Remote Work - Is it all Green?

The trajectory is clear enough.

There is this mountain of assumptions that remote work is not effective- come, a big pandemic situation everybody is forced to do remote work to survive and the truckloads of assumptions goes to the trash can in a week. Internally within my organisation and worldwide, people have written playbooks, experiences, best practices of how to build & run a successful fully remote teams. This has lot of consequences - new segment of labor, superior focus on infrastructure, better inclusivity, falling real estate prices, global workforce and a lot more. Lot of Managers have said that remote work has almost no drop or even increase in productivity and that they are able to get focused work from people.

Personally, I feel Remote working has exposed the culture wide open- controlling cultures would have got it tough, but more open cultures relying on intrinsic motivation would have eased into it easier. Again, on a short term. Culture changes with context. All seems green here. Are we missing something here?

In a way, yes- unless we think what we miss has a significant impact on how we work and what we produce. There are three important things that we miss in co-located work which has no equivalence in remote work.

1. Information Exchange : In the loop of knowledge exchange of moving from tacit ( of what one understands without stating) to explicit knowledge, it is crucial that conversations happen. Webinars, zoom sessions are decent approximations but this handles only known Unknowns. When you are in a physical space, you tend to meet with people whom you don't meet daily and this builds conversations that leads to new information which you can classify as Unknown Unknowns. That builds ahuge possibility information exchange, second order effects.
2. Facilitation: Facilitating virtual calls/meetings is a nightmare and gives rise to lot of ad-hocness. Lot of it can be controlled by structure, templates, some sort of round robin mechanisms. While that's the good part, a good portion of facilitation of observing the body language, focus of people and changing the style and pivoting the discussion is largely absent. It is good for certain discussions and bad for certain ones( especially when the people dynamics are tricky)
3. Water Cooler conversations: Oh yes, zoom call helps. But water cooler conversations involve almost all senses- involving a cup of coffee, eye contact, touch ( Hi-fi!) and a humor that's so so contextual of the people & space. Usually water cooler conversations start from gossips, move to whats happening and sometimes creative ideas come out of them. The trajectory can never be planned, discovery is usually serendipitous and people composition vary a lot and there is a sense of unscripted activity. Replacing that with conference calls with fun activity is not bad but it does put a perimeter to what can be achieved.

Personally, these are some of the things that I miss a lot and influences my way of working and managing things. There is a wisdom that is gained through this remote working, just that we don't forget the benefits of co located working when we get to that model and replicate the Remote ways of working there.