Part 3

What You Missed About Remote Work in 2020

Navigating Future Ripples in Remote Work

Mark Kilby
The Pragmatic Programmers
9 min readJul 19, 2021

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We finally are nearing the end of the pandemic and the effects, or are we?

In 2020, the pandemic produced a big splash. However, the resulting ripples included a rapid shift to remote work, Zoom fatigue, feelings of isolation, stress built up from managing multiple responsibilities and activities at home, or just even finding a quiet place to work at home some days. Those were just the work-related ripples.

Ripples from a drop of water on a late afternoon
Photo by Izzy Gibson on Unsplash

Beware Forced Transformation

Keep in mind that the pandemic represented a forced transformation in how we work. Those of us who help guide change management efforts never use “forced” and “transformation” together. Transformations take time to be absorbed by the organization and trying to push a transformation to completion can lead to numerous problems. These problems have been well known and documented from the 1990s to even recently.

Because transformations can be challenging, some organizations try the same transformation multiple times (agile, anyone?) to different types of transformations to make a change in the business. But these frequent attempts (and failures) at systemic change produce a

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Mark Kilby
The Pragmatic Programmers

20+y remote work practitioner, organizational coach, and co-author of the book, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver.