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A skeptic’s guide to the real business returns of remote work options

We know we will be vaccinated and the pandemic will continue to persist when we make the crucial calls on whether to resurrect our white-collar workplaces. Many offices will remain dormant and dust-collecting.
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We know we will be vaccinated and the pandemic will continue to persist when we make the crucial calls on whether to resurrect our white-collar workplaces.

Many offices will remain dormant and dust-collecting. Pressure will persevere to work remotely full time or part time. Judging by our Research Co. survey this week, the last year has persuaded plenty that permanent stay-at-home labour is viable and optimal.

I am a skeptic.

I don’t think the experience of the last year has been any kind of actual litmus test of whether remote work will work. I worry we believe it has been.

Don’t get me wrong: I admit there are many workday-related inefficiencies – getting up and ready for a particular time, commuting with recurrent snags, keeping fed away from home at a cost, waiting for meetings to start and to end, distractions and interruptions galore.

Who wouldn’t want to shed these drawbacks to create a wonderful new normal? I would, but hold on. Greater convenience does not guarantee effectiveness.

The pandemic’s test of the work-from-home experience has been an artificial one. We fled offices and have stayed home for the purpose of our personal safety, not for the advancement of our contributed work. We might be reconsidering the value of work in a larger way, but one thing we can’t assume is that we can reap all the benefits of remote work without their drawbacks.

Our current conditions misguide us on work-from-home’s sustainability: subsidies for wages and rents and programs to prop many elements of the economy will soon disappear, probably around the decision day about a return to the workplace.

Then the authentic test will begin. Only then will we be able to judge if we can produce and prosper away from the office setting without that significant safety net. We will have to move from maintenance to growth. Will we not just pivot but innovate? Will we not just retain but grow?

I am skeptical.

From personal experience, at home I can fulfil my work duties (my place is never cleaner, too), but I don’t generate ideas with the same regularity. The work gets done, but the inherent progress I seek of it doesn’t materialize as it did. I need the presence of colleagues and contacts to help – as do most others, I’ve observed. My best work emerges when I collaborate, and I have seen the same this year in others.

It is wonderful for many of us to have been sheltered from the coronavirus with considerable personal expediency, but that is hardly the ideal framework for work. The old routines were built for a reason, the settings for them matter, and in trading them away in the pandemic many of us convinced ourselves that a suitable substitute had been found.

I am skeptical of that, too.

The trade-off has been illusory in convincing some of us we can individually produce without the full benefit of the critical mass. We can feel personally industrious but fail to see how workplaces are greater than the sum of our individual efforts.

What we sacrificed as we scampered home a year ago was significant: the hundreds of substantial and nuanced experiences that come with workplace connection and creativity. Inarguable as workday inefficiency is, so can be the ineffectiveness of remote work.

The recent technology of Zoom, Teams, Skype, GoToMeeting, Discord and the like is the undeniable heaven-send of the pandemic – where would we be without it? – and in our case at BIV served us well in staging podcasts and virtual events beyond our numerous staff discussions. But again, I fret we are giving over the social and cultural values of the workplace to technological determinism. Just because we have tech, we don’t need to fall into it.

Yesterday, I walked over to our managing editor in the office to discuss what our newspaper cover should look like and state. In the course of about a minute, we used mostly body language (masked body language at that) to reach accord on the plan. He and I found comfort in the decisions by reading each other in three dimensions with all sorts of nuanced messaging. No way a screen and a laptop microphone could replicate that. No way an online gathering could achieve that in short order.

When our socially distanced sales team meets at the start of the week, we communicate on entirely different levels than we do when we conduct our end-of-week review online. This short-cut creativity is why we work together as employees and not independent contractors, and the longer we deny ourselves these features, the more time it will take for us to rebuild better.

True, there are some solitary functions that can be done remotely indefinitely with the same or even better efficiency. But not many. Most occupations require the input in real time of colleagues, their presence an important governance on our daily toil.

If we’re headed for the dissolution of the office, I’m afraid I won’t fit in for the time ahead. If you’re trying to convince me of your argument, I’m afraid I don’t have time to see if I’m wrong.

You see, I’m a skeptic. •

Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.