Why Were Businesses Stumped by Remote Work When COVID Hit?
It wasn’t technology: Zoom was founded in 2011.
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When the world went into COVID lockdown, everyone who could suddenly became a ‘remote worker.’ Economic impacts aside (and the fact that COVID lockdown =/= remote work), there was one question I couldn’t get out of my head…
Why were companies so unprepared for remote work?
It wasn’t technology - Zoom was founded in 2011 and global companies have ‘teleconferenced’ between offices since before DSL internet. There was a bigger problem which COVID laid bare: work was about location, not output. Yes, consultants travelled … to work on client sites. Executives worked from their second homes … where they often entertained big-ticket clients. Companies ‘teleconferenced’ as a form of cost minimization for juniors, but executives and department leaders frequently hopped from office to office. We focused on familiar locations to help us produce a variety of outputs.
So when COVID lockdown made us work in unfamiliar locations focused on specific outputs, the working world all but crumbled for a bit. Many people are still trying to figure it out.
Which begs the fundamental question of why.
Why did the business world hold onto the belief that good work could only be done in an office? More specifically, why would so many dismiss it out of hand and not even run a test to see if it worked? Employees dealing with incredible strife deserve to know.
Here are my theories about why companies held onto the mentality that good work can only be done in an office, presented in three categories: Money, Psychology, and Touchy Subject Matter.
The money reasons
Ah, the almighty dollar.
Security and infrastructure costs
Like the migration to the cloud, many companies resisted remote work because they’ve spent a lot of time and money investing in office security and work infrastructure. This is a very valid concern, and probably the strongest argument for actively ignