Remote work revolution

Much ado has been made lately about the upcoming “Great Resignation”, the idea that a flood of tech workers are about to quit in droves soon if their employers don’t allow them to to continue working remotely. And yeah, it’s happening. It’s currently more difficult to hire for in-person roles and many candidates aren’t even considering interviews with companies who aren’t open to remote work. The pandemic forced the largest work-from-home experiment around the world and now that it’s coming to an end (in the United States at least — barring any Delta variant complications), employers want to pretend that it never happened and go back to the way things were.

For over a year now, tech employees have been bombarded with messages about how difficult it is to work in the middle of a pandemic, social unrest, and political chaos in the backdrop of a rapidly warming planet. CEOs, wellness coaches, and HR leaders have held company-wide Zoom calls where they’ve preached cliché mantras like “COVID impacts us all differently” or “We know everyone’s experiencing this pandemic differently”, only to unveil a one-size-fits-all return to office plan to all its employees. They either don’t realize how tone deaf they sound or are willfully ignorant of it.

When asked to justify or prove the data behind why employees shouldn’t be allowed to continue remotely, they’ve got no data. All survey results point to most employees wanting to continue remotely in some fashion, with the occasional office visit as needed. For how much tech orgs pride themselves on being data-driven to make decisions for its userbase, it sure seems like a glaring red flag to ignore employee sentiment entirely when designing a return to office plan.

Now that most of the US is vaccinated, CEOs and execs have started holding offsites and plannings in-person. And they loooove to preach to the rest of the team how great it was to see people in-person again and jam on something. And yeah, I know it’s a lot easier to make decisions in-person. Nuance and context is easily missed on video calls, it’s tough to get to know folks personally, and all interactions feel transactional. But guess what, it requires an active investment in remote collaboration tools to actually collaborate effectively, remotely. Most tech companies have shrugged off the required investment here with some version of “This WFH period is only temporary”, and it really surprises me that this is the hill they’ve chosen to die on.

The ones championing the return to the office the most are, as predicted, the CEOs and managers. The ones not doing the actual work but just fostering collaboration between people and teams. It’s the ones who are most likely to be higher up in the org and already have an established home base and professional network in the geographic area. They likely own houses, have kids going to school, and have likely settled in the area. As a result, I’m sure it is really nice for them to reconnect with each other after a year and a half of being trapped at home. But it’s a different story for the rest of us.

The individual contributors with introverted personalities greatly prefer the benefits remote work provides. I personally find it far easier to get into a state of focused “deep work” when I’m not in an open office where anyone can interrupt my state of flow. I can think through user flows more easily, iterate on designs faster, and make decisions about the user experience with more clarity and depth. An open office is a disaster for this type of work. Sure, the “hybrid” approach of return to office has a couple of built-in work from home days, but it requires physically existing in the same geographic area as the office for that to be convenient. And that goes against the flexibility needed for most people who have been impacted in dramatically different ways by this pandemic. Caregivers, people supporting older family members, folks who have been uprooted due to the housing crisis or evictions…all of which conveniently seem to be missing considerations from the return-to-office plans.

Many directors and managers have tried telling me that design roles aren’t as effective remotely. I thought so too at the beginning of the pandemic, but my thinking on this has entirely flipped. After having run design sprints, hosting large workshops, sharing design visions, pair designing with peers, and having run whiteboarding sessions with product partners, I’m entirely convinced that I can be an effective designer remotely. All it takes is some creative hacking of collaboration tools and setting expectations correctly upfront. If the company invested in these tools, it would make this process a hundred times simpler.

Ed Zitron’s Substack has great pieces on this topic, like this and this. He essentially makes a very strong argument that if employees have proven that they can effectively work and collaborate remotely over the past sixteen or so months, there’s absolutely no value in them physically being the same space aside from the perceived benefit managers receive of having more control and visibility over their direct reports. Being in the same physical space is nothing but a hack to try and diagnose poor planning and prioritization. It’s much easier for managers to walk everyone into a room and say the plan has changed instead of writing up a document outlining the new goals and field twenty comments in Google Docs questioning their decision.

I really do believe that a big piece of this involves CEOs and their desire to have visibility into what “their team” is working on. In an office, they could walk through and show investors rows and rows of desks, with inspirational posters and worker bees toiling away at capitalizing on the seed of an idea that the CEO had. It’s much harder to do that remotely. There’s a severe lack of trust to let teams operate in the way that works best for them, and it’s going to cost them all dearly in the future. We’re warning them now, but as with prioritizing any features in a product, they need proof of how bad the problem actually is before deciding to do something about it.

