for after fitness workouts (or if you stayed at the office all night and needed a shower before the next day), even a “Zen Room” for meditation, were just a few of the many things I’ve seen and helped implement to lead employees to merge their life into their work.? Still, all these attempts only exacerbated the cries of the people for the always elusive “Work/Life Balance”.?

Even at my current company, I witnessed my own productivity thwarted each day by non-work conversating that ruled the day.? If I happened to arrive by 8:30 am, I would witness people getting their company-provided free coffee, making their breakfast, blending their breakfast shakes, toasting their bagels, catching up on politics or the weather or gossip or what they had watched the night before on Netflix – all during that first hour of each day.? And at 5:30 pm, the only ones of us left in the office were the ones who had had our days robbed by much of the required socialization that had NOTHING to do with the actual work we were paid to accomplish.? While remote work may leave us starved for connectivity with each other, the positive impact of productivity by remote work cannot be overstated.? Do we have far to go in holding our teams accountable for the time spent working?? Perhaps.? Do we need to continue focusing on ways to keep our teams engaged, develop less experienced talent, create emotional connectivity?? Absolutely.? But, in my observations, it would be foolish to believe that more time is wasted working at home than was wasted at the office and in our commutes.?

And gone are the issues of lobbying for office real estate assigned by ego/level that has plagued almost every office environment I’ve ever worked.? Although titles (and sometimes pay) is still a big part of the ego for many, having that corner office or the private office or the larger cubicle that comes with a promotion is never an issue in a remote work environment.? Gone are the days that luring an executive with a big office is more effective than offering that executive the option to work remotely.? Our executives at my current company gladly gave up their offices to continue remote work.?

For those of us who live in geographic clusters, our plan moving forward needs to focus on social gatherings, including happy hours and team building, that allow employees to re-connect with each other in-person.? However, at other places where I’ve worked, when everyone was working in an office and already spending 8+ hours a day with their co-workers, going out after work or doing activities together on weekends was more of a chore than an actual perk or team morale builder.? Instead, these activities were a reminder to our families of how much time we were already not available to them – physically, mentally, and emotionally.? As well, these after work activities served as a reminder to us all about how much our personal lives were being consumed by even the “fun stuff” associated with our jobs, further distancing us all from that elusive “work/life balance”.?

And finally, we all talk endlessly about the need to reverse climate change.? Yet, even when the pandemic forced us to stay home and we immediately saw a temporary “reset” of our planet, some businesses failed to acknowledge the contribution remote work provides toward lessening the environmental damage of employee commuting.?

Trust me, I never want to go into lockdown again. But what was any of it worth if we learned nothing about how to improve our work/life balance and our world?? It would be foolish to return to a way of life that we can now see was so damaging: globally, personally and professionally.? Obviously, not every industry or business can work remote, but for those of us who can work remote, we should.? We all need to continue leaning into this change, to find better ways to work remotely and increase productivity, work/life balance and connection with our teams in the remote work world.? Businesses that embrace technologies and changes associated with remote work will be the future of business around the globe.?