Revisiting Remote Work

David looks at the current data and weighs all the pros and cons of continuing to have staff who work from home in our post-pandemic economy, which makes Blair wonder if he would even survive if he was starting out in his profession today.

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“The Pros/Cons of Remote Work”

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, our topic today that you've chosen is a very hot topic. There's a new trend in the working world. What's it called? Work from home? Remote work?

David C. Baker: Remote work.

Blair: It's a hot new thing. It's just happening. It's just taking off. Why this? Why now?

David: Because our industry is really struggling with it.

Blair: Is it?

David: Yes, the owners are. The principals are. Not the team. It was just this wonderful development at the beginning of COVID because it enabled you to still have a business, right? There was very little second-guessing of it and so on. Now we've settled back in, and we're just thinking a little bit more deeply about it. Now, I think that the employee pool generally loves it, but there are some little rumblings underneath that mean maybe it needs a second look. The first thing I would say about this is if this were democracy, then remote work would be here to stay all the time for now. I think in a couple of years, there might be some dissenting voice.

We're not running democracies, right? There are times when the team as a whole is going to make a decision that's more short term than long term. I have a professional opinion about this, and then I have a personal opinion about it. The two are not the same, so this should be interesting. Your opinions are probably the same on both as far as I can tell. I'm not sure where you are on this.

Blair: Yes, I'm not sure where I am on this either. I guess you would say we are hybrid, and maybe we're only hybrid because I bought a building and renovated an office. I'm in it now, but I rarely come here. I've read your notes and I've read your post on it, and I think, to me, it feels like it's a little bit in flux. Let's get into some of the research that you've done and what you're seeing.

David: Two sides to that, really. One is that most of the research that is influencing our public opinions comes from call centers.

Blair: I did not realize that. That really struck me. Why is that?

David: It's because it's so easy to measure productivity. You've got the surveillance state all over this, and people are tending to work remotely because that's just the nature of the workforce. Almost all of the research, like more than 80% of the research comes from call centers. We're not running call centers. That doesn't mean that we throw all the results out. It just means we need to think about it a little bit more. That's one side of the research pool. The other side is research from our industry. This was collaboration with Forrester by the SoDA Global Network Society of Digital Agencies. I'll just read the sentence here.

It says, "Over the past three years, much has been made of the benefits of the hybrid remote work environment, but a strong minority of agencies report declines in company culture, 49%, internal team communication and collaboration, 43%, and to a lesser extent, levels of creativity and innovation, 34%." Here's where what seemed like something that was universally loved by the team, we have a little bit of dissent bubbling up. I can't vouch for the research, but I don't have any reason to doubt it. That's a pretty strong signal outside of a call center that we either need to rethink this or we need to shore up our policies so that we can counteract some of the negative implications that come from remote work. That's the big point.

Blair: Do you think all the votes are in, so to speak, in terms of, have we been running this experiment long enough to know what's really going on yet?

David: No, I don't. Because in the early days of this-- Now, a lot of firms were remote all along, so that's different. They had generally good experiences or they would have changed, but most of the firms were not remote. What we did is we took a team that had already worked together. They already had this fabric of trust underneath their culture. There was a diaspora where they were scattered. We can't expect that to be representative of what will happen when you hire somebody in from the outside who's never been a part of a working environment face to face. No, I don't think we know exactly what's going to happen. I'd say another year-and-a-half, two years before we really know.

Blair: Going back to, you asked me my opinion on this, I think as somebody who grew up professionally in the office environment, and I know what's gained, and I have a sense of what's lost. Although, my role is different now as a business owner and it's a pretty small team. Two of them are family members. I do have a sense of what it was like before. Maybe it's just nostalgia for those old days. My sense is, I think it's another four or five years before we get a sense of what is truly lost. We'll talk about what's gained and I think we'll talk about that next under the banner of advantages. Most of those are pretty obvious. I think on what we're giving up, it's not as obvious and it's going to take some time to bubble up.

