The Remote Work Weekly #6

Welcome to the sixth edition of The Remote Work Weekly!

If you are new here, my name is Amr, and I write this weekly newsletter to keep you updated on the latest in the world of remote work, including news, emerging trends, insights, studies, and more. I also cover related topics such as freelancing, coliving, coworking, digital nomad trends, and more. So, feel free to subscribe so you don't miss an update.

In this week's edition, we explore poll results linking remote work and “productive anxiety,” cover trending reports about quiet vacationing, and summarize new research to help remote teams make decisions faster.

Remote Work and Productivity Anxiety

A recent poll by Workhuman found that 61% of UK remote workers are more productive while working remotely; however, two thirds of them suffered from what the report referred to as productivity anxiety. It is described as “the feeling that no matter how much you work or what you accomplish, you're doing enough, efficient enough, or good enough.”?

The signs of productive anxiety include physical and mental symptoms. The following image from the poll report shows a breakdown of those symptoms:

The poll report listed workplace uncertainty due to unclear project expectations or responsibilities and job insecurity as the leading causes of productive anxiety. It also suggested ways to reduce the stress that leads to such anxiety, including promoting rest and wellbeing, creating learning and development opportunities, promoting flexible work policies, and reducing priority overload.

Trending talks on Quiet Vacationing

Despite being a relatively old topic, it has been trending on many media outlets for the past two weeks. Quiet vacationing is a term referring to when a remote employee travels on a workation or even a vacation while pretending to work without informing their employer. Quiet vacationers often use VPN connections to hide their locations and sometimes use mouse-jiggling software to fake mouse movements.

A recent report by The Harris Poll showed that nearly 37% of U.S. millennial workers have gone on a secret vacation without informing their employers. At the same time, an article by MSN discussed quiet vacationing, calling it “a sign of America's broken work culture.” Another article by yNetNews pointed out that it is not only common among young U.S. workers but also has been reported in Australia and other areas worldwide.

Research: Make Quality Decisions Quickly

Atlassian's Team Anywhere consists of behavioral psychologists addressing distributed work issues. After summarizing their previous research in editions #2 and #4 , we now review new research aimed at helping employees make quicker decisions. This research builds on earlier findings that an audit increases decision-making clarity, role clarity, and work speed, mainly when employees receive feedback from their managers.

The experiment included eighty-two participants from across the company, split into two groups. Both groups filled out a pre-experiment survey, a decision-making audit template, and a post-experiment survey.

Based on the template, participants were asked to list up to 10 recent decisions, their uncertainty about making the decision, and what went well about the decision-making process that they could replicate.

Each group was given a different final prompt:

• The first group received the question: “What, if anything, could you do to move a decision like this forward more quickly next time?”
• The second group was asked to share their template with their managers. The managers were asked: “Is there anything your team member could do to move this kind of decision forward more quickly next time?”

After the experiment, the results were compared between those who discussed the template with their managers and those who didn’t.

The experiment shows that conducting a decision-making audit increased the participants’ confidence in their decision-making judgment by 19%. It also increased their ability to execute quickly and move work forward, with 72% of the participants feeling they could increase the pace of their work, and 60% made more progress on their top priorities.

The following is the decision-making audit template used in the experiment:

Wrap-up

This wraps up the 6th edition of The Remote Work Weekly. I hope it was informative, insightful, and entertaining :). To receive notifications about each week's edition, feel free to subscribe .

If you'd like to share your thoughts or suggest a useful tool, your input is always appreciated. You can reach out to me directly here .

See you next week!

Amr