Another big factor in all this the detachment of the worker from the physical space. In an office, it’s easy to put up with bullshit demands of some boring project by supplementing the boredom with co-worker gossip, celebratory breaks, after-work happy hours, etc. There’s a lot of “social culture” that comes with work (especially tech startups) that makes up for how tedious and grueling the job can sometimes be. But with remote work, workers have been forced to evaluate their relationship to their job by removing the social element and confront the work by itself. Is the work itself actually engaging? Is it intellectually stimulating? Is it what they want to be doing long-term? They may not have found themselves asking these questions in an office setting, but this pandemic has made many folks significantly re-evaluate their own priorities.

Simple things like having more time with family at home, being there for your pets, being able to take appointments or sign for packages in the middle of the workday, are all perks of remote work. In fact, employers are the ones committing wage theft here by not subsidizing employees’ internet and home office usage. Most job offers being made to new hires are at a lower total compensation than pre-pandemic levels, but the companies are still upselling the hires on the office perks and benefits, none of which the employees are able to take advantage of at the moment. That right there is a big red flag, because all those office perks are technically a part of your offer package. It’s already too late though. Many workers have realized how bad their pre-pandemic lifestyle was, often commuting two hours a day, working late, and never having time for family or a social life. And many won’t go back to it now that they’ve gotten a taste of what it should be like.

And look, I get that it’s not for everyone. In fact, if this pandemic happened five years ago, I probably would be on the other side of this argument. I was a novice in the design world and the way I learned how to get better as a designer is by observing other more senior designers and copying their habits. Yes, seriously. I probably would’ve been very bitter (as many young workers today are) that this opportunity for learning and growing was taken from me due to a pandemic. It’s very difficult to “learn” a job when you’re entirely remote and have no visibility in what your senior peers are doing and what you need to be doing to grow. I empathize heavily with this cohort, but again, there are alternatives here as well. I unofficially mentor a couple of designers where I share tips and best practices regularly. I’m always available to give feedback or for calls as needed. And I’m sure some percentage of the senior workers will choose to go back into the office and stay in-person anyway, so hopefully that’s enough to serve as a training ground for the younger workers.

In addition, I also realize that not everyone — regardless of age — actually enjoys working from home. If I was living by myself, I actually would enjoy the social benefits of going into an office and chatting with like-minded peers two or three times a week. Being introverted means I don’t proactively put in a lot of effort to plan things with friends outside of work, so having work as the natural “second place” where social interaction happens was a boon for me in my first few jobs. And if I as an introvert recognize this, I realize that many extroverts must absolutely detest working from home where they cannot talk to anyone. The old way of working heavily favored extroverted salesman-esque cis white male personalities at the cost of everyone else. Many women have reported feeling safer from casual workplace harassment at home, and a lot of employees with disabilities (physical and psychological) say that they feel remote work levels the playing field significantly. All I’m suggesting is that employers allow different types of people and personalities and preferences to work in ways that is most productive and beneficial for them. If some people want to come in, let them come in. If others want to be remote, let them be remote. If they occasionally want hybrid, let them have hybrid when they want. As long as the work is getting done and you’re hitting your goals, why on Earth does it matter? Design the entire office space, workplace policies, and remote collaboration tools around this. Any company that isn’t actively working on it right now is going to be severely disadvantaged.

At the end of the day, I’m at a point in my life where I’m prioritizing my personal physical and psychological needs (along with my family’s) over that of any corporation or product. It’s weird to even say that, because that’s how it should always be, but the tech world has somehow tied my personal worth too closely to my work. Guess it’s one of the pitfalls of chasing your passions. Anyway, I’m shooting to be permanently remote forever, and if it doesn’t happen at my current company, it’s simple enough to get a fully remote tech job from one of the hundreds of recruiter InMails I get on a daily basis. The design industry is red hot right now, and I wish I was saying that I feel bad for the tech companies unwilling to adapt to the new abnormal, because in reality, I don’t. They say these return-to-office policies put their companies in the right place to succeed, but ultimately, it’s the employees who suffer. And if the employees aren’t satisfied, then your customers sure as hell won’t be.

The tech industry needed a big shakeup from the unsustainable burnout culture it had going, so this is, in many ways, a move towards a better world. The companies that recognize their employees’ need for flexibility and the pandemic’s uneven impact on varying demographics and generations will win out for serving their own employees better. And the ones that prioritize their “culture of collaboration” over employees’ needs will ultimately lose out on a lot of solid talent. It’s unfortunate that it will take a revolution and a “Great Resignation” for this to become clear to them, but alas, it’s where we’re at right now.