Every company did not just become a fully-distributed company
I have had the privilege and pleasure to work for three fully-distributed everyone-remote companies in the last 15 years of my career.
My wife has worked from home for almost 2 years. But she doesn’t work for a hip tech startup that is fully-distributed, remote-first, or even remote-friendly. She’s one of very few individuals who worked from home at her company prior to COVID-19 lockdowns.
She’s trusted to do this, but there is always an implicit, sometimes explicit, sentiment from the management that “we don’t want people working remotely”. Before COVID-19, her boss told her that if they hear kids in the background, then they assume she’s not actually working.
Today, most everyone in her company is suddenly working from home.
While my wife was on a conference call this week, my daughter — who would normally be in daycare — screamed out from the bathroom, “Mommy! I’m done! Come wipe me!”. A perfectly normal thing for a toddler to say.
Of course, my wife felt embarrassed, and became worried she’d lose what seemingly tenuous credibility she has as a remote worker. And as a woman, she’s especially conscious of appearing unprofessional to her manager and coworkers.
When I described this situation to my colleague in our fully-distributed company, they asked “Why would her company treat her differently because of this?”
Fully-distributed companies have different DNA
In these terribly troubling times, for those of us who have been working for fully-distributed companies for years, now is a good time to remind ourselves that we enjoy something very different from what many others experience at work every day.
In each fully-distributed company I’ve worked for, there was a conscious choice to build the business on a fundamental set of ideas, two of which are:
- Work-life integration
- High trust and autonomy when it comes to time management
What is work-life integration?
Most folks are familiar with the term work-life balance — how you separate your physical and mental presence between your work and your life. It implies an either-or situation.
In a company where everyone works from home, work-life integration rejects this idea of complete separation between work and life.
Because when you’re on a video call together, you’re literally staring into each other’s homes. And you’re doing this every day.
You can try to separate home from work with a separate office space (highly recommended), but it’s inevitable…
- Your kids will walk into your office naked asking for potty help when you’re on a video call with executive leadership
- Your dog will bark furiously at the Amazon delivery person
- A significant other will accidentally walk into the room in a bath towel when you’re in a 1:1 with your boss
- Your family will be heard loudly singing showtunes in the other room when you go off mute in a big meeting
(Yes, these are all real situations I’ve seen or experienced myself over the years.)
Point is, work-life integration is part of our culture.
In fact, these funny life events are often the ones we share and repeat to each other. Yes, that time your coworkers heard you peeing because you accidentally left your mic on will be remembered forever. Naturally, you feel embarrased, but you also know this doesn’t affect your job status. (Okay okay, sure, you were pouring a glass of water in the kitchen, we believe you. 🤣)
As leaders, we accept these events because it’s happened to all of us, and we know that you need to feel safe at work in your own home.
A Reminder To Myself and My Colleagues
For other companies, this is not the norm.
For companies that are now working from home and have a strong culture of separation between work and life, managers and employees have just been jolted into a new world where the rules of work-life separation have fundamentally changed.
Since we’ve been doing this for longer, we need to help others be effective in this new world, but we also need to remind ourselves that this is not going to change another company’s culture overnight.
We can’t expect them to change their DNA to that of a fully-distributed company.
But we can talk to them about what makes a fully-distributed company’s culture special, and maybe, just maybe, when they re-open their offices, they’ll recall just how precious work-life integration can be and bring a piece of that back to their in-office culture.
For example, here are some ideas:
- Trust and encourage a new mom or dad to work from home one day a week in order to spend more time with their newborn
- Say “yes” when a parent asks to take an hour off mid-day for a parent-teacher conference
- Figure out a schedule that allows parents to get their kids on and off the bus without burdening grandparents
- Allow the occasional personal phone call during work hours
Because it all comes back to trust.
If I’ve learned anything working from home, it’s that if your company provides an amazing work culture and trusts you to do the job, most people will feel an immense internal drive to make up the hours and perform well for you. Because the opportunity to work for a great company and manager doesn’t come along often.
