As we leave the Covid-19 pandemic, new ways of life are emerging. New vaccinations have entered the fall flu shot ritual and we cautiously wait for an annual “summer covid surge.” Management experts debate the effects on productivity of a “return to the office,” and cities fret over declining tax revenue from empty office buildings.
I’m reminded of a productivity study, perhaps ephemeral, I heard about in high school. A factory experimented with lighting. They increased light on the factory floor and productivity improved. They increased light more. Productivity improved further. They were on a roll. Then someone noticed that lighting costs were high, so they decreased lighting. Astoundingly, productivity increased again. After fiddling with lighting for some time, they concluded that changing the lighting in any way short of darkness increased productivity.
I keep this story in mind while thinking about working from home.
There’s nothing easy about managing a workforce. As a cynical observer of business management, I’ll hazard that short term decisions on remote work depend more on preferences and prejudices rather than objective analysis of pros and cons. Nevertheless, eventually, a smart manager will figure out a solution in their organization that gives them a winning edge and it will be written up in the Harvard Business Review, thus becoming common knowledge.
I doubt that the smart solution will be a return to 2019. Some increase in working from home over pre-pandemic is likely, but the form and extent of that increase is still unpredictable. In any case, I will be thunderstruck if one solution is best for all enterprises.
I worked remotely long before the pandemic. I still live on a homestead farm that goes back to my emigrant great-grandparents, a heritage I will not relinquish, but I don’t have the farming gene.
Most of my career has been with multi-national corporations. For nearly thirty years my official corporate office was on the Seattle east side, a two hundred mile commute from the farm. I’ve burned outrageous airmiles, sometimes effectively commuting between the northwest corner of Washington State to a job in New York City, but most of the time my real office was in the old farmhouse on Waschke Road from which I participated in and led development teams that stretched all over the world.
I have faced the challenge of remote work. I’m not here to say that I have answers, but I have experience.
Before I go on, I should disclose that I’m an introvert. After meeting face-to-face, I seek time alone to relax and recover. After online interaction, I’m often energized. However, my preference for online connections does not reveal anything about the quality of those interactions, only that I am open to them.
Aside from the remoting forced by pandemic lockdowns, online interaction is particularly suited to the 21st century.
Having lived in the same geographic location for over seventy years, I am aware of how much life has changed in my community. When I was growing up, we had far fewer neighbors than today and most were more or less related. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, who was arguing with whom, and what they were arguing about. Calling ahead to announce a visit was unheard of and knocking was often optional. I note that in this, our life was similar to Jimmy Carter’s account of growing up in rural Georgia.
That has all changed. I have a nod-and-a-wave acquaintance with everyone living on “our” road and the four-lot development that has popped up at its end, but I don’t know all their names, and I’ve never entered most of their houses. I’m content with this relationship. My circle of friends is no longer limited to physical proximity, and I am glad it is not, because I now communicate daily with friends in every U.S. time zone and beyond.
I read and write daily emails, message, and video conference with a group of friends who share my interest in Victorian novels, software architects from my former career, a group who lived in the same dormitory fifty years ago on the South Side of Chicago, and friends from my church, which happens to be close to my old corporate office in Seattle not the farm. This bunch includes astronomers, lawyers, surgeons, geophysicists, psychologists, and chemists, very different from the narrow physical community of sixty years ago.
This in an improvement in life.
For those who cling to the magic of personal proximity, I point to Christian and Zen Buddhist communities. Today, churches hold daily online prayer sessions following centuries old traditional rites. Zen sanghas hold online zazen meditation following traditional practices. These things work. They don’t replace face-to-face interaction, but they add opportunities that didn’t exist in the past.
Is humanity about to become a disembodied digital phantasm? No. Digital connections augment physical presence, they do not replace it.
But we are entering a new world.