Year in Review: Remote working

By around mid April this year, millions of office workers around the world had stopped commuting, stayed home and became remote workers, many for the first time. What had previously been an esoteric modus operandi for a small group of small sized tech companies suddenly became the default setting for almost everybody in the global knowledge economy.

We’ve learned a huge amount during this great social experiment. Mainly, that business functions in the knowledge economy pretty much continued as they did before. And that remote proved not only possible, but in many cases, preferable, to working on premise. CEO’s took note of the reported gains in productivity; CFO’s saw the fixed costs of empty commercial real estate; CHRO’s saw the expansion of the total addressable talent market offered by the distributed way of working. And us – the workers – embraced the opportunity to set our own schedules, in our own spaces, in our own time. Nobody missed the commute.

But the shift to remote was not without challenges. Sudden removal of human proximity turned out to be psychically challenging; dangerously so for some. And those of us who shared our homes, now also shared work spaces, often to chaotic results. And all the while, nagging doubts about all the other stuff that goes on in business where personal contact was the generally the way to get things done; the talk we needed about promotion; the airing of petty grievances about you-know-who; the latest bit of company news only for those in the know; and the innovation that comes from spending a sustained periods of time with colleagues.

In the final analysis, I suspect that Heather McGowan will be right – we’ve learned too much these past 12 months to simply revert back to way things were. But equally we might find that going full remote will require demands and trade offs we’re unwilling to make.

Of course Recruiting Brainfood is going to be here collect it and to curate it. The newsletter saw a massive 376% increase in the number of remote working articles posted in 2020 vs the last 3 years combined. More on remote working was produced and consumed in this year than any of the years before. Here is the best of what we talked about:

The Year of Gitlab

No company had a 2020 quite like Gitlab. A remote only business long before Covid, the company’s concurrent commitments to transparency and documentation – remember, written communication over verbal communication, in a remote first world! – meant that the software company became the de facto resource hub for how-to remote.

Their Manifesto is right there. As is their comms handbook. And their compensation calculator. The employee benefits scheme. And so on. So much so that Gitlab’s Head of Remote – Darren Murph – soon found himself acting as an impromptu consultant on the Gitlab way, as well hitting the webinar / podcast circuit as a suddenly in-demand speaker.

As if the kudos wasn’t enough, Gitlab ended their year raising another mega round in a secondary share sale. They no doubt continue to fly the flag for remote first, remote only operating model. A company to keep an eye on? I suspect we won’t be able to get them out of the news or this newsletter in 2021.

HR Open Source? Yes, finally

The shunting of the entire knowledge economy from office to remote generated challenges which were swiftly met by solutions created and shared on the very technologies which made remote working possible.

Need all-in-one remote working handbook? There’s a Notion for that

Communicating policy to your newly distributed employees? Try this Coda

How about something to do with the stay-at-home kids? Google doc

The decentralised production and distribution of these invaluable resources was one of the defining features of the 2020. We learned to collaborate not just internally with in-group (i.e colleagues) but externally, with out-group - with people we didn’t know, maybe would never meet. This cross company collaboration – as individuals rather than as company reps – might well turn out to be one of the most important, embedded lessons we pick up from 2020. HR – one of the most closed of organised departments – finally learned to open source.

Many Flavours of Remote

At around about the time we got used to the idea that maybe remote was here to stay, we began to realise there were actually different flavours of remote that we’re going to need to choose from.

Remote friendly, Remote first or Remote only? It is still all too new, so we've settled for ‘temporarily remote switching to remote friendly when it becomes safe to do so’

This ‘hybrid’ model of remote work is a cop out of course.

We know this already because almost all pre-covid remote organisations tried hybrid first before abandoning it as unworkable. For now, it’s convenient fudge on a choice we don’t yet have to make, but when we do need to make it, we’ll find that splitting our workforce into two is going to eliminate any efficiency gains made from shifting to remote, whilst adding massive ongoing overhead of managing two cultures which will inevitably diverge over time. Like installing two operating systems on the same computer – it can be done, but why would you do it?

Remote should polarise.

