Reflections on an Extended Work-From-Home Stint
In early March 2020, metro Seattle was hit with a local outbreak of COVID-19, the first notable cluster in North America. On the afternoon of March 4, we received a surprise email from top management directing us to work from home for the next three weeks ending March 25. Since then, the novel coronavirus proved itself unexpectedly resilient against the world’s attempts at quashing it. As I write this in October 2020, our three-week-long WFH stint has been going on for seven months and is scheduled to continue until at least July 2021.
Up until this point, my WFH experiences had all been very brief and had all been either due to illness or bad weather. This was my first time ever working from home for such a long period. The pandemic created excellent experimental conditions for assessing the viability of this working model.
The topic of WFH has already been done to death on the blogosphere, but the significance of this topic cannot be understated. If remote work proves to be effective and sustainable, this pandemic may have a long-lasting effect on the daily lives of knowledge workers. A widespread shift to remote work has profound implications for things like real estate, urban planning, migration patterns, social circles, household structures, and the role of work in our culture.
Here are some trends I have observed from the past seven months of working from home.
The biggest win is focus time. The main two elements of office work that disappear during WFH are in-person interruptions and the overhearing of other people’s in-person conversations. Engineers trying to focus have regularly gotten knocked out of the flow by one of these events, but suddenly they are all gone. If you want to shut off all distractions and make yourself unreachable, you can now close your email, close your IM, and work in true quiet isolation. In the absence of in-person conversations, email and IM have both become more busy, so more care is needed to avoid ending up in a notification-driven mental daze. However, unlike your office environment, your WFH environment is fully under your control. You have more flexibility over when and how you respond to people trying to get your attention.
The biggest loss is collaboration. Suppose one person needs to get the attention of a coworker in order to get some information or ask for action, a common problem for any knowledge worker. Office-based workers had many methods at their disposal, ranging from low-urgency options like email and future meetings, to higher-urgency options like IM or in-person interruptions. WFH takes away the in-person interruption, the fastest of all interruption techniques. If you have any kind of dependency on a coworker, it will usually take more time than usual in order to get the dependency fulfilled. The basic network of cooperation and knowledge transfer becomes slower.
Documentation gains importance. Every software team has a body of informal knowledge and expertise. In an office environment, where in-person conversation is one of the primary methods of knowledge transfer, it is often okay if some of this informal knowledge is undocumented; you can always ask around and you’ll eventually succeed. However, since WFH makes it harder to reach coworkers and coax responses out of them, the informal knowledge transfer network becomes much slower and choppier. It becomes more important to document more knowledge and to document it with greater thoroughness. Documentation is the most straightforward way of dealing with the slowdown of the knowledge network. On my team, our internal wikis and OneNotes have improved dramatically and many previously-informal processes have gotten formally codified.
Day-to-day productivity becomes more volatile. When you work from home, no one sees you or your screen except you. No one is deliberately counting your hours or tracking the times you disappear throughout the day. If you have a good day where you manage to get into the flow and take advantage of WFH’s lack of distractions, you can accomplish much more than you ever could at the office. On the flip side, if you have a bad day where you get stuck, get distracted, or can’t get into a rhythm, it’s easier to quit and stop trying. I can’t say for sure whether my productivity has gone up or down during the pandemic because of how much has changed about my day-to-day work. However, I am noticing a trend where my good days are better and my bad days are worse.
Day-to-day well-being becomes less volatile. Whereas productivity swings a lot in WFH, job satisfaction and well-being swing much less. Many of work’s most satisfying moments come from working with others to solve a problem, whereas many of work’s worst moments stem from in-person interpersonal conflict. WFH puts a damper on all interpersonal interactions, whether positive or negative. I am sure I missed out on many quality moments and experiences by being at home all day and every day. On the other hand, during stressful situations like on-call shifts, I appreciate having the comforts at home nearby and having a greater emotional distance from others. For better and for worse, individual workdays become more neutral and unmemorable.
Work hours largely shift upward and forward. With fewer hard rules about availability expectations, the majority of people I know are starting work later and ending later. This is by no means universal, as there is also a minority (which includes me) that is starting earlier and ending earlier. I have also observed more work being done during lunch hours, more people logging on in the late evenings, and more people logging in (usually briefly) during weekends. Booking meetings in the early mornings has become less socially acceptable while booking meetings in the late afternoons has become more acceptable. With the disappearance of commutes, a big fraction of the newly-gained time has been going into work. People have been taking far fewer vacation days than normal, though this is probably a pandemic-specific behavior that won’t continue forever.
Physical activity goes down and must be compensated for. My WFH stint made me appreciate how much spontaneous physical activity (mainly walking) exists during a normal workday at the office. First of all, there is no commute during WFH days, so any associated walking never happens. At home, the restrooms and the micro-kitchens are usually only a few steps away rather than a few hallways away, which reduces total walking even more. Low levels of physical activity cause a slow and long-term malaise whose root cause isn’t immediately obvious. In my case, once I realized reduced physical activity had become a problem for me, I took care to go outdoors for walks multiple times a day, to take lots of stretch breaks, and to do some strength training once in a while. The flexible scheduling of remote work makes it easier to integrate activity throughout the workday.
The quality of meetings went down, but eventually we adapted. Despite improvements in remote meeting technology, remote meetings remain unpleasant due to a mix of technical and human factors. People feel less shame in showing up late to a conference call than showing up late to an in-person meeting, so meetings tend to start delayed. There is no other group booking your meeting room who will kick you out once you go over time, so remote meetings are more likely to continue past their scheduled end time. It took a while for everyone to develop good habits regarding muting and unmuting, but in the end this is a skill that is easily learned. There is no access to visualization aids like meeting room whiteboards; software is trying to recreate the whiteboard experience but nothing is still quite as good as the real thing. With everyone now having a private computer screen that no one else can see, it is much easier to become mentally disengaged from a meeting and easier to disengage without others noticing. One major plus is that with physical meeting rooms out of the picture, we only have to think about the availability of people and not the availability of physical rooms themselves. The trend I noticed is that hour-long meetings are less popular, half-hour-long meetings are more popular, and meetings are averaging a smaller number of participants, all positive trends. Meetings are a mixed bag overall, but WFH forced us to learn lots of good habits that will help us in the future.
Coworker relationships are maintained but not grown. After seven more months working alongside my coworkers, I would normally expect more relationship growth and more emotional closeness. However, my relationships mostly feel like they are still where they were in March 2020 when WFH began. Some opponents of permanent remote work, notably Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, have commented that the status quo is not sustainable; our relationships may feel sustainable, but it’s only because we are all burning off social capital that we had accumulated in the office-based past. In my case, I don’t get the feeling any of my relationships have deteriorated; stagnation might be a better term. As the WFH stint continued, a new type of relationship entered the mix: new coworkers who joined after work became remote and who I have never known in person. I have never yet established a relationship of emotional trust and closeness with a coworker I have only ever known virtually, but these new relationships are still young and I won’t rule out the possibility just yet.
There is high variation in outcomes by role. Like all work arrangements, WFH has its winners and losers. In WFH, focus work becomes easier while collaboration becomes harder, so the ease of remote work depends on which of these things you need more. By my observation, the biggest winners are senior engineers with high independence and high self-direction; senior engineers require quality focus time more than they require help from others. The biggest losers are junior engineers with unclear priorities and high dependence on others for clarity. Managers are also net losers, mainly because of the increased difficulty of informal communication and collaboration in a remote environment. The difficulty of being a remote manager may explain why managers and other decision-makers have been resistant in the past to permitting their teams to work remotely. In my case, I’m a mid-level engineer who gets interrupted more often than he interrupts, so I’d consider myself a slight net winner here.
There is high variation in outcomes by household situation. In a way, offices were an equalizer since they brought everyone together into the same environment. Whether your home life was easy or demanding, whether you had lots of lifestyle baggage or little, there was always a quiet expectation that you left your personal life at the door when you came to the office. In a remote workplace, your household situation cannot be ignored and cannot be fully separated from your professional life. If you live somewhere with lousy internet, you are at a disadvantage. If you have annoying or demanding children at home with no concept of boundaries, you are at a disadvantage. If you have a crowded home with lots of distractions and little privacy, you are at a disadvantage. In my case, I am a one-man household with a lean and low-baggage lifestyle; in this pandemic, I happened to be one of the winners. On the other hand, many people have found WFH to be unbearable and have continued going to the office during the pandemic, despite commonly facing bureaucratic hurdles in doing so.
Future of the WFH model
Will permanent WFH be a common model in this industry after the pandemic has faded? A few tech companies were already all-remote before the pandemic began; during the pandemic, a few others have already announced that they will offer WFH now and forever. As for my employer, Microsoft publicly believes the future of office work is hybrid and flexible rather than fully remote. Microsoft recently announced that after the pandemic closures are over, WFH for under 50% of the time will be unconditionally available to all its employees. Permanent WFH will be available with corporate approval and it will come with the loss of an assigned office space.
The pandemic showed us that we were better-prepared for a world of remote work than we realized. Lots of the necessary infrastructure for WFH was already in place before the pandemic; lots of workers worked from home sporadically, but few did it frequently. On the spectrum between universal office work and universal remote work, the needle has strongly and abruptly shifted in the direction of remote work, perhaps more strongly than it ever would have without a crisis to jolt it. The needle will surely swing back in the other direction once it is safe to return to the office, but it’s hard to believe we will completely return to the old status quo.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused many slow and ongoing societal trends to speed up; the rise of remote work is one of many such trends. This grand social experiment showed WFH’s naysayers that society doesn’t collapse when people are not physically present in the office. At the same time, WFH is not a one-size-fits-all panacea for all the challenges faced by knowledge workers. As is often the case in life, the sweet spot is probably somewhere in between.
I don’t know what a typical software engineer’s lifestyle may look like in the 2030s. However, I am optimistic it will be less rigid and more accommodating than that of the 2010s.