Is sex better in the dark? Well, 86% of Americans think so. In fact, they’re adamant about it. So, what does this have to do with remove work? More than you might think. Both deal with individual preferences. Both only work if all parties involved agree. Oh, and both are more complex than you might imagine.
In 2022 as society was attempting to find some sort of what the media liked to call “new normal”, a revolution was beginning. It was a challenge to what our society calls “work” and what it should or should not involve. Almost immediately reports began surfacing of employees not working. There were articles about employees having sex during work hours (no word on whether the lights were on or off), and some even daring to tend to their children.
Despite the fact that research shows that at least 47% of jobs in the United States can be done remotely according to the Pew Research Center, some corporate giants have swung the pendulum from initially saying remote work was great to saying it harmed the company. There were articles on the internet lauding CEOs who embraced remote work, and articles spewing a firestorm of anger from CEOs saying remote work promoted laziness. Thus, one of the most glaring questions of our age boils down to whether or not remote work should be allowed.
LESSON #1: THERE IS NO ONE SIZE FITS ALL
That’s right. We’re dealing with a question that has more than one answer, so there’s no point in asking it on a broad scale. Just like sex in the dark, it depends on the people involved. For people who hate their jobs or companies whose leadership doesn’t actually understand leadership, remote work has a slim chance of success. For some industries research shows that remote work also can become problematic because it creates isolation and limits the flow of ideas.
Then there’s the “coffee and biscuits” problem. In 1972 a group of British researchers (social scientists John Short, Ederyn Williams and Bruce Christie) developed something called “the coffee and biscuits” theory of computer-mediated-communication. After significant observation they stated that there is an added human element, a craving for actual in-person meetings, that would always get in the way of communicating remotely. In their study they looked at how people who attended a meeting via telephone differed from their counterparts who were at the meeting live. Many things were the same for both groups… that is until the coffee and biscuits came out. The side conversations and the feeling of human connection resulted in what the researchers called a superior experience for those attending live.
While this is obviously a significant element, and during the pandemic lockdowns humanity saw this up close and personal, there are some major differences between 1972 problems and today’s. For one thing, researchers did not have the advanced technology we have today. They also did not have the advantage of everyone having experienced remote communications. For them it was a last resort and very few people were skilled in how to do it.
There is indeed a skill that needed to be learned for people to work remotely, and we all got a crash course in 2020. This is not unlike the telephone, which was so totally foreign to people that Bell laboratories had to issue instruction manuals for how to hold a conversation with someone they couldn’t see. Think about that. No one would flinch now at the thought, but it wasn’t very many generations ago that this was a challenge.
People do need to learn how to work remotely. It isn’t natural or intuitive. At my current company we had a young woman working from home who would spend her morning at the gym, her afternoon running errands that she assured me would only take a few minutes, and then complained that she just didn’t have enough time to complete her projects. Before we let her go, we spoke with her many times about her need to prioritize work and to actually be plugged into the company during work hours. She needed to understand the right mindset.
In addition to the mindset, there also needs to be cooperation from an employee’s environment. I actually began working from home many years before the pandemic and I still remember how challenging it was that first year – my brother would drop by unexpectedly, my neighbor tried on many occasions to drop off her child so she could run errands, and there were dozens of other situations that arose due to people thinking that working from home was some kind of free pass from work. In a previous job before that one, I tried to work from home one day when I had a huge pile of work and needed quiet isolation (my office for that job was near the employee lounge and even closing my door did not protect me from an onslaught of visitors). During my day at home, I actually got a pile of work done and then some, but when I returned to my office, I was met with jeers from colleagues and leadership alike who all seemed to think I had spent my day eating candy and watching TV.
For that position I only did it that one time, and maybe had I stayed there I would have tried it again. Who knows? What I do know is that I had to learn how to work remotely and so did my employer. Together we had to learn what would work and what wouldn’t, but it all needed to start with a willingness to find out.
LESSON #2: LEADERSHIP NEEDS TO CHANGE
Even if you take the question of remote work off the table, there is absolutely no way that pre-pandemic leadership styles can continue unchanged. But then add to it the question of remote work and it becomes painfully obvious that things are not business as usual. Unfortunately, many CEO’s have not gotten the memo. Just do a quick internet search on this topic and a dozen stories emerge immediately with CEOs talking about how intolerable remote work is for serious minded leaders.
There’s a verified story of a CEO who claims to have had employees who didn’t open their work laptops for an entire month and yet still collected a pay check from his company. Exactly what kind of leader allows employees to go for more than two days without checking in at work? Obviously, there was indeed a problem, but was it the problem the CEO saw? His “lazy” employees seem to be following the example of lazy leadership that can’t even be bothered enough to make sure an employee is okay when they don’t sign in… for 30 days!
Leaders need to be retrained in this post-pandemic world and remote work is just one part of the equation. However, it is an important part, and the answer isn’t as easy as saying, “Everyone, come back NOW!” In fact, there’s been quite a backlash and research shows that many employees are now willing to simply quit when they get these orders. The battle lines have been drawn in many companies. Leadership is going to have to learn how deal with these new issues or the world of quiet quitting will simply grow more expansive.
LESSON #3: A NEW PARADIGM IS A MUST FOR MOVING FORWARD
Whether a company decides remote work is for them or not, there’s a bigger lesson that needs to be learned here. We need a new paradigm, one that accounts for family and allows us all to be human. One major lesson from the pandemic is that we are all indeed human. That’s not a major news flash, I realize, but when we were all required to work from home, we connected in a new way with our families, our neighbors, our pets, and, yes, our pajamas. There is indeed a balancing act that needs to be performed. Obviously, we can’t have a crying toddler interrupting an important client meeting, but isn’t it time we all acknowledged that crying toddlers exist and it’s not the end of the world?
The main reason I took my first remote job was to be home with my children. The hour commute both ways, the inflexibility for appointments, and the distance between my children and I in general all weighed heavily on me. However, when I did get a remote job, I knew it wasn’t all playtime and afternoon hugs. I had to meet my responsibilities and I had to focus. Sometimes that meant inviting an elderly neighbor to have her afternoon tea while watching her favorite TV drama at my house while holding my toddler on her lap, other times it meant outright paying a sitter. I took care of business, but I did it on my terms.
When my grandmother was in her 20’s she had a job at the Ford Motor Company as a secretary for the vice president of the company. She loved her job and planned to keep it for a very long time. However, when she got pregnant, she was told she had to leave because “there’s no room for families in the workplace.” I’d like to think we’ve come a long way from that stance, but so often when remote work is discussed it creeps up again. In my research on remote work, I heard many CEOs complaining about people needing to choose between their careers and their families. They didn’t say it directly, but comments about how children were distractions for people working remotely came up time and time again.
Families are a fact of life. Other countries have accepted this, and research shows that U.S. companies would benefit from embracing this fact. Yes, there may be some distractions from children. Yes, some employees may have sex in the afternoon. (Is that actually worse than people watching YouTube videos during their breaks while sitting in their offices?) We are human beings with human needs. Those needs won’t go away no matter if someone works in an office or works remotely.
In conclusion, Americans have a unique opportunity in this post-pandemic world to create a more fulfilled, stronger workforce. It’s not about saying EVERYONE should be in the office or that EVERYONE should be remote. It’s about leadership evolving and making the decision that incorporates a new paradigm, a human-centered (dare I say “family-centered”) work world.
So, are the 86% of Americans right about sex in the dark? No. I lied about that statistic. Research shows that when Americans were surveyed about sex in the dark, they responded that it depended on their partner and the circumstances. Like the work world, it’s a topic that’s more complex than you might think.