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Why Remote Work is not all good (or all bad) · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Paul, you ready?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: All right, let's go.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, everyone, welcome back.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: So today we're gonna return to a theme we spent an entire series on in the past.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Remote work.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: So now before you switch off, we're gonna look at it from a different angle.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: What we know factually, but also people are coping or not coping with coming back to the office, probably worth 10 minutes of your time.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: So uh you ready, Paul?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: There's there is a lot, a lot to get through, but I think we can do it in 10 minutes.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: So is remote work the greatest invention since sliced bread or the end of society as we know it?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: LinkedIn tells us both things are true.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's funny.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Social media is a bit like that.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um never uh doesn't it doesn't really do nuance well, does it?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Social media.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Your your feed is is you know tailored to make you think what you already think sometimes.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think I I think I would argue it's neither, as you might uh you might expect.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, neither.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's hear about it.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, I think the first thing that it's important to remember is remote work's been around forever.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it just it just became a big thing uh around the pandemic uh time.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I'll use myself as an example.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: I've been in the workplace since 1994.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 1994.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I've only spent about maybe two percent of that time in a formal office.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: And the this is being recorded from my home.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: The vast majority of my work has been done there, in hotels, in conferences, etc.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I've had a career that's involved working in probably I don't know, seven or eight companies, maybe maybe ten in that period of time.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been able to do work remote work for that entire period of time.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: And my experience has not been unique, right?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: Remote work is basically just a type of work that a relatively small percentage of the population were doing, and then during the pandemic, a lot of people were doing it.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um as to whether it's good or bad, it really depends on how it's done and um how well people are doing it, whether they're trained to do it, um, and whether the managers that manage them have the skills to manage in that type of environment.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I if I really think about it, I'm probably about officially, formally, like 12 years of of remote work prior to the pandemic.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it is uh, although it wasn't an exception for sure, um it it's one of those things.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't think about the fact that we were building this skill that would come in handy, I guess.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh but uh so so let's get some examples of of ways it might help or or hurt people.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so to be clear, right, everything I'm gonna say here is is based on on patterns, right?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: Not everybody's gonna have the same experience.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Ym v as they say.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh let's start with the the helping part.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um so definitely the lack of commute is is a lot of help to a lot of people.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um it gives people more time, often an hour a day or more.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if you live on a you know, you live in in LA, often more in that in that kind of area.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that's free time, right?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: The number one way in which it's used, um, the data clearly shows at this point, is more sleep.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we are a sleep-deprived nation.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: So it helps with that.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um we'll talk about that more in another episode, the the whole issue with sleep and rest and so on.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: Number two, where it's used is more exercise, and that's also great, right?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: But it does hurt in other related ways.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I'll give you one example that was uh a Stanford study that was conducted um around about the pandemic, but then has been revisited since.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: We are sitting in our desks more often when we're working from home.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in many cases, a lot more, right?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, on average, people who are sitting that are working from home are sitting about an hour or more than they uh than they were in the office, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's as we skip things like running to physical meetings or just walking from the parking lot to our uh to our uh to our place or going, grabbing something from the water, you know, doing the water cooler stuff, you know, all that kind of thing.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so we're skipping all of that.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: That means that we are more sedentary when we're not doing the exercise stuff, etc.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: We're generally more lonely, and that can have a significant effect on our physical and our mental health.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: So it is not all good, no matter what anybody tells you, right?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: There are differences, and those differences have to be managed.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man, we were sedentary already.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: When you say that, I'm like, oh, you're at you're so right, you know, uh, just thinking about because I had a brief period where I was working from home, working from home, and then I joined a new company before the pandemic, and I was in the office for like a month and a half, and then the pandemic hit, and we were back out.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it was kind of shocking to be in the office after not being in an office for so long.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but yeah, you're constantly moving, constantly moving.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I yeah.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: So uh what about the stuff the leaders talk about, you know, or complain about, you know, uh lack of innovation, lack of drive and employees and things like that.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, things aren't like they were.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: We can only fix it by bringing people back in, you know, that kind of thing.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Much of that is totally overblown.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, it stems mostly from the fact that the leaders have absolutely no idea how to lead in this new world.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: But they want to unscramble their egg mainly because they were more comfortable in the old world.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, let's face it, looking at a bunch of people working away and knowing in quotes they're your people.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: That can feel nice, right?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't get that if everybody's spread apart and you're not seeing them and you don't see the the fruits of your labor as a leader, right?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a whole part of it, really, is just like, I don't know how to do this, so it's bad.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's totally possible to innovate and do work effectively and efficiently in remote or distributed teams.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: But you're not going to do it just by wanting it to happen, right?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: You need the training to do it.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we do teach people how to do this, and it's different, but it can be extremely effective.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: So there are a bunch of reasons why you might want to bring people back in an office, but those kind of reasons are not the reasons.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think of it sometimes as like the CEO's job is to know what's going on throughout their organization.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: They don't necessarily have a direct work output other than all of the work output, right?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: So they kind of do need to be able to have a way to see what's going on and check in and see what's going on.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if they're not like super techie or using current means of doing that, whether it's, you know, you know, productivity boards, Trello boards, asanas, things like that, where they can actually be virtually engaged, they think they got to be watching people.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I just picture the factory floor, you know, with somebody up in the window looking out at their domain.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's pretty crazy.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: So uh yeah, the commute.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so let's get into that a little bit more.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: So if you do drag people back to the office, is that gonna help?
• 7:32
  unknown: Nah.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I mean, I guess you can, but you've got but you've got to remember that your people are not used to doing that now.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: So in fact, in our day job, right, we're starting to see demand from companies who are bringing employees that used to work in the office and are now out of the office, they're bringing them back in.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: And they're finding that the people have lost the skill, right?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: They don't really know how to work well in office.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and some early in career people have never worked in an office, right?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: And some of those later in career people haven't done it for several years.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: So it people are gonna have to get used to that as well.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great point.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's true.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's it's crazy to think that it's you know, five years.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And and that is a significant chunk of people's careers uh spent very differently.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that the working together skill fell off also is is probably underappreciated.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh wow, that's really fascinating.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: So so practically, what should you do?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um, if you're an individual, I think you're gonna have to uh think about how you're gonna make your work environment the most effective it can be, right?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: Your environment is what helps you do great work, and that can be at home, that can be at work, can be wherever.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: The good news here, of course, is that it's your work environment if you're working from home.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so you've got a lot of choice uh that you can do around that.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: So if it's a room or part of a room, make that awesome.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: Create routines that help you separate your work from the rest of your home life and give yourself a wind-down schedule, things like that.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we got a newsletter on this actually that I just wrote.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so if you're following this on Substack, you can see it directly there in the feed.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: If not, then go grab it.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and if you're a company, give your leaders dedicated training on how to manage and lead distributed teams, right?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's different in really, really many ways, and many of those ways are subtle, ways they're not going to learn themselves.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: So your training basically needs to focus on that.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: We did it, Paul.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: We did it.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 9:42
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• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us reach more people.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.