The dark side of remote work
Summary
All’s not well in remote work paradise. For many employees a remote work arrangement is a Faustian bargain. They have to endure the dark side of remote work, summarised by the mnemonic, ABODES.
Alienation
Biases
Obstacles to organising
Dysfunctional practices
Exploitation
The Size paradox
But people still prefer remote work, because it buys them time with family, reduces their commute time and gives them flexibility. This’ll help remote work survive its current crisis, but we must remedy the ABODES problems if this work pattern must proliferate.
I’m a remote-work evangelist. It’s a pattern of work that’s popular with the people companies employ, it’s a way for corporations to be more profitable, and it’s also kinder to the planet. When a mode of organising workers ticks the people, profits and planet boxes, companies must adopt that pattern of work. Indeed, most of us remote work advocates will agree that the world of work is already “distributed by default” and as Nicholas Bloom has said, we’re set to see a Nike swoosh effect in the future. In other words, he expects a rapid rise in remote work in the coming years.
But as I say this, it would be dishonest to ignore that many companies aren’t ready for a remote-first future. Even when people like me argue in favour of remote work, we present an ideal conception of this work pattern, which isn’t ubiquitous in the average corporation. Only a handful of companies embrace the Internet as their default medium of work and design their work processes for this medium. The rest take one of three approaches.
They either give in to the will of their employees and call themselves “remote-first”, without modernising their work processes.
Or they adopt what they think is the middle ground; a.k.a “hybrid”; which is problematic on many counts. As DHH says, it’s the Machiavellian middle that combines the worst of office and remote work.
And then there’s the third approach. Roll out a return-to-office (RTO) plan whether or not it makes sense for your company. These companies grapple with poor morale and a divide between employees and their managers and they externalise many costs.
While #1 above seems like a win, I argue we ignore its dark side. Remote work, done badly, may still be good for the planet, maybe even profits, but it can hurt people in the long run. And in today’s post, I want to unpack that dark side for you.
Remote work can be alienating
While I have no love lost for the office, it had a redeeming quality. It was easier to know your coworkers, beyond the work you did together. Whether through a disarming smile or jokes you cracked in the hallway or lunch you shared, you got to know the human beings that were your colleagues.
When you go remote and toss away the ill effects of offices, this redeeming quality can become a casualty, especially if you haven’t paid attention to the design of your digital workplace. Before long, our colleagues are less human to us and we treat them like fungible resources.
While at the individual level, you can still take this transactional approach to work and collaboration, at scale, it becomes dangerous. Leaders have even less of a reason to think of people as human beings first. If you were earlier responsible for a hundred people you knew, now you’re only in charge of a hundred resources. Resources, that as capitalism taught us, we must utilise as best as we can. This leads to dehumanising language - think “supply and demand”, “headcount”, “human capital”, “manpower”, “leverage”, “balance of power”, “labour market”. The more dehumanising language we use, the more it translates to poor workplace behaviours and policies.
I don’t imply that leaders have poor intentions. But you know all too well that it’s hard to empathise with people you don’t know. Leaders already face a tough task with the Dunbar number - we can only maintain 150-odd meaningful relationships with people. An alienating model of remote work makes this demanding job, even harder.
Now I must acknowledge that remote-native companies have recognised this pitfall and guarded against it, by funding in-person interactions. That isn’t something we can say about all firms that went remote during and after the pandemic. By the way, people run firms and that brings me to the next pitfall of remoteness.
Biases can erode remote work benefits
Remote work didn’t make our human frailties disappear overnight. All of us have biases and these impede our judgement. The world of work has improved a lot since I got my first job. For example, we are far more intentional about including historically underrepresented minorities in the workplace. We have a long way to go if workplaces must be microcosms of the society they exist in but we make conscious efforts to include women and underrepresented gender minorities (WUGM), black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC), and people with disabilities (PwD) in the workplace. We know that each of these groups benefits from remote work (see here, here and here) and companies are often willing to support these groups by offering them flexible work arrangements.
But what happens when men, the historically overrepresented members of the workforce, ask for remote working arrangements? Our workplaces continue to be hyper-masculine, so men experience discrimination when they violate masculinity norms. Let me give you some examples.
Employed fathers experience flexibility stigma when they seek workplace arrangements or workplace benefits that accommodate caregiving responsibilities.
