Today’s date, the date I’m publishing this, is Monday, March 13th, 2023. three years ago today, it was the ultimate Friday 13th, it was the day that we were going to test the whole company working remote, to see how our systems could handle bandwidth and communication, etc., with the very clear understanding we’d be back at work as normal on the Monday.

Fast forward 165 days and we were back for our first day, and, as with everywhere reopening, it was among a sea of 6ft markings on floors and desks, masks on, hand sanitizer at every available station and temperature scanning on entry. I’ve written previously on the resilience we found to navigate the uncertain landscape, today I’m interested in how, with three years of perspective, our way ways of working have changed and what this might mean for the future.

Before the pandemic hit, 6% of the estimated US workforce was remote. The global events of H1 2020 caused that to spike up to 42% before stabilizing around the 26% mark. Regardless of personal or professional preference, hybrid work is clearly a huge part of the old ‘new normal’.

One clear outcome of the pandemic was the advancement of hybrid ways of working. As in the graph above, not only did we see a spike but also a relative stabilization - moving to nearly a quarter of the ~170m Americans in the workforce classifying themselves as working remote, not to mention those who operate on a more hybrid model.

It is hard to remember now exactly what it felt like not knowing if the whole globe was shut down for a few weeks, months or years, nor how novel the concept of working from home was. The relationship between work and professional life was put into sharp relief, whether it was the size and layouts of what were previously perfectly adequate apartments, kids doing remote learning or quite how much time we had been spending commuting.

We rapidly became experts in Zoom, Microsoft Teams and BlueJeans, we found out who was a camera-on person as opposed to a camera-off and still, three years later, I don't know anyone who has a 100% success rate of coming off mute before speaking.
Benefits from an individual perspective became clear, there was more time to be productive and with all meetings being virtual it meant that there was suddenly a flexibility to where and when those meetings took place. At the same time the boundaries between work and personal became more blurred, I personally ended up starting earlier and finishing later and I especially felt the psychological impact of seeing my improvised work set-up all day long, enticing me to check emails one more time or catching up on a recorded call that I’d been unable to attend during the day.
From a business perspective the view on WFH, an acronym that I think was barely known in February 2020, is even more complicated. Hybrid or remote work inevitably opens access up to a wider pool of talent, and along with that is statically more attractive to job-seekers. Working remotely can also reduce the people cost by over $10,000 an employee, even more so if you take into account potential savings when looking at need for physical space such as offices. A lot of employers and businesses worried about the productivity of employees when not physically supervised or corralled - an argument I have no stock in, for the very simple reason that if you don’t trust your employees then you either don’t have the right team-members or the right managers.

The biggest concerns that I see from exclusively remote work are maintaining the culture and reaping the benefit of in-person collaboration.

Culture is an enormous word that is often thrown around and used as a synonym for corporate identity or, more cynically, a tool to control employees - for me it is the true meaning of putting people at the heart of decision making - culture is the environment you create for people to work within, where they can be authentic and ultimately the best version of their professional selves. It’s also the soft edges - it can be the sense of humor, the competitiveness, the social events - something I missed massively throughout the WFH periods.

We showed that it was absolutely possible to collaborate online and virtually, however there is no comparison to being in the room and bouncing off each other without a fraction of a second delay, technical issues or misread tone in IM’s. The point I am making is simply because we can do things doesn’t mean we necessarily do them better. I’ve found that by aligning office days with my team, we’ve hit a groove of being able to have our 1:1’s, our team meetings, our project touchpoint together and not only get the benefit of working together, but also continuing to drive the culture.

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