Those that can go back to fully on-premise – and retain or replace their talent – will do it; those that can go fully remote only – and retain or replace company culture – will do that. Those that can do neither will have to invest enormous energy and resources into building the institutional scaffolding to concurrently manage and consistently align two operating models of organisation in the same business. This maybe what most of us end up doing. As suboptimal as the middle way may be, politically it is the most palatable and practically requires the least decision making to get started on a path. This is will mean more – and new – work for us in HR. Dark clouds, silver linings.

Virtual Recruitment Conferences!

We learned a great deal about virtual conferences. Mainly that we don’t like them very much. No one wants to sit in front of screen a watch someone speak at them for 30 minutes. Fewer still wanted to repeat the experience and go on to Session No2….

Turns out the real reason why we loved conferences wasn’t the talks on stage but the talking we did off stage. As #trumunity OG’s already knew, it was in the foyer, in the hallway, at the party, at the restaurant where the real value was to be had. The main purpose of conferencing wasn’t the knowledge share from the main stage but the making and renewing relationships between everyone else who showed up. They were the seasonal potlatches of the industry – and doing it by remote really wasn’t doing that at at all.

But there was something there.

Joanne Lockwood on Discord was perhaps the first to do a conference which made some of that magical serendipity of unforced networking happen. SOSU from Phil Tusing was the second which nailed the networking part, primarily with a new conferencing tool, Remo – a Hong Kong based software application looks like it might have once been a restaurant floor plan app. And Matt Burns pushed the boat out a ludicrous distance from shore with the uber ambitious and needle moving Global HR Summit – the world’s first HR conference in AltSpace.

These innovative online events, all using technology not designed for the purpose, suggest that there are already or will be in near future, viable digital alternative to in-person events. The opportunity – as seen by Hopin’s ludicrous rise to unicorn status in less than 12 months – is enormous who can grasp it.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

The shift to remote changed the way we communicated. Synchronicity went from the being the most, to least, efficient way of communicating with colleagues. In fact, in the remote world we found that if we waited for synchronicity to happen, it never would, so learnt quickly to schedule in every instance which required speaking to another human being, into the calendar. Then, as Zoom fatigue inevitably set in, we began to question what exactly was required in this 1-2-1 meeting that couldn’t be communicated in email?

Again, we only have to look at those who have gone before to find out the reasons why. Synchronicity is stressful because there is an imbalance of information between the requesting and accepting parties. The requester is in the drivers seat – they know what the meeting is going to be about, have a plan about what they want the other person to do; the accepter doesn’t and can only hope not be ambushed. Insistence on synchronicity is repeated assertion of this imbalance – toxic to relationships, terminal to motivation.

So synchronicity is out, aside from when it is neutralised by routine (daily standup) or invoked as a check in or course correct. Everything else, needs to be written down. Ideally in the project wiki.

Professional vs Personal

The shift to remote might also have decisively ended the division between our professional and personal selves. Social media had already made the line difficult to police but the shift to remote made it entirely futile to try. Working from homes not yet configured for purpose meant that domesticity inevitably spilled onto screen. We dealt with it like we dealt with a lot of the new this year – initially dislocated, then kind of charmed, before quickly and imperceptibly making it mundane.

What does this mean for the future of work?

It may be a bigger deal than we currently realise. Our domestic lives were never separable from our professional ones, only hidden from view for reasons which we now struggle to explain. The fact that we have full lives outside of work has now been ideologically embraced by managers who themselves have had the same experiences and can no longer set expectations for staff that they wouldn’t follow themselves. We will see new language , mindset and policy toward employees. Expect: more talk on hiring ‘the full human being’, increase of optionality for those human beings, consequently a proliferation of different working styles, greater flexibility of working times, and perhaps – eventually – a full on customisation of jobs to best suit the circumstances of every worker.

Greater organisational complexity then, which should again mean more – and new – work for us in HR.

Who pays for Remote?

Deutsche Bank raised more than a few eyebrows with a report in November arguing the case that the newly remote workers should incur a surtax of 5% income, in recognition of both the increase in standards living acquired by not having to commute, and in order to pay for those who were unable to work from home and still had to do so. Met with predictable furore from the twitteratti, the idea – only ever a speculative report – was quickly forgotten. But the moment gave us a glimpse of the underlying tensions – between government vs employer, government vs citizen, employer vs citizen – triggered by the shift to remote: mainly, who was going to be pay for it?

