Remote work can be far from efficient
Staggered shifts and limits of tech remind us of the office’s virtues
CONTRIBUTORS
There’s a lot of chatter about hybrid models. This means some workers will have some choice over where they work — at the office or remotely. Many upsides (e.g., less commuting) enhance the appeal, but challenges lurk.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve surveyed thousands of Canadians with the help of the Angus Reid Forum, and we recently did followup interviews with those working from home.
One theme stood out: Allowing control over where employees work blends into control over when employees work. This impacts others’ work, especially in interdependent teams. One’s autonomy is another’s ball-and-chain. Ultimately, this wrinkle might be why some hybrid models won’t endure.
“That’s where you get stuck in that perpetual work mode,” said a 28-year-old policy analyst.
“Everyone’s working slightly different schedules because of flexible work arrangements, so you’ll have more 7 p.m. emails, and it becomes easy to set aside time throughout the day to adjust to everyone else’s schedules. My manager is online around 5:30 a.m. — then he’s in total dad mode from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. So, I sometimes have meetings with him at 5:30 a.m. Then, he goes off to his kids and I jump into work. And then I have another manager … whose favourite meeting time is 5:30 p.m. OK, I started the day with a 5:30 a.m. meeting and now I’m at a 5:30 p.m. meeting.”
An extended workday is not the only complication.
“We’re all trying to be respectful of everybody’s personal clock,” said a 64-year-old communications strategist. “Working from home, the night owls and the early birds are not meshing. When we had to drag our sorry butts into the office, at least the night owls were there, and you could grab them if needed. Now, I get the ‘dumpand-run’: I wake up and my inbox has something from a night owl … but I have questions. When I reach out, they answer me at 7 p.m. I’ve lost the whole day on this and with tight deadlines, it impacts my ability to deliver. That’s frustrating.”
Is there a price to flexibility? “There’s always a price (but) I’ll pay it,” she professes.
While the days of walking down the hallway and poking your head in a colleague’s office for a stop-and-chat seem antiquated, some miss the efficiency. “Phone and Zoom calls are not the same as being physically in an office with people,” said a 52-year-old real estate law clerk. “It’s a lot easier to discuss things when you’re at an office, because you just walk over to their desk, whereas now I have to email them, try to get a hold of them, and find a good time to call.”
“That and being available all the time,” she added, “are two things I dislike most.”
Sometimes proximity matters.
“If I’ve got 15 people to get answers from, I hate to say it but holding them hostage physically does work better — I usually can get more answers,” said a 39-year-old policy analyst who was otherwise enthusiastic about remote work. A 36year-old communications adviser agreed: “Several Crown attorneys have offices near mine,” she said. “If I have a question, I walk down the hall and pop my head in, and if they don’t know they’ll say, ‘Check with so and so down the hall,’ and that takes five minutes versus a half-hour or two hours of emailing, calling, and leaving voice mails.” She laments, “the efficiency just isn’t the same.”
Syncing everyone’s personal clock gets complicated — a demand that falls heavily on already-burdened managers. The 28-year-old policy analyst empathizes: “I look at my manager’s calendar, he has daily oneon-ones with each member of our team. A lot of those were never a thing before. And it’s just because he doesn’t have the opportunities to come poke in the office and say: ‘Hey what are you working on today? Do you need anything?’ Now he must schedule those 15 minutes every day with all 14 of us … a five-minute conversation that’s now 15 minutes.”
Dump-and-runs, extended days, and inefficient meetings will happen — hybrid or not. But remote work presents unique minefields. This shouldn’t stop employers from adapting. Some already have.
A 46-year-old director of strategies described the implementation of “a timetable to ensure people allocate certain hours to be near some kind of a device … helping regulate all of our lives.”
Other tools facilitate co-ordination. A 39-year-old flight safety investigator said, “In Microsoft Teams, if the status buttons shows green and active … I will hit the dial button.”
Now, someone just needs to invent a tool to stop the dumpand-run.