By Beth Dunn, UX Operations Lead at HubSpot (and remote work enthusiast)
In 2019, 69% of employers offered remote work. While that number sounds pretty high, the fine print isn’t as flexible as one may think at first glance: They offered remote work on an ad-hoc basis to at least some employees. That’s a pretty low bar. And while some companies operate fully remote — Zapier and Automattic, for example — many companies have been operating as office-first, remote second. This year, most companies moved very quickly to being 100% remote. While the future is still foggy, one thing that’s clear is that remote work will continue to be foundational in how we all operate. And to get good at it, we need to change how we talk about it.
Asking your remote coworkers if they’re going to be “in” on Friday, or saying that you’ll wait until someone is “back in the office” before you schedule that next meeting, sends the message that you have to be in-person or co-located to be effective at work, which can make remote workers feel like second-class citizens. An afterthought. (Mea culpa: We’re sometimes guilty of these gaffes at HubSpot, too. Thanks to our amazing and growing distributed workforce, we’re increasingly aware of how important it is that we get these things right.)
Whether you’re like us at HubSpot and are shifting to a hybrid remote-office model, already work at a full-time remote company, or have just a handful of colleagues who now work from home, here are four phrases we can all remove from our daily vocabulary for a more inclusive remote experience for everyone on the team.
“We’re a remote-friendly company.”
Talking about your company as being remote-friendly still implies that being located in an office is the preferred way to work. With more workers choosing — or needing — to work remotely for the long term, it’ll become increasingly important to make sure they know their work matters, too. Where a person does their work should be much less important than the quality of the work that they do. When you remove the value judgment from the wording you use to describe where your workers work, you empower them to focus more on quality, collaboration, relationships, and speed.
Instead, try using “distributed workforce.” It’s more honest and inclusive of whatever choice or circumstance compels employees to do. Some will want to return to the office, some won’t, and some will prefer a blend of the two.
“We all work from home now.”
Western culture has a history of devaluing work that’s done in the home, with hundreds of years’ worth of gendered expectations around who leaves home for work and who stays at home. Talking about remote work as “working from home” can raise these subconscious implications in employee’s minds, making them wonder if the very fact that they’re working from home means their work is less visible, less rigorous, or somehow more “soft.”
And not everyone who works outside the office will be working from home. Some of us will find a quiet cafe, while others might thrive in a co-working space. Working remotely is all about the employee having the agency to choose what works best for them, their team, and the company, too.
Shifting to calling it “working remotely” shows that you trust your employees to make the right choices about how and where they work every day.
“I’ll be off that day, but I’ll still be online.”
People making the shift to working remotely often struggle mightily with setting up and honoring boundaries between work and life. We’re all so used to using our physical location as an indicator of how available we are to respond to work needs. If we’re in the office, we’re working. If we’re at home or out exploring the world, we should be offline.
But when the office exists in your home, how do you handle being “out of office”? For many, working from home is an option used when you’re not feeling well and want to keep your germs out of the office. But when you’re already working from home, how sick do you need to feel to keep your laptop shut? And, how should you unplug from work if your vacation is a staycation, and you don’t have the usual excuse of “I’m traveling now” to be unreachable for a prolonged period of time?
It’s essential that we’re able to recharge ourselves mentally, physically, and spiritually on a regular basis, whether we’re able to travel for a week or we’re just closing our laptop and tuning out for the day. Leaders and colleagues on distributed teams have a responsibility to model that behavior — and to model it loudly. Set Slack status updates for when you’re not checking email, put up that out of office (check out our very own OOO Generator for some quick and witty examples) and communicate with your team about when you’re taking some real time away from work.
“It’s nice to e-meet you.”
Most work has been conducted online now for a very long time. Email, instant messaging, cloud storage, and collaborative document sharing have transformed the workplace in the last twenty years. So it doesn’t make sense to call it out with an “e-” prefix, or by calling work “virtual” (or worse, “cyber”) or whatever other word might set it apart. We wouldn’t say “nice to meet you IRL (in real life)” when shaking someone’s hand, so the online version should follow a similar flow. Saying “it’s nice to e-meet you” in an email or on Zoom neglects the fact that you’re still meeting the person, just in a somewhat different — and increasingly normal — way.
By the end of 2020, it’s safe to assume that nearly 100% of the global workforce will have had a taste of what it’s like to work remotely. Granted, working from home during a global pandemic is different than being a full-time remote employee, but we’ve all now experienced some of the pain points, challenges, and obstacles remote folks have felt for years. Whether companies transition fully back to work in the office, or embrace a new world of work, my hope is that we all work on evolving our natural workplace behaviors, mental models, and language to be more remote inclusive. We can all play a part in creating a more equitable remote experience, wherever and however we show up for work.
If you’re interested in learning more about HubSpot’s culture, approach to the future of work, and both remote and in-office positions we’re hiring for, visit www.hubspot.com/careers.
