Remote Work Is Here To Stay, So Build A Reinforcing Culture

“Remote” work is nothing new to me. I’ve been doing it most of the time since 1973. Back then, high tech office equipment was an IBM Selectric typewriter with the bouncing ball. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could change the ball to print in italics.

I worked in Washington as a speechwriter in the Executive Office of the President. Many of the streets were torn up for construction of the subway system, so the traffic was awful. The commute was both nerve wracking and time consuming.

So, I suggested to my manager that I work at home. He laughed at me. The notion was so foreign he thought I was joking. But I finally convinced him to let me work at home one day a week.

That first day in my home office was glorious. But something seemed weird. Although I’d brought home what I estimated was eight hours of work, I finished in less than half that time. Then it occurred to me: I’d had no interruptions. Nobody dropped by to chat about the weekend ballgame. Nobody invited me to attend a meeting that had little or nothing to do with my current workload.

Fast forward to today. Millions of people around the globe are working at home either full time or at least part of the time. This has brought seismic change to our assumptions about the art of the possible.

Although much of that change was triggered by the Covid pandemic, there are other factors at play. Matt Mullenweg, a founder of WordPress site builder Automattic, noted at the start of the pandemic that Covid was “the remote work experiment nobody asked for.”

Someone with a particularly insightful perspective on the change is Melissa Romo, author of Your Resource is Human: How Empathetic Leadership Can Help Remote Teams Rise Above.

“Covid didn’t come with intent and planning,” she says. “We didn’t train leaders or workers to develop remote-compatible habits, which meant that remote work came at the cost of loneliness, burnout, and disengagement. The solution to those three is not to reverse remote work, but to learn how to create belonging and engagement through new management skills.”

While a lot of people are talking about burnout these days, Romo says home office monotony can lead to “boreout.” She explains the telltale signs of boreout, and how to prevent it.

“Boreout describes the sensation you have when your work has lost all meaning and you show up in body but not in heart or mind,” she says. “Remote work makes it harder to get the feedback and the association we have with colleagues that’s important to feeling like we are doing meaningful work. If tasks suddenly feel monotonous, repetitive and are difficult to focus on, it’s likely we have disconnected from the meaning of what we are doing.”

Romo, who’s worked with companies like American Express and Procter & Gamble and has led remote teams for more than a decade, says excessive amounts of time in a home workspace can under-stimulate people and lead to boredom.

“Preventing boreout comes down to managing an employee’s workload and output closely,” she says, “drawing close associations between what an employee is doing and the mission and vision of the company.” She says managers should ensure that remote employees have the ability to work in varied environments and that this practice is encouraged by the company as a wellbeing practice, versus something employees do on their own “under the radar.”

Romo highlights five emotional pitfalls of remote and hybrid work: boredom, depression, guilt, paranoia, and loneliness. Boredom and loneliness don’t seem terribly surprising. But what about depression, guilt, and paranoia. How—and why—do these emotions come into play?

“Paranoia for remote workers is simply the notion that they are ‘out of sight, out of mind’—the nagging sensation that things are happening without them,” she says. “Even though more employees are returning to offices, the population of remote workers will remain far above what it was pre-Covid. The efforts companies are making to get employees to return to offices risks creating an ‘us and them’ culture, something that predominated for the small minority of remote workers before the pandemic and drives even more feelings of being left out.”

Romo says guilt for remote workers has many layers: guilt about having a work arrangement that others don’t or can’t have; guilt toward themselves about not being able to simultaneously manage the demands of home and caregiving when they are remote; guilt about any amount of time offline, especially if one’s manager is online, even in another time zone.

As far as depression is concerned, Romo says, a multi-country review of studies measuring remote work’s impact to mental health for the 20 years prior to the pandemic indicated that remote work itself does not cause depression. “But what becomes problematic for a remote worker,” she says, “is the likelihood that their isolation creates fertile ground for rumination and worry during a depressive period, such as a divorce, death, medical diagnosis or other significant life trauma.”

Organizational psychologists have said one of the few silver linings of the pandemic is that more people at leadership and management levels are starting to recognize that if you don’t care about people’s quality of life, you don’t get quality work. Romo agrees with that perspective.