David: My personal opinion doesn't really matter here. I keep hearing from principals who regret remote work but are afraid to talk about it. I can't measure that. Here's one anecdotal report. I was on the phone with a really well-known branding firm, and there was the typical diaspora during COVID. Now half the team is still in the city, the other half has moved for good reasons, family, less expensive homes and so on. He has tried to bring the team back together, and there's just been this huge pushback from, as you would expect, the half that are not there now. He is seriously considering closing the firm and restarting it with new people.

Blair: Wow.

David: I've only heard that once. That's obviously way at the extreme of this, but I do know people that are really struggling. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that they have this expensive facility. I think it's just simply what they think is happening around the quality of the work and the culture. Then on the other side, there are many, many principles who absolutely love remote work and they see the disadvantages but they feel like they're not insurmountable. There are big advantages.

Blair: I can understand that as a business owner and CEO who struggles with rising up above the day-to-day of the business. Being remote, not being in the same office as others has really allowed me to do that, to not stick my fingers where maybe it's not appropriate to stick my fingers in. If that describes you, the listener, then I can see how the advantage of not being in the office is beneficial. There is something you give up. You have the sense of maybe like mild panic of what's really going on.

David: Yes, I can see that.

Blair: Did you say that employees are generally in favor of this and principles not as much? Is that what you said?

David: Yes. Employees are generally in favor of it, but it's not universal, for sure. I would say the flip side of that, there's probably a slight majority of principles that would prefer face-to-face work environments, but many, many, a large minority that would prefer remote, they see the advantage. I've written out four advantages. I think two of them are just so significant and the other two are kind of minor.

The first one, and these are not a surprise to anyone, is that you have a much larger employee pool to hire from. You don't have to hire somebody who's already living in your city or willing to move there. That's by far the biggest advantage. Second is that you don't have this commute issue. When we moved to Nashville 25 years ago, traffic was not an issue. I was out yesterday. I was just shocked at what my city has turned into. Those are the first two big ones. You have a large employee pool to draw from, there's no commute.

The other two are not as big, but they're there for you to think about. One is employee tenure. It seems like people tend to stay longer. Now, you have to have a perspective on that. I personally don't think that's a huge advantage, but most people do. Employee tenure seems to be longer when you allow remote work. The other is that it forces you to put systems in place because you can't just have this casual pass in the hall and check in with somebody on the status of a project. It nudges you to use the powerful SaaS tools that are out there for project management and workflow and process and so on. I don't hear many people talking about that. I think that's an advantage. It's not a massive one, but it is an advantage. Those are the four really obvious advantages to remote work.

Blair: Well, that last one of forcing the use of tools, it sure drove software sales in the last two, three years.

David: Yes.

Blair: I think we're cooling off on that a bit now. Rand Fishkin from SparkToro had a pretty good video on the combination of factors today. This is early December of 2023 when we were recording it. The combination of the economic factors that are creating some financial stress among digital firms right now. That topic does come up. I know we need to move on here, but your first point under the banner of advantages of remote work, massively larger employee pool, and your third point that employee tenure is lengthened. I'm a little surprised that that goes hand-in-hand, because now everybody's employer pool is larger. I guess the net effect of this is people have more choice. They choose jobs that are better fits for them, career-wise, skill-wise, happiness-wise, and therefore, they last longer.

David: I don't know that it's showing up in the original choice. I think it's showing up in why they don't leave for another job. They take a job and now they want to have a family in less expensive real estate area or something. In the past, they would've had to find a new job. Now they can keep the job because it allows remote working. I think that's where it's coming from.

Blair: Got you. Okay. What are the downsides or the challenges?

David: I've just listed the seven that I think are significant to varying degrees. The first is that leaders or managers are really having to learn new skills, and that's how to manage humans in a much more complex environment where you don't have the natural rubbing shoulders effect. That's one. A second is it's just so much more difficult to onboard new employees. The idea of "okay, follow me around for the first week" doesn't happen the same way when both of you are remote, so onboarding employees.

Blair: Can I just speak to that one for a minute, because I think there's an add-on to this? Onboarding new young employees. I put myself back in time to going to work in my first agency job where I learned so much via osmosis. How does somebody who's new to the industry or fresh out of school, how did they learn to do everything? How did they learn all the nuance and the stories and everything about the business if they're not rubbing shoulders with people?

David: Yes, right. One of the other disadvantages that shows up, we'll talk about, is the difference between younger and senior team members. That's really valid, yes. It almost means that you'd be a little more hesitant to hire somebody in a role at your firm who hadn't worked at another firm like yours before. That occurred to me as you were describing that. I think that would be real.

Blair: I think it begs the question, if this is a bit of a stumbling block or a barrier, how do we create the next generation of talent?

David: Yes.

Blair: I don't mean just us, but everybody, because I think one of the things we're going to get to here is more senior people like this better, more junior people don't like it nearly as much. The senior people are happy. What do we do with that information?

David: This would be really interesting to look into, and I just don't know if this is true or not, but let's say you're training to be a CPA. Maybe the osmosis you need at your first job at a CPA firm is how to deal with clients and how to read signals and so on, but the actual trade itself, you've mastered. I'm not sure that's true in our field. It seems to me like most of us learn from senior people like copywriters or programmers or people that have figured out SEM stuff. The training is not as formalized in our field. A lot of it is absorbed through just rubbing shoulders with older people. That's why this is maybe an issue. Who knows?

Blair: Your next challenge on your list here is widespread reports of loneliness and isolation. I keep hearing of these two, but you frame it as widespread reports. Has this been quantified at all in any of the research you looked at?

David: It has, yes. If people want some of this research, they can find the article I wrote on this. It's on my blog at punctuation.com. Yes, there's definitely more loneliness and isolation. This is dependent a lot on people's individual circumstances. Some people live alone and they love going to work because of the social experience that they have. It's not the same for everybody, and some people more easily make friends and they're the extroverts, other people need to be dragged into things. This doesn't surprise me at all. That's the third one, loneliness, and isolation.

The next one is, if you look at promotion rates, they vary pretty significantly between remote team members and team members that work in person. This is not an issue for a team that's entirely remote. This would show up more if you have more of a hybrid team, say half the team is at the facility and the other half is remote. The ones who are remote are simply not going to be promoted as readily. They just aren't.

Blair: I've heard Scott Galloway give advice to young people about this mixed working environment, remote and in the office. Get in the office. If you want to be promoted, get in the office.

David: Yes. Fifth, less collaboration and sharpening of ideas.

Blair: I can imagine some people pushing back on this. They would say, "Well, the tools are there. We can collaborate on Zoom. We can both be in the same Google Doc at the same time. There's Slack. There's an infinite number of tools."

David: I've had principles swear up and down on both sides of this argument I don't know personally, but the point is that none of these things are universal. There's people that think that these are true, people think they aren't, and even the people who think they're true would rate them differently. The next one is just the misunderstandings that occur when you're texting instead of talking, there's a Hanlon's razor, an issue here.

Blair: Hanlon's razor is never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence? Is that it?

David: Yes.

Blair: Or ignorance. Sorry, not incompetence, ignorance. Just not knowing.

David: This is my biggest failing as a human.

[laughter]

David: I just jump in.

Blair: It's all of us, yes.

David: Then the last challenge of remote is just the impact, and this is showing up more recently, the impact on younger versus senior. You referred to this, but it seems like senior members working remotely are not as harmed. They've already learned what they need to, but the younger teams are harmed because they are not learning as much as they need to. the other thing that completely surprised me came out of the blue. I had no idea this would happen, is that there appears to be a disproportionate impact on women who work remotely rather than men, and I simply don't understand why that's the case, but it's just something worth watching.

Blair: Hmm. I wonder why that would be the case. Yes, it is worth watching.

David: This was a very big study by three economists. It wasn't just a fly-by-night, sort of a Twitter poll. It was a real study that not only surfaced the difference between junior and senior members but also men and women. We'll have to watch that. It's here to stay. It is here to stay.

David: It is here to stay.

Blair: It's here to stay, so what principles or ideas do we want to hold in mind as we move forward into this world of remote or hybrid?

David: The first thing is don't pretend that because you don't need a facility all that money drops to the bottom line. If I were doing this again and I felt like, okay, remote is the way to do it, it makes sense for all these reasons. If wanted to mitigate the impact of remote, I would have mandatory yearly retreat. It probably would be twice a year. I would have to pay for, obviously, travel, putting people up and everything.

If somebody had a medical emergency, obviously, they couldn't come, but otherwise, it would absolutely be mandatory. During some of that time, there'd be time for people to work and catch up and interact with each other, but then a lot of it would be social and learning and so on. Of the firms that I know that are doing remote really well, all of them are doing this, and they're taking it very seriously. It is absolutely a part of the culture.

Blair: So they're reallocating their facility expense to travel?

David: Right, and being very intentional about this. By God, it's expensive to do something like this. I've always had this dream of building a really cool creative retreat that firms would come to, they'd bring all their people to, and you would just schedule it out, like a week at a time. 50-some firms could use it. They could share the expense. That would be conducive to this learning.

Blair: Remember during COVID, I texted you and another friend? I said, "Okay, let's buy a hotel in Palm Springs. You can be the bartender for just this purpose." It was another one of my silly ideas.

[laughter]

David: Yes. That would be the first thing.

Blair: I think you're onto something. The location is obviously an issue, but I think you're absolutely onto something. There's a really interesting idea there.

David: Yes, somebody who's got a lot of money and not a lot of sense, jump on that.

[laughter]

Blair: Let us know how it works.

David: The second thing I would do is I would have four or five hours a day of overlapping labor. You can assume that in a remote work environment, there are going to be people spread across time zones. Just establish this central four to five hours every day where people are expected to be working. Then the rest of that we assume they're just doing their thing and that they're not as available to collaborate with other people, so establish these overlapping, concurrent working time zones. That's the second thing I would do. What do you think of that idea?

Blair: I love it in principle.

David: Just not for yourself.

Blair: No. It would work just fine for me. I love it in principle. I guess it depends on how geographically disperse the team is. I think it's probably safe to say that if a firm was founded in, say, Chicago, the vast majority of people are within a three-hour time zone swing. The exception that immediately leaps to mind is you have a lot of dev teams over in Europe that from the West Coast, that's a nine hour time difference from the East Coast. If they're in Central European time, that's a six-hour time swing. That's not impossible.

David: I know a chief of staff person who manages the team, most of the team is in the Midwest. Her husband is stationed overseas and she wanted to be able to do this. It seems to me like, okay, if you want to do this, then you're going to have to adapt to our time zone thinking. That's just part of what it means.

Blair: Yes, that makes sense.

David: The third idea was to figure out some way to preserve the spontaneous passing in the hallways kind of thing. I have no idea how to do that, but there's got to be something that's not big brother watching you, but allows you to just spontaneously connect with people. I don't know what that solution is, but that has to be a part of what we're trying to preserve if we're trying to limit the downsides of remote work.

Blair: There are people who have built tools. I was in an owner's peer group with one of these people, and I'm not sure what the state of that software is. If you think of the web meeting software as a better representation of a physical office where you can see everybody, you can pop in, you can pop into the lunchroom. I can see how technically something like that could be enabled.

David: Yes.

Blair: That added no value to this discussion at all. Let's keep going.

[laughter]

David: Another is just being careful about contemporaneous brainstorming, but this is not actually unique to remote teams. I've been in favor of this my whole life because I've just noticed that certain personality types don't think as quickly on their feet. They come up with really great ideas two ideas later and it would just bring the whole group back. That's not unique to this, but I just think this contemporaneous brainstorming is a bad idea. Then somehow you ought to be giving people employee development opportunities where they take a course together, or they go to a seminar, or they go to a conference or something. Will try to do it, weave people together so that at least they can get to know each other and work closer together while they're at some retreat where they're learning something. That seems like a no-brainer and not a big issue, but something that we could do to help a little bit.

