Part 1
What You Missed About Remote Work in 2020
Choices, Autonomy, and Remote Amplification
The headlines of early 2021 reflected the coming evolution of the workplace: remote work will become more of an option in the future for employees.
While remote work isn’t for everyone or for all organizations, employers should catch up on remote work developments they may have missed in the chaos of 2020 and consider trends we’ll see in remote work for 2021–2022.
Ignore remote work at your peril. Employers who insist that we all go back to the office may see sizable employee attrition and corresponding problems in the bottom line.
While many of us struggled with working at home with family, conflicting work schedules (and school schedules), lack of workspaces and resources, or just seeing people without a screen, several key developments in 2020 may have escaped your attention.
Choices
Many of us felt we had far fewer choices with the pandemic looming over us. But long-time remote workers know that choice is critical to remote work. People made choices about remote work long before the pandemic, as soon as tools and opportunities to work from anywhere became available. Choices included how and when they collaborated and whether that collaboration was done synchronously (online meetings) or asynchronously (messaging tools). These choices lead to other choices, like how and when to focus on deep work.
Matt Mullenweg, one of the cofounders of Automattic, described these choices in April 2020 as 5 levels of autonomy for distributed organizations.
In this modified version of Matt’s 5 levels diagram, choice begins above the gray line. Not many people in 2020 were above the gray line unless they were already remote pre-pandemic.
By September 2020, other early adopters of these remote work philosophies and methods formed the weareasync.com community launched to provide education resources for others wanting to learn these levels of autonomy. This site made the successful Level 3 and Level 4 remote companies more visible to the public.
Remote Amplifies
A few months into the pandemic, I wrote a blog post that summarized one of my key observations about working remotely for several years:
To summarize:
- Remote amplifies our relationships
- Remote amplifies possibilities to collaborate with others
- Remote amplifies our gaps (in all the above)
In other words, if we are open to new connections and new possibilities and we have the resources, working remotely can improve connections. However, if we have problems with work relationships or difficulty collaborating with others, or lack resources, remote work amplifies those problems.
Virtual Distance
In April 2020, Dr. Karen Lojeski and Richard Riley released their third book, The Power of Virtual Distance.
The Power of Virtual Distance is a unique offering that summarizes 14 years of research spanning 55 countries, 36 industries, and includes senior leaders and individual team members. The authors define virtual distance as “a felt sense of distance that grows unconsciously when we rely heavily on mediated communications through smart digital devices.”
Of the three key components of virtual distance:
- Physical distance (geography, time zones, and organization distance) is half as impactful as operational distance (tech issues, lacking skills to resolve quickly, overworked staff).
- Operational distance is half as impactful as affinity distance (closeness of relationships based on shared value systems, styles, social behaviors, relationship histories, worldview, and mental models).
In other words, remote amplifies. Remote work doesn’t amplify just what we assume it should — it amplifies the positive and negative. But building a sense of affinity can overcome many challenges, remote or otherwise. Likewise, building strong working relationships in and between teams can minimize geographic and time zone differences.
As you may imagine, we have more to discuss about remote work. In the next segment, we’ll explore another development you may have missed — the remote Agile Framework.
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to read From Chaos to Distributed Agile Teams by Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby:
Use promo code drkteams35 through August 31, 2021 to save 35% on the ebook from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Promo codes are not valid on prior purchases.
Resources
Mark Kilby offers you talks, workshops, and other hybrid-remote agile resources:
