I didn’t record a podcast for today, because my throat hurts a little, and I don’t want to strain it too much, given that my metro area is dealing with coronavirus, and doing so pretty badly.
Instead, I decided to look at research on the current state of remote work, given that’s what a good number of us are probably doing right now.
Surprisingly, I didn’t find that many papers with differing conclusions on productivity while working from home, and a lot of them were pre-2012. I didn’t want to consider those, because they belong to a different time. Lots has changed with technology and opportunities for remote work.
I liked this paper titled Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort, well-being and work-life balance. This paper is by two researchers at the University of Cardiff.
What the research finds
There’s multiple studies cited in this paper, and they agree on a few things.
They all find that remote work is growing over time. They find that remote workers have:
Higher job satisfaction
Higher organizational commitment
Which come at the cost of:
Intense work engagement
Blurred borders between work and home.
I haven’t come across very much about the lived experience of working remotely in the literature, and so there isn’t much insight into what factors lead to these issues, and/or if they are uniform across the population.
Let’s talk about these issues
I like working in the same shared space as my colleagues. But I don’t enjoy commuting or getting out the door to work, because I’m at my lowest energy in the mornings. I also dislike open floor plans, and having some office space to myself has been a big boon, that helps me be much more productive than otherwise.
So I do understand how working from home gives you higher job satisfaction. Depending on the job, you can choose your hours, and no one is peering over your shoulder. The anxiety of being in a shared space with few established rules is also much less. It takes the edge off the worst parts of work, if you work from home.
But I find it surprising that people have higher organizational commitment. It’s difficult for me to connect with my colleagues if I’m not in the same space as them. I find a lot of my work gets easier with water cooler conversations and other informal methods of communication. Online communication with colleagues is less informal, more directed, and has more of an objective. I don’t find that making it easier to connect with people. It’s also harder to watch people interact with each other and get a read on the culture of the company.
But that probably depends on the kind of culture that is set in the company’s conversation spaces. It takes effort to keep an informal culture going on Slack or whatever other communication system companies use.
At What Cost?
I wonder about whether intense work engagement and blurred borders are actually bad for you.
I looked at research about long days previously, and it turns out that more engaged workers have better outcomes from work. They tend to have access to more resources so they can make their work lives less stressful. They also have better stress responses.
But this is reversed if the employees feel like they can’t switch off work mentally. People who don’t have control over when they go off work, or who have anxiety about getting calls from work have worse health outcomes and are at increased risk for metabolic syndrome (the precursor to diabetes, heart issues and hypertension).
That might be problematic when it comes to blurred lines between work and not-work. Being constantly on-call, or having unclear goals that have you constantly going probably get much worse when you are working from home, because along with there being no physical way to turn off work (if you’re not working from home, you have a commute or just the notion of being at home that can help you switch off), you have this added stress of your job always having access to you.
As always, the good jobs give you control over your day and your job, and the ones that are stressful don’t give you enough control or resources to balance work and life.
Dealing with it
When I look at my own experiences, I realize there’s got to be some work on my end as well to control my work experience. I find it tiresome to work by myself for more than a few days at a time, because it’s just me and my mind and the same objects on my desk to look at. It feels like I’m recycling my own energy over and over, and there’s only so much juice I can get out of it.
One thing that a lot of people who manage to work fully remote make sure to have is an office space, which is free of distractions, and which they use only for work. This helps them snap in and snap out of work mode. I know some companies demand that remote employees have access to such a space where they aren’t bothered by family or roommates.
It’s also good to stick to a schedule so you can divide your day very clearly into work and not-work. When I was in gradschool, everything bled into everything else, and it was easy to keep putting off tasks because the whole day was my workday and three hours later was about the same as now. But sticking to a schedule and saying you’ll switch off after a particular time is supposed to be a good way to go about it.
Which is hard if you have a lot to do, and identify heavily with your work, because you are filled with guilt when you do something with your time that isn’t work. Same with jobs that are so much work that your work hours aren’t enough to get everything done. It’s difficult to glean where it stops being a you-problem and starts being an employer-problem.
Even so, maybe sticking to a schedule will help. I notice when I don’t have a schedule, I just burn myself out within a few days and then my mind gets slower and melds the days and times into each other even more.
I know a lot of people are fans of books by Basecamp. I’m a little iffy about them, because they tend to be one or two ideas, but reiterated a zillion times. They have this book titled Remote - Office Not Required, which is apparently the go-to book about remote work. I haven’t read it yet, but I wonder what insights they have about this topic, and how it might match up with research.
Until then, I’ll just stick to a schedule, chitchat with my coworkers over IM, and make sure to not work weird hours.