Employers perceive men who request family leave or reduced hours as poor workers. (Berdahl and Moon; Rudman and Mescher; Vandello et al.).
Men who opt out of work for family reasons later experience lower wages, and employers consider fathers who do so less hireable.
When evaluating job applicants, employers discriminate against men who signal a history of employment in jobs which facilitate caregiving, including part-time work.
Many employers and managers can’t compute that men too can have a share of domestic responsibilities. This means that in many companies if men ask for a flexible work setup, it limits their career options. We get rid of one kind of gender bias, only to fall prey to another. As a single parent to my daughter, this raises my hackles.
That aside, we retain several biases from our pre-pandemic work experience. Managers have grown into their jobs by learning “management by walking around and looking” a.k.a MBWAL. If they hold up this model as the epitome of great management, then by association, they can’t trust the people they don’t see. They blame their remote colleagues for “quiet quitting”, moonlighting and slacking off.
Moreover, when companies retain some office space while endorsing remote work, they rarely rid themselves of proximity bias. If managers frequent the office, then they often perceive people who they see in the office as more dedicated and productive. The people in close physical proximity also benefit from better roles, favourable work allocation and promotions. This breeds toxic workplaces that employees are powerless to push back against.
When you must push back, organising is hard
The genius of modern capitalism is that it pays top-dollar to skilled knowledge workers while encouraging them to be glorified freelancers. Many of us have grown up on the narrative that unions are bad and that they destroy companies. We forget that many of our current day privileges such as the 40-hour work week or parental leave came about thanks to organised campaigning. Unions are a missing, yet essential part of the modern workplace.
No company, not even companies that have socialist founders, encourage unions. If anything, they actively discourage employees from organising and bargaining collectively. I encourage you to watch John Oliver’s entertaining video to learn more about this topic.
Of course, this isn’t a recent phenomenon with remote work. But remote work makes organising even harder than it was in the past. Back in the day, if your employer rolled out an unpopular policy, it was easy to sense the disgruntlement amongst your colleagues. Even if you couldn’t unionise, you could at least organise around a common angst. The office was a medium to share collective concerns and to know that you’re not alone. Even if the company discouraged such organising on their premises, you could get together at a restaurant or a bar after work and discuss your issues with someone else.
It’s not impossible to organise and band together in a remote company, but you need communication platforms to do this. Enterprise social networks are an effective way to help people connect, but few companies have these in place. And even where such platforms exist, it’s not safe to have frank conversations without the fear of retaliation. Companies don’t have any incentive to foster dissent, do they?
The other aspect of organising, is implicit labour solidarity. You see, we knowledge workers are the labour elite. We enjoy many work privileges; remote work included; that make us look beyond the problems of modern employment. But there are our less privileged compatriots who work in hotels, factories and mills. While we, the labour elite have almost given up on organised struggle, these other workers often band together for their rights and demands. Back when we worked in the office, if there was ever a labour strike, the office would also have to close down, even if they did so reluctantly. We'd all grumble about the strike, but by closing the office we were implicitly supporting our less priveleged compatriots’ struggles. That was a good thing. Today, these same people could be protesting on the streets, and your employers could close their empty offices and still not feel the pinch of reduced economic output. In a way, our remote working privilege undermines labour solidarity. Of course, this suits capitalism just fine. After all, most employers want you to do your work and not be a pain in the wrong place.
But dysfunctional practices make work harder when remote
As I’ve noted earlier, remote work depends on the internet as a medium for work. Most companies had an office-centric way of working until the pandemic struck. To this day, the remote work that most teams engage in pastes this office-centric model onto the new medium which is the internet. This leads to what Cal Newport calls the hyperactive hivemind and what I call the office in the cloud phenomenon.
I’ve written A LOT about this topic on this website, so I won't repeat myself. You can start with the first article from this project if you want to examine all the problems with legacy ways of working. But here’s what I’ll say. If you don’t have effective processes and systems for remote collaboration, the resulting ad hoc, unscheduled back-and-forth interactions make work harder. And when your work becomes harder, it ceases to be fun and takes longer to complete. Burnout becomes commonplace.
Burnout, what burnout?
Do you know what’s worse than burnout? It’s when being burnt out is the baseline expectation. A few weeks back, Narayana Murthy - the founder of Indian IT firm, Infosys - urged people to work 70 hours a week. He invoked a familiar trope - making the nation prosperous - to justify this preposterous demand. Nationalism, it seems, is the veneer you need to put the sheen on exploitative work arrangements.
Despite criticism (see here and here), it didn’t surprise me to see many celebrity founders endorse Murthy’s clarion call. Shantanu Deshpande of the Bombay Shaving Company had already spoken of 18-hour workdays. Bhavish Agarwal of Ola joined the chorus saying that 70 hours is the norm at his company. Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Naukri.com went on to say that employees shouldn’t expect work-life balance in startups. That all these suggestions run afoul of India’s labour laws seemed like an irrelevant, technical detail.
“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.” - we got to that arrangement after a century of labour struggle. But in the name of “entrepreneurship” and “hustle culture”, capitalist bosses will do their best to reverse those hard-fought gains. Especially in the global south, where employees aren’t litigious and employers have a feudal mindset, this kind of exploitation becomes commonplace.
Remote work makes such exploitation easier. When you work from home, which is the most common remote work arrangement, the boundaries between work and life become blurry. Companies can offer you remote work as a fig leaf and ask for “flexibility” in return. That flexibility is a way to justify many excesses - long hours with no overtime or late hours that take a toll on your personal life. You see yourself apologising for even having a life outside work. The lesser known a company’s brand and the smaller they are, the more it can fly under the radar with such exploitation. Which leads me to my last point.
The size paradox
If you ignore the shock value of Narayana Murthy’s comments, you’ll notice that the company he founded isn't making an official statement about a 70-hour work week. No large IT employer will make this an official policy, because it breaks the law. Since most of these companies are publicly traded, and household names, they have a brand perception to maintain. So even if they informally coerce employees to work long hours, they can’t make burnout a company norm. There’s way too much at stake.
A smaller company; let’s say a startup; that’s either VC funded or bootstrapped, doesn’t have any of these image concerns. Many such companies haven’t even figured out their business models, let alone being concerned about their employer brands and their public perception. Sometimes, founders only care about the following acquisition, after which they can move to their next venture. “Embracing the hustle”, “customer obsession”, “growth at all costs”, “entrepreneurial spirit”, “pursuit of excellence” and other such motivating catchphrases become excuses to demand overwork, in these setups.
Smaller companies are also less likely to invest in the tooling and the process discipline you need for effective remote work. In contrast, bigger companies provide a better environment for remote work. But which companies are more likely to offer remote work? Well, the smaller ones. And which companies are likely to enforce an RTO mandate? The bigger ones.
And there lies the size paradox. The large companies that have systemic counterbalances for remote work, are the ones that prefer it least. So at least in the short term, it won’t surprise me if remote workers are also the most stressed and overworked.
I may have painted such a dreary picture of remote work in this post, that you may think I’ve become a turncoat. That’s not the case though. I have, however, recalibrated how I expect remote work to proliferate. A couple of years back, I thought that remote work would see exponential growth, despite all the RTO pushback. The semiconductor crisis, crypto crash, inflation and wars have affected the economy and as a result, the bargaining power employees have with their employers. That’s slowed down the growth of remote work. But as the market comes back up, I don’t believe remote work will see corresponding growth. We’ll probably notice an extended plateau before we see the Nike swoosh that Nick Bloom expects.
This doesn’t change the fact that remote work will continue to be popular with workers. I imagine that you’d have identified with one or more of the ABODES problems I identified earlier in this post.
Alienation
Biases
Obstacles to organising
Dysfunctional practices
Exploitation
Size paradox
The bright outweighs the dark, but remote work is still a Faustian bargain for some
Despite those problems on the dark side, employees weigh them against the top three benefits of remote work - no commute, time with family and flexibility. People hate commuting so much (Daniel Kahnemann told us so in 2004) and they value flexibility and the extra time they get back with family so much that they’ll look past most problems of remote work. That’s quite different from saying that remote work is the best arrangement for them. But that’s also why remote work will outlive its present-day crisis.
Before I sign off, I must also tell you why I’m optimistic about the future of distributed work. It all comes back to the few teams and companies that are paying careful attention to the design of their digital workplace and presenting their models back to all of us. Atlassian, is one of them. With Annie Dean at the helm of their Team Anywhere program, they’ve now distilled their learnings into a fascinating report. I’ve embedded it below, for your reading pleasure.