The management failure of remote work
Most managers aren't good at managing people.
A lot has changed since I first started this Substack back in October of 2021. People were still quitting their jobs en masse. I wrote, ad nauseam, that companies that failed to adapt to the future of work would be left behind. I thought that progress was being made, albeit slowly.
Today, we’ve seen the pendulum swing in the opposite direction. Layoffs (at least in the tech world) are still rampant. More companies are ordering people back into the office. A few days ago, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said, “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever… I would say that the experiment on that is over.” (Interestingly, his employees seem to be willing to follow his lead.)
Yet there continues to be no evidence that remote work was a “failed experiment.” In fact, the only people saying that are The Bosses. It’s a power struggle: employees gained too much power when they started saying “Nope” to their working conditions.
And if remote work did fail at an organization, it was a failure by management, not individual contributors.
The status quo is easier
When my employer decided to go fully remote in 2010, it was a very intentional process. Three employees had been working remotely (myself included) for years, but it was a “special consideration,” and the rest of the company was in-office.
Consultants were hired to help with the transition. The company spent two days “unlearning” the ingrained concepts of traditional office work. In this new world, people could work whenever and wherever, as long as the job got done. Responses to internal communication were not expected to be immediate. And — perhaps most importantly — managers had to fight the urge to judge how people were spending their time.
Work was compared to a college setting. You go to class because that’s the professor’s requirement and maybe you attend meetings because they’re a necessary component of collaborating. But outside of that, how you get your homework and projects done is up to you. If you don’t do the required work, you fail.
The transition wasn’t without bumps. Even though I’d been working remotely for years, I’d been working a traditional 8-5 day. Company-wide, we decided that “non-immediate responses” needed to be within 24 hours, not “whenever you want.” And there were other logistical issues, like answering support emails and calls from customers that had to be sorted out. There were technical issues, like some of the tools that no longer made sense with a fully remote company. It was painful for at least six months.
But every time something came up, the impacted people talked through it. We developed a series of internal norms around communication, working on deadlines, and time off. New employees were “taught” our way of working as part of the onboarding process.
Companies that transitioned to remote work in 2020 did so with an overnight jolt, rather than careful consideration. And, I suspect, they never went back and addressed some of the issues that naturally arose. They kept trying to replicate in-office work in a remote environment and experienced friction along the way.
Remote work management is “too hard”
An engineering industry CEO said that remote work demands more effort from leadership across the organization, including more intentional communication, collaborative work, and cultivating relationships. In other words: the old way doesn’t work. And therefore, it’s easier to give up — or assume the status quo was better — rather than demand that managers adapt.
Remote work is a shift from managing “the work” (because you can no longer “see” the work) to managing people, communication, and relationships. And some managers are simply not cut out for that type of management, or not given the proper tools/training to be effective.
Many leaders are influenced by “status quo bias” or the tendency to prefer the current state of affairs over change, even when the alternative may be more beneficial. Not recognizing that, without intentionality, remote work can indeed feel disjointed, managers and CEOs want to return to what feels safe and familiar. They can’t figure out how to manage in a remote environment and assume that it’s not working.
I’ve always said that if a company can’t thrive in a remote environment, it’s a management failure, not an individual one. Yes, employees are responsible for their individual performance as it relates to assigned work and collaborating with others. But the work environment? That responsibility rests squarely on the company’s shoulders.
Decreasing performance is a myth
A well-researched article in Harvard Business Review found that an employee’s poor performance can be blamed largely on the boss. The article says:
Several studies show that compatibility between boss and subordinate, based on similarity of attitudes, values, or social characteristics, can have a significant impact on a boss’s impressions.
While this article was first published in 1998, conceptually it can apply to the divide often felt in remote work. The boss struggles to manage remote work, so might prefer in-office. It creates an incompatibility between the boss and the employee. The employee suffers as a result and remote work is deemed a “failure.”
The article also says:
When an employee fails—or even just performs poorly—managers typically do not blame themselves. The employee doesn’t understand the work, a manager might contend. Or the employee isn’t driven to succeed, can’t set priorities, or won’t take direction. Whatever the reason, the problem is assumed to be the employee’s fault—and the employee’s responsibility.
But sometimes—and we would venture to say often—an employee’s poor performance can be blamed largely on his boss.
Of course, the crux of this assumption in a remote work environment is that the employee’s performance is “poor” to begin with… and study after study and survey after survey find that this isn’t the case. Employees are adamant that they’re more productive in remote environments. It’s The Bosses that feel that something is off.
Sam Altman claims that “creativity” that’s lost in a remote environment, but there’s no evidence of this. The idea that creativity can only be fostered through in-person interaction is a bias on its own and feeds into the compatibility issue pointed out in HBR.
Or, as some CEOs have said outright, employees are doing “less work” and the companies are losing out as a result. As written in Fortune:
But at least one CEO, James Clarke of digital marketing firm Clearlink, worries employees might be secretly working multiple jobs while working remotely. He also worries some might be freeing up time by using A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4—time that his company isn’t utilizing.
It makes sense that remote work frees up time. Companies often end up reducing the number of meetings. There are fewer distractions, so employees are more productive. Work gets done more quickly.
But that begs the question: How much “time” belongs to the company? Salaried employees are not required to work 40 hours per week; they “work until the job is done.”
The reward for efficient work should never be more work (at least not without more money). That’s a bizarre system that incentivizes people to “fill time” in a day.
“If I can’t see you, you must not be working (as much)” continues to be the pervasive bias that keeps companies trapped in work mentalities of the past.
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