BC - Before COVID
At the beginning of the pandemic, I worked for a company that allowed one day per week remote, pretty much across the board. When hired, I negotiated two days remote, but I was an anomaly (in a not-so-popular way). I wasn’t the only exception to the rule however. There were a handful of employees across the company who were hired as full-time remote or allowed to transfer to a full-time remote status, usually due to their physical location being too far from the office. This company had the best of intentions, and they were really striving to do what the employees needed. However, the inconsistency in remote work statuses within and across teams bred more than a little contention. Enter COVID, the great equalizer of remote employees.
The COVID-19 pandemic certainly didn’t invent remote work nor did it create the many wonderful upsides or the common pitfalls associated with it. However, it did bring the swirling ecosystem of pros, cons and neutrals to the forefront. Companies across the globe had to dust off their remote work policies, or create them from scratch, to figure out ways to make remote work scalable and applicable to their entire workforce. When everyone was first sent home some companies found the switch relatively easy, some not so much. Some companies didn’t have to switch anything because they had been remote all along.
Fully Remote for the First Time
About a year into the pandemic, I left my analyst job at a midsize company to take on the life of a consultant at a tech start up in a fully-remote-no-intention-of-ever-being-in-person role. I was equal parts excited and intimidated at the prospect of never having an office to go to. In those early months, our company talked a lot about how we individually viewed remote work and the influences on those views. Rework and Remote (by the creators of Basecamp) have had a huge impact on how our team approaches work; talk about revolutionary! I started challenging the truths I had always accepted about work and office work in a way I hadn’t expected. This new world of fully remote really got me thinking about how difficult it can be to implement effective remote work policies how we could make them simpler. The answer is equity.
Equity is different than equality.
Equality is the source of the blanket policy; everyone gets treated the same way. It is not a bad thing in theory, but because of an increasing trend towards embracing individuality, it is really rather difficult to implement. The blanket policy often requires exceptions to be made for one reason or another, and, under the banner of equality, these exceptions can be incredibly difficult for other employees to accept.
Equity solves this problem because it casts an eye to treating people as individuals who need different things. The ideas around policy at this new company were based on equity. Need to work remote full-time to be your most productive self? Sure, go for it. There were no hangups about productivity or trust or any of the push back I had seen regarding remote work elsewhere.
The philosophy was simple: only hire people you trust to do the work you hired them to do, and assume they are doing just that until there is evidence to the contrary.
With this approach, there is really no room for contention because each person works to figure out how remote work can work for them and the company works to support that. Each employee has the opportunity to establish their own policy around remote work and then to be transparent about if that policy is working over time or if it isn’t. The employer has that same opportunity.
But will it work on a large scale?
Now, it may seem like this philosophy isn’t scalable, but why not? The answers most employers will give center around fear of losing the semblance of “control” or “oversight” of employees and their productivity. But it begs the question, how much control does the office setting really offer? If we are honest, we find plenty of ways to escape productivity while physically in the office. Regardless of precautions taken by the employer, there are myriad ways employees can be unproductive in the office. Additionally, those aforementioned precautions often breed mistrust and a feeling of being watched and monitored that most professionals find insulting and belittling. Other answers for “why not remote?” center around the challenges of being collaborative while remote. It seems that the last year would be more than sufficient evidence to the contrary. Many companies, especially in the tech industry, really didn’t skip a beat when their entire workforce transferred to full time remote.
Bend and Not Break
The philosophy of equitable remote work can feel revolutionary especially to companies that have been around long enough to have the “we have always done it this way” syndrome. It could be that a blanket remote work policy has worked well or well enough for many workplaces; however, change is upon us. Remote work is here, and many of us will never work in an office the way we used to. Companies all over the world are trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube as they frantically look for ways to entice employees back into the office. Many will face a significant loss of talent. Organizations that are ready to implement, but more importantly EMBRACE, a culture of remote work will have a good chance of retaining their existing workforce and are poised as soft landings for people fleeing the traditional brick and mortar model. Adopting an equitable approach to remote work policies gives companies, regardless of size, the flexibility to bend and not break as the workplace changes in drastic and unprecedented ways.