“The fact that the majority of companies today embrace a hybrid model of work, where workers are expected to be in the office two to three days per week, is a sign that leaders and companies realize the quality-of-life benefits of remote work and are willing to enable those,” she says. “But we aren’t all there yet.” She notes Accenture’s Future of Work study, which surveyed more than 10,000 workers and 200 CEOs, finding that a full 65% of those surveyed were dissatisfied with how their company is administering hybrid work. So, she says, companies are acknowledging the quality of life benefits of hybrid work without really knowing yet how to fully deliver on them.

With all these variables at play, what role does empathy play in a leader’s relationship and influence with people in the remote and hybrid workplace?

“Empathy is just the ability to see something from someone else’s vantage point,” Romo says. “When that vantage point is a home office, and the leader can meet remote employees where they are, it creates a connection that transcends the work that needs to get done.” For example, a leader who can understand that a dog needs to be let out and doesn’t mind the 30 second pause in a conference call shows that they relate to the employee’s environment. Even in a minor example like this, Romo says, a leader’s empathy demonstrates trust and confidence, and the employee will pay it back.

For the most part, Romo says, remote employees don’t feel trusted to get their work done. She cites a 2020 New York Post survey finding that two-thirds of remote workers were afraid they would lose their jobs if they left their desks. “Empathy conveys understanding and tolerance of a remote worker’s reality and that understanding conveys trust,” she says.

Author and educator Brené Brown teaches that, to be vulnerable, one must give up control and the “predictability of outcomes.” How can a leader learn from—and use—that perspective in interacting with work colleagues?

Romo points out that much about a commercial endeavor is focused on controlling the bottom line, forecasting and establishing confidence and predictability of that forecast. “This is why vulnerability at work is so difficult for leaders—'predictability of outcomes’ is so intertwined with projecting confidence in commercial performance. However, if we separate controlling the work from controlling the people doing the work, vulnerability becomes easier. Leaders can be vulnerable and human with the people they work with, and still exercise control and confidence over the work. It’s worth it for leaders to walk this line because the more senior a person is, the more impact their vulnerability has, up to 13% greater engagement and 30% greater innovation than empathy coming from middle management.”

Remote and hybrid work arrangements have certainly impacted meeting and conference behaviors. A 2022 study from the Harvard Business Review found that workers now have more virtual meetings than they did in 2020, but they are shorter and more often are unscheduled.

Romo says virtual meetings have benefits that in-person meetings don’t, and remote teams are taking advantage of them: recordings, transcripts, and file sharing for example. For teams that are global and who work across different time zones, also called asynchronous work, meeting documentation from a virtual call can be invaluable to keep everyone on the same page.

In remote and hybrid work arrangements, leaders can employ an updated version of the old “management by walking around” practice.

“In a remote context, replicating ‘management by walking around’ is actually simple,” Romo says. “Just make time to have regular one-to-one calls with the remote people who work for you. Make time to have unscheduled calls with your people as well. Be visible, show interest. Unscheduled calls between colleagues have increased four-fold since the start of the pandemic to now, which means we are learning how to recreate those serendipitous moments online as a way to connect like we did before in an office.”

Psychological safety is important in any kind of work arrangement. So what special challenges do remote and hybrid work pose for people’s sense of psychological security?

Romo says there’s evidence that remote workers experience disadvantages that can be summarized as “proximity bias,” meaning that their work is evaluated less favorably, they experience slower career progression and less important assignments simply because a manager values the work of an in-office employee more highly. “This impacts the remote worker’s feeling of inclusiveness and has a downstream impact on their sense of psychological safety,” Romo says. “They will hesitate to risk anything that will put them at an even greater disadvantage.”

How should companies manage hybrid schedules so employees want to come into an office and don’t feel they’re mandated to do it?

“Most employees prefer hybrid working to fully remote working,” Romo says. “So companies don’t need to worry that people will never come back. They will, they are, and they say that’s what they want. Here’s what companies are missing though: the hybrid schedule, sometimes called a ‘team agreement,’ must be compatible with a company’s operating model.” For example, if a company makes the decision that a group of people in one central location will manage business in multiple locations around the country or the world, most of this central group’s workday will be spent in virtual meetings with teams in outpost locations. Time zone differences may even drive non-traditional schedules, working early or late hours.

“Greater span of control will drive greater virtual work which will drive the need for greater flexibility,” Romo says. “It’s an equation that’s fully misunderstood by many companies right now. Workers are understandably frustrated about the time lost commuting between home and office if most of their work is done virtually anyway. The solution for that is to give teams and managers autonomy to set the hybrid schedule or team agreement that most efficiently conforms to what that team is responsible for, and the operating model they function within.”