We had arguments from employees that employers should compensate them for the expense of refurbishing their homes into workspaces

We had arguments from employers that the newly remote should accept a cut pay for staff who no longer have to incur cost of commute

We had arguments from government that remote workers should return to the office, in order to revive the trillion dollar office economy, and the trillion dollar night economy which is dependent on it.

For the last one, it may already be too late. The newly remote were quick to assess that if we're going to be predominantly based at home, then we may as well do it from a bigger home, ideally in a nicer place. Relocating away from super expensive metropolitan centres (remember when ‘superstar cities’ were a thing?) to more affordable regional towns gave rise to its own phenomenon – the Rise of Zoom towns. Likely to be the one of the most significant socio-economic trends launched by Covid-19, the reversal of urban agglomeration enabled by remote working – unthinkable 12 months ago – may inadvertently achieve the sort of economic ‘levelling’ that had long frustrated the planning and policy of national governments. What do national economies look like when house prices collapse in London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco? A popping of a speculative property bubble certainly, but perhaps also a more even distribution of national wealth and economic opportunity, the decade longs absence of which found political expression in Trump, Brexit and the rise of the right wing throughout Europe.

Remote….all the way to Barbados

And yet every silver lining, always darker clouds. Taken to its logical conclusion, national economic levelling should prove only to be a temporary pitstop towards a more fundamental international economic levelling. After all, if location of some work is truly is irrelevant, then that work will go to where ever it can be most efficiently done.

Tech was once again the first to forewarn that remote working was a precursor to off shoring and that knowledge work was particularly suitable work to move. Fittingly, we are seeing it again first in tech, where remote anywhere jobs from San Francisco based companies attract talent from Berlin tech workers, who stay in Berlin but earn as if they they were in SF. The response of Berlin tech companies losing workers this way? Post replacement remote anywhere jobs pay Berlin salaries for engineers who can stay in Poland. And so the cascade begins, as remote jobs that can be done anywhere, migrate to those places where it can be done most efficiently.

In some respects, we are seeing a return of the 'War for Talent', this time with different protagonists (country vs country rather than company vs company) and with subject-object reversal (jobs move, not the labour). Have in demand skills and want to live in paradise? Barbados is hiring.

Ultimately the rise of remote anywhere may well go a long way toward rebalancing the inequities which have been present in the global economy since the Age of Discovery and dominance of the European then US led worlds. Will ‘the West’ be prepared for a future where the wealth of the world is shared more equally? Now there’s a DE&I challenge for you.

Short term though, TA have got a lot of work to day. We need remote worker compensation models, ultimate source sites where these jobs will end up (and build up sourcing capacity in those places) and find a solution to pay a remote anywhere worker in a tax compliant way. Remote.com raised $35million to be the Transferwise for payroll. I should expect they will be in for a busy 2021

Top Brainfood Posts in 2020

• Quarantine will normalize WFH & recession will denormalize full-time jobs, by Abe Winter. A far sighted post which not only recognises the permanence of the shift to remote, but an intriguing second order effect of this shift – de-normalising full time jobs. The shift to remote challenges the integrity of the company, and all of the institutional roles in a company. Portentous for us talent acquisition – what will our work look like when the great unbundling occurs?
• Our remote future is going to suck, by Sean Blanda. Another outstanding far sighted post, this time warning that the logical outcome of the shift to remote, is offshoring the work to where it can be done most efficiently.
• The implications of working without an office, by Harvard Business Review. Some interesting insights on the potential damage to ‘weak ties’ (read your Granovetter) that the absence of the office will bring. Some might say that this will lead to less cronyism and greater meritocracy; others might say that is not how the world works
• “I’ve spoken to 1,500 companies….” by Chris Herd. Twitter threading done right by the CEO of Firstbase, who mega thread ended up being read by tens of thousands of people eager to get chunkable advice on how to do remote.
• 6 steps towards hiring as a fully remote team, Parabol. Loads of great content written by vendor side this year on remote work but I’m picking this one out from Parabol because it manages to combine practical how-to with some deep insight on candidate psychology and hiring manager bias, whilst delivering it all in an accessible easy-to-read way

Further reading…..

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Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, the industry newsletter for the talent industry.

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