Some businesses are waging war on remote work for good and, in my opinion, mostly bad reasons, but if you look more closely, they are putting an end to one form of remote work to impose another and ultimately not solving any of the so-called problems they attribute to remote work.
Indeed, when we talk about remote work, we immediately think of people who are not physically on the premises, but if we scratch the surface a little, we realize that we can be remote while still being in the office.
And in some businesses, it’s even the norm.
In short :
- Some businesses reject remote work on the pretext of preserving cohesion, while maintaining distributed organizations that generate the same effects of distance, including within offices.
- In large organizations, teams spread across several sites or time zones collaborate remotely, regardless of their physical presence, which puts the importance of the office as a place of social connection into perspective.
- Office presence is often mistakenly perceived as a guarantee of engagement and interaction, whereas many situations illustrate real isolation despite physical proximity.
- Well-organized, well-equipped and well-managed remote teams can be more efficient and cohesive than poorly structured face-to-face teams because they are forced to be more rigorous and clear.
- The real issue is not the workplace but the quality of the organization, management and collective bond, the most problematic distance being relational and not geographical.
A distributed organization: remote work in all but name
It is not uncommon, especially in large businesses, for teams to be spread across multiple sites and floors, and sometimes across time zones as well, making work inherently asynchronous.
The paradox is that it is sometimes easier to communicate with a colleague on the other side of the world than with the one on the floor below or even your open-plan neighbor. Simply because you have to work with one and not the other and because, in the end, “operational” proximity takes precedence over physical proximity.
Having experienced being part of an internationally dispersed team, I found myself in a situation where I saw “my” team all day long on video calls and where there was a real team spirit and cohesion between us, whereas I had nothing to say to the person sitting next to me in the open-plan office, who sometimes didn’t even need to know what I was working on.
I might as well tell you that whether we were at the office or at home made no difference and the migration happened more than naturally.
So being at the office doesn’t bring people together as much as you might think. It’s not uncommon to see video meetings being organized even when everyone is on site simply because it’s easier than finding a meeting room or moving around the offices.
Meanwhile, it is common for people present in the same premises to work on projects that are completely disconnected from each other, without coordination or a shared vision. They are colleagues in that they work for the same employer but have nothing to say to each other or do together.
It is a distributed organization.
But since everyone is in an office, they tell each other that everything is going well, or at least better than if people were at home.
A managerial paradox
We therefore have a real inconsistency of perceptions.
When someone works from home, all the warning lights come on: isolation, lack of social connection, loss of performance, difficulty in collaborating, and so on.
Conversely, when a team is physically dispersed, managed remotely, without real human interaction, there is no cause for concern.
All this because the office is perceived as an implicit guarantee of cohesion, as if the simple fact of being there were enough to create a bond.
But we know that this is not the case.
Let me put it another way: you can be at the office and feel alone (What the loneliness of some remote workers really tells us and We’re Still Lonely at Work), have a manager who is on another site and who sees you working no more than if you were at home and surrounded by colleagues who have nothing to do with what you do or even who you are.
Physical presence is no guarantee
Anyone with experience of distributed work and remote work knows that the office does not create collaboration, that it is no substitute for clear management, shared objectives and team culture, and that it does not solve the problem of misalignment.
You can spend your day at the office and not meet anyone or even have nothing to say to those you do meet, you can be in an open-plan office and spend the day on Teams and be surrounded by colleagues and feel totally disconnected from the collective.
The distance is not geographical. It is organizational, cognitive and relational.
Some remote teams work better than those in the office
It is the inconvenient truth that some management, managers or HR do not want to see: 100% remote teams, well-structured, well-equipped, well-managed, can be more efficient, more united and more engaged than physically present but poorly managed teams.
Why? Because when you work remotely, you don’t have the luxury of approximation. And when I say remote, I’m talking about people who work from home as well as people who are in the office but in multiple locations.
It is necessary to:
- Formalize exchanges.
- Structure the transmission of information (CRM can save your business, but not the CRM you think!).
- Clarify roles, rituals and decisions.
- Intentionally create connections.
- Develop the necessary soft skills (The importance of soft skills in operational excellence).
Conversely, some face-to-face teams rely on an illusion of cohesion when there is no shared vision, no real synergy and no sense of belonging.
Bottom line
Working remotely does not mean being outside the walls of the business; it means not being physically with those with whom one works. And it does not pose any problem if one knows how to organize oneself for it, if one knows how to manage in this context.
The real distance that causes problems has nothing to do with the workplace: it’s being outside the game, outside the collective, outside a shared vision. And that distance can set in right in the middle of the office.
The real issue is not remote work but an organization’s ability to build relationships, maintain a collective dynamic, and intelligently manage collaboration regardless of location. Work is more a state of mind than a place.
The office is not a cure for organizational problems; worse, it is often just a placebo.
Image: empty open space by Giulio_Fornasar– stock.adobe.com
