7 unexpected truths about remote work

You've probably all noticed it: not a day goes by without your Linkedin feed showing polls or posts rhapsodising over the amazing benefits brought by remote work.

This current hype strikes a particular chord with those advocating wellbeing, mental health self-care, work-life balance, digital nomadism, autonomy, and the freedom of no longer being forced to an office.

But is remote work really a lasting global trend, a genuine revolution in the making? And if so, how far should companies go to embrace it? Headlines can be confusing: for every Facebook or PwC who enforced full remote policies in perpetuity, we hear of a Tesla or Microsoft who mandates returning to the office at least 2 days per week... or face consequences.

What caused these turnabouts? Covid forced all businesses to hastily implement remote work policies, but they had no other choice at the time. Now the pandemic is behind us, it seems some companies are discovering in hindsight a few potential drawbacks.

As a remote worker myself, based some 900km away from France's economic heart, I am obviously biased: remote work did work for me. But I have learned a lot from my gradual transition from onsite to remote worker, and from my experience implementing remote policies for distributed teams.

This article is not meant as a comprehensive list of pros & cons for remote work, but rather a selection of unexpected pitfalls both employees and employers should be aware of. To keep things simple, I will focus on Fully Remote policies only, rather than (less disruptive) hybrid policies, where employees are still partly tied to a physical office.

#1: REMOTE WORK ISN'T FOR EVERYONE

As with so many other universal narratives conveyed by social media, the world isn't exactly black or white.

Some workers crave for remote work, while others will not be keen on it. It primarily comes down to demographics: age, relationship or parental status, hobbies, housing budget... factors that influence our lifestyle choices throughout our lives. In my twenties, I would never have even considered moving to a city smaller than Paris or London, and miss out on the bustle, excitement and socialising opportunities offered by such major urban capitals. Who cares about the tiny shared apartment, the fun happens outside!

Another factor is the job itself: some roles simply do not lend themselves to be operated remotely. Despite the flurry of communication and collaborative tools available today, not all office jobs can be delocalised. This also depends on your hierarchy rank (individual contributor vs. people-manager). Let’s say you have a centralised onsite team to manage: if they are junior and require frequent guidance and coaching, not being onsite yourself could be a real challenge.

Finally, think about yourself, as a person: do you have the inner discipline to work autonomously, organise your day productively to meet deadlines while essentially being alone at your kitchen table-turned-office-desk?

#2: MISSED CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

If you are in the early years of your career, and nurture the ambition to build that career, working remotely could become a drag. When you start your career, you want and need to learn from more experienced peers. It can be done through virtual meetings, but these are merely a substitute for the real thing: in-person interactions.

As the old adage says: out of sight, out of mind. For promotion opportunities, career gurus recommend that you rub shoulders with leaders in your organisation, understand your HQ dynamics, navigate office politics, build a solid network of promoters, be seen, be visible beyond your personal performance. Even if you delivery is stellar, even if you interact daily with your line managers, remember that in a remote-only setup, you are little more than a voice and pixels on a screen. Tread carefully before unwittingly self-quarantining yourself from personal growth opportunities.

#3: YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME

Who could argue that productivity does not improve when moving to a remote work setting? Being home-based saves you time on commuting, and you're no longer distracted by co-workers chit-chatting right by your desk while you're trying to send that urgent proposal.

But beyond common sense, or making assumptions based on (inherently biased) respondents' statements from qualitative surveys, is there really any tangible metric out there to measure productivity gains in today's multi-faceted digital era?

Working in a corporation is a complex combination of multiple tasks and interactions with internal and external stakeholders. Productivity gains can come from many intertwined factors: improved corporate culture, leadership changes, new tools and processes, additional hires, team reorganisations, and of course training.

It therefore seems impossible to single out productivity gains resulting from remote work alone.

If workers do become more productive, could it not be because they just tend to work longer hours? It may strike as a controversial paradox, but in my experience, a fair portion of the commute time remote workers saved is sucked up by extra efforts required to stay "connected" with their team.

Let me elaborate on that. When removing informal and non-verbal in-person communications, teams must rely more heavily on written, asynchronous communications. Most of us write slower than we speak. In contrast, we may indeed read faster than we listen, but speed is only one dimension of communication. Anyone who has read a Shakespeare play knows how much more meaning can be conveyed by the spoken word over the printed word. Even emojis can be misinterpreted.

There is also an insidious guilt factor at play, where remote workers might be tempted to double-down on outbound communication, to prove that they are not "slacking". Be mindful not to sink into self-induced paranoia: the volume of outbound messages to your team is not a performance KPI.

And finally, keep in check you ability to switch off work effectively. Remote-work boundaries become virtual, you're no longer seeing your co-workers leaving a physical office building one by one. There is no longer a commute to help make the mental transition from "work mode" to "private life mode". That laptop or smartphone will keep pinging while you cook your kids' dinner, especially if you team spans different time zones.

#4: COMMUNICATION TOOLS : USE WITH CAUTION

This brings me to the next pitfall, regarding communication tools. All companies in a remote work environment use them extensively. Besides conferencing tools such as Zoom, many also use Slack or Teams for instant messaging. These tools were meant to improve workplaces, but when misused, they actually end up deteriorating productivity.

In hybrid companies where some employees remain office-based, fully-remote colleagues can experience an insidious feeling of isolation from not being part of the in-person 'gang' at the office. They therefore tend to overcompensate by multiplying opportunities to interact with peers through video calls.

Zoom fatigue can then crop up. Participating in several back-to-back video conferences, every workday, can seriously wear you down. Keeping control of your time becomes harder when you are "virtual": gaps in your calendar are easily mistaken for actual availability for quick catch-ups.

Here's a tip to keep your sanity: schedule 25 or 50-min meetings instead of the traditional default 30 or 60-min ones. It only takes a couple of clicks to change that in your calendar app settings.

You'd be surprised to see you can get just as much out of slightly shorter meetings, while earning precious minutes for a comfort break, responding to urgent messages, or simply giving your brain enough time to switch between meeting topics.

Slack saturation is another common pitfall. At first I feared I had reached that dreaded 'OK Boomer' moment where towards your late forties you eventually become overwhelmed with the rapid pace of technology. But I was relieved to hear that the majority of my (much younger) co-workers were equally affected by poor Slack practices.

It would be fair to assume that these intuitive Instant Messaging tools do not require any kind of training. After all, nobody had to teach us how to send an email or an SMS.

Yet companies who gloss over the opportunity to establish a Slack 'etiquette' can end up with chaos: hundreds if not thousands of Slack channels, and an exponential barrage of messages to go through. Without oversight and guidance, anyone is free to create channels, name them as they fancy, and invite whoever they want to those channels.

Of course Slack offers filtering and sorting features. But it cannot overcome two human flaws already discovered during the email era, namely CYA (cover your a**, ie. systematically include managers on a topic, however trivial, to avoid taking sole accountability should any problem arise) and FOMO (fear of missing out, where you decide to read all messages in all channels, just in case something's relevant to you, or requires an actual action).

For remote workers, who no longer have access to informal discussions around the office water cooler, the primary source of business information comes from tools such as Slack. The plethora of channels and endless flaw of IM disruptions can overwhelm them, make them lose sight of what's urgent, what's important and what's trivial.

For sure, we can pause Slack notifications, but it's merely a delayed respite. Treating the issue at its root requires a deliberate corporate decision to better structure its communication flows. Even champions of remote asynchronous work such as Gitlab recommend removing Slack from employees' phones.

#5: BE READY TO COMPETE WITH THE WORLD

If you are looking to apply to a fully-remote position, I have bad news for you. When you were office-based, you were somewhat sheltered by your location, your culture, your local network, and were competing with relatively few people who had comparable skills, cost of living constraints, and salary expectations. You were part of a 'catchment area'.

In a remote context, you will have multiple additional candidates to fend off. Candidates from further afield who not only match your skill level, speak English and other languages flawlessly, but are also potentially much cheaper than you. Remember that companies move to a remote policy to overcome talent pool shortages, not just as a means to retain and satisfy existing employees.

#6: COMPANIES GOING REMOTE DO NOT MAKE SAVINGS

Whether your company went hybrid, remote-first or full-remote, it is worth remembering that every penny saved on office space rent will likely need to be reinvested elsewhere. It's pretty much a zero-sum game.

All remote-friendly HR policies create new expenses : employee insurance, home-office equipment, additional T&E to onboard new hires onsite, frequent in-person meetings, company retreats and team-building events.

Left unscrutinised, these costs can rapidly exceed whatever office lease savings were made. But if budgets are set too conservatively, without regular get-together rituals, any remote policy will backfire and erode team cohesion, employee engagement, company culture and ultimately staff retention.

A move from on-site to remote can tempt companies to review their Compensation & Benefits policies. A common option here is to reduce the compensation of employees, once they leave expensive cities for (usually) lower cost of living locations. There is some logic when moving to a different country, but domestically, such trade-offs might trigger resentment, let alone a feeling of demotion and demotivation.

#7: THE GOLDEN HANDCUFFS MYTH

When an executive team does decide to maintain consistent salary scales irrespective of employee location, it may still be wary of the hidden consequences of such policy. What if employees stay loyal to the company only because it pays above the market level of their new (remote) location?

There is a grain of truth in every myth. But let us keep in mind the actual tangible benefits a remote-friendly policy brings:

• Tapping into a much broader talent pool unleashes diversity and enriches the average competence level of your team. This is worth gold in the long run.
• For every bad apple who may procrastinate in their company, there are several shining stars that same company failed to retain. Studies show that remote policies help reduce employee churn (and its associated cost of hiring) by reconciling people's career and life aspirations. Labour market dynamics are fast becoming a level-playing field: by having the flair to go remote, a company gained an edge over competitors stuck in their old ways. That competitive advantage won't last forever.

CONCLUSION

It is a tough time for corporate decision makers. Choosing the right approach with so little historic data is strewn with risks. It's also very much a one-way street: you cannot turn back. Rolling back to the prior policy would mean losing valuable team members who relocated far from their office, assuming there still is one.

I suppose it will take a few more years of trial and error until the corporate world eventually strikes the right balance. By then, there will be enough data and success stories around for HR consultants to make sound recommendations, based on each company's unique set of internal constraints, business environment factors, employee population mix, culture, and strategic ambitions. Meanwhile, I wish success to all businesses and workers who embarked on this exciting societal revolution !