The Telecommute Dispute

This article is based on the transcript from the Cafe Grit Podcast, S1E8.

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🕰 As I write this we entered our seventh month of The Covid. Bazillions of people began working from home when the lockdowns started.

And many still were.

It was a little shaky in some areas. People weren’t used to remote work so there was a learning curve. Equipment, office logistics, dealing with kids and spouses; adapting to coffee or tea that doesn't taste like an old shoe; the psychological adjustment of not being around people in the office anymore. 😳

Some people managed it better than others. What’s that meme that was going around about introverts?

“I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life.” 🤣

For the most part, employees adjusted well. Some companies were even staying in a work-from-home model. And I applauded those companies. 👏🏻👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾👏🏿

But I wondered if the misconceptions about working from home would persist when the pandemic was behind us.

✅ Even when so many people have done it.

✅ The world didn’t stop turning.

✅ The infrastructure held up (or it was updated quickly enough), even though there were some shaky days.

✅ Productivity continued, even improved in some places.

✅ Employees became, in some cases, more reactive and more available.

✅ A lot of people found that they actually prefer telecommuting.

Even given all of the evidence that working from home is not only a viable alternative but in some cases a better and more preferred one, I wondered if the perception would really change. 👁 👁

I have worked in a home office for over 4 years now with no problems. And I work with many people who have been remote since before The Covid.

🏢 But before that, I worked at a big company where most people reported to an office.

I worked in the technology department, which was well ahead of the average 💻. We had many 24/7 on-call teams who routinely dialed in from home for crisis calls and other emergency situations 🚨. We worked big projects with long days and sometimes we’d do work after-hours from home. Even our company help desk was outsourced and most of the reps worked away from the office.

✋🏽 Yet, even within my own department I routinely got pushback when I put in requests for team members to work from home as part of a regular schedule.

I hired a number of people to my team over the course of six years, and many of them came from other departments within the company. These were company employees with years, even decades of experience, and work ethics that were exemplary. If they were in elementary school, they’d have been given gold stars every day and perfect attendance awards at the end of the year. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

They also lived, some of them, a bit of distance from the corporate headquarters where my team and I sat.

🚘 They had commutes ranging from 45 minutes to over an hour and that’s a long commute even when you don’t have families and pets that need to be taken care of and, oh, I don’t know…a life?

So for several of them, I requested approval for part-time work-from-home schedules when they onboarded.

And I did get some resistance from management.

Now, I’m going to tell you right up front that it was not hard resistance. They were in the category of “I have concerns, it makes me a little uncomfortable.”

And I did get my way in all cases. Thank yuh…thank yuh very much.

But I had to do a little convincing 🙏. They had the same kinds of misconceptions that I’m sure many others have heard in their career lives.

A lot of you have had far worse experiences than I have with resistance to working from home. I am floored by some of the feedback.

🤯 What really boggles my mind that is that some companies have no problem hiring outside firms who work partly from home or they outsource a piece of their work to an offshore team, but their own employees aren’t trusted to be somewhere else.

Look at what some of you are responsible for in your daily work life:

👩🏼‍🦰 You take care of huge, complex, critical systems and processes that cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

👨🏾‍🦱 You manage systems that are imperative for paying your company bills or producing the products that earn your company’s revenue.

🧑🏼‍🦳 You keep systems running that manage all your work and keep track of all the obligations that allow your company to even exist.

🧕🏽 You run systems and processes that manage employees and keep you out of trouble and keep your lights on.

And yet, until a pandemic forced us into it, there were still a lot of managers and executives who didn’t trust the people who run all of that shit to do it from home when it was technically possible. 🤦🏽‍♀️

🤔 And I wonder when this is all over, even after we’ve proven it’s not only possible but practical and PREFERABLE…will we just go back to the same old same old?

Will we see that resistance creep back again because the trust is just not there?

I don’t know. I hope not. I just find it disappointing that it took a lockdown to open some eyes. What other things are out there that we aren’t trusting our people with even though we trust them with all this other important shit.

Not long ago I put out a post on LinkedIn and asked:

What is the strangest logic you ever heard for not allowing someone (maybe yourself) to work from home?

I got a lot of very interesting comments and here are some of my favorites (click HERE for the original post):

🙄 Work from home would require significant amounts of training as so much has changed in the 2.5 years since you were last here.

This nugget of wisdom was given to someone who had worked at the company for over a decade and a half…when she was returning from maternity leave. Classy!

Even if this is true, what does the location of your desk have to do with it? Nothing, is the answer.

🙄 They won’t be motivated if they don’t have to make the commute.

So…we’re not motivated unless we have a really long and shitty commute?

I’m not sure this manager knows how human nature works.

🙄 What will the client say if they can tell someone is on their cell phone?

I’m sorry, did someone hitch a ride with Doc Brown and Marty McFly back in 1985 and suddenly find themselves in the mysterious era of mobile phones?

I mean I guess if you’re at a Starbucks on your cell phone, but that’s a whole other kind of stupid when you call into an important client call with an espresso machine cranking in the background.

Who can even tell if someone is on a cell phone these days?

🙄 What happens if their Internet goes out.

Thank goodness offices have those special Internets that never go out. SMH.

🙄 I don’t think you’re going to be as successful as you want to be working from home.

I imagine this being said by a middle-aged super-pale guy with a black cape and fangs. Or The Godfather.

Or maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi using the force: I don’t think you’re going to be as successful as you want to be working from home.

I mean it sounds like a threat.

🙄 You may need them right away and it’s easier to walk to them.

OMG, how do I ever manage when I walk to Sally's desk and she's not there? Did she go to the bathroom 💩??? Rafael isn't here, is he in a meeting? I need Chris and I walked over but they weren't in their cubicle!

What am I going to do??? Wait, I have to CALL THEM? OH, THE HUMANITY!!!

🙄 If I can’t see the employee, how do I know they’re working.

I don’t know, Mr. Schrute. You didn’t seem to know that they were:

🔎 Looking at porn

🔎 Sitting in the cute guy’s cubicle for the last hour doing nothing

🔎 Catching some zzzz’s, employees napping at their desk, multiple times during the day

🔎 Blatantly abusing the Internet

🔎 Losing Solitaire games by the hour

🔎 Taking hour-long breaks in the morning and afternoon and long lunches…every freaking day

🔎 Never at their desk…which is where their computer was, which is what they used to do their work

And perhaps my favorite reason:

🙄 We just can’t have that.

Well, there you go. We just can’t have that. Who could argue with that astounding logic?

Thank you to my LinkedIn family for these great insights and for sharing. ❤️

And with that, I think I shall end here by underscoring that I hope the mass work-from-home movement of 2020 has shown at least some of these untrusting, authoritarian, old-school managers that indeed…we CAN have that.

All right Grit-From-Homers…thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you, like me, are able to work from home freely and with trust from your leadership. If not…speak out! The only way things will change is if we use our voices.

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Thank you once again for stopping by Café Grit, where the moxie is fresh, the passion cold-brewed, and everything is served with a heaping side of mojo.

That’s all for now, remember: You don’t have to deal with the bullshit, and there IS something better out there. Let’s figure it out together.

Take it easy…