Blair: Got you. You've got some notes here on control freak tendencies. You're probably speaking of yourself.

David: Oh, no, no. Not me.

Blair: If I know you.

David: People are going to struggle with this because they have this assumption that somebody's not working hard or maybe they have two jobs or whatever it is. You either trust people or you don't. What I don't want is if you've got some issues where you need a therapist, well, don't take that out on your work from home or your remote policy. Separate those two things.

Blair: This issue of are people really working, when remote works started to happen, even at the beginning of COVID, we operate in a space where, as you've already mentioned, some firms have been a remote since well before the COVID pandemic. This issue used to be a really big issue. Are people actually doing the work? Has that gone away, that concern?

David: I think people are more mature about it, but no, I hear control freak principles all the time. I'm wondering about this.

Blair: If I'm fully honest and I imagined myself at the beginning of my career where I was paid to be productive, it's not like I'm not productive now, but the way I add value now in this business is in my sweet spot. I'm not crushing a to-do list and I've never been the person to crush it to-do list, but I've been in jobs where I had to crush a to-do list, and I just don't think I would have survived. I would have had a hard time staying focused if there weren't people around me checking in on how I was doing on that to-do list.

I'm revisiting my early career and cringing a little bit about it, but this is my way of saying I really do think this is an issue for people who are not in their unique ability or who are in a-- Sometimes to find our place in a business or in our career, we have to go through the jobs that we're not very good at and we have to put up a certain level of performance in those jobs to be able to get promoted into the jobs where maybe our skill sets are a little better aligned. Certainly in account management in ad agencies like where I grew up, you had to be very detail-oriented. You had to crush a to-do list at the junior level of the job.

Not that you didn't have things to do at the more senior levels, but it was more strategic, it was more about your ability to nurture a relationship, to think strategically on behalf of the client, to have the difficult conversations with parties in sometimes positions of conflict. I just don't think I could have been a junior account person working remotely. I just would not have gotten shit done, period.

David: Yes, I think that's probably true for me, too. There's an overlap between this discussion and timesheets, honestly. On the side of why we need timesheets, it's like, to plan capacity, to justify expenses to clients and all that. We can make very good arguments against those reasons. In the end, I think some principles, no matter how good the arguments were around the idea that we don't really need them, is just like, I want to know what people are doing.

Blair: I'm going to push back on that. That is such bullshit because I would do fuck all day and then still log eight hours of time on my timesheet.

David: Oh, yes, for sure. Even principals who know that, they just take some solace in the fact, well, at least they were busy on my dime, even though they didn't--

Blair: He put the eight hours in, so I'm going to build a client.

David: It's a complicated issue. Humans evolve very, very slowly. Here we had, in just a four-month period, our entire way of working changed. I think it's going to take decades to catch up to it.

Blair: Really?

David: Yes.

Blair: As we said off the top, I think it's going to take years before we see the negative impacts of this. I think the positive ones we see right away, and I think the negative ones we see signs, and we hope that will adapt or we hope that they'll improve. You might be right, maybe a decade. I think it's going to be the people who started work in the last four years, who started their careers in the last four years. Let's see where they are in 10 or 14 years. To any of my previous employers that are listening, I did do some work.

David: The people that are now remote workers are the ones who are going to be principles someday, and so it'll just be very natural. I just hope we have an open mind to the pros and the cons of this and that we address it. That's my main goal.

Blair: Okay. Any other concluding points you want to wrap up with?

David: No, I think I'm good. We've lost our remaining audience. This is good.

Blair: When are we next going to talk about this topic?

David: I'm not going to know anything more for a couple of years.

Blair: I was hoping you would say five. I'm done with it. Let's just do the work however we're doing the work. Then as the trend starts to appear, maybe we'll revisit it again.

David: Until then, just keep doing your timesheets. We'll all pretend we're busy.

Blair: Just keep filling out those lies. All right. Thanks, David.

David: Thanks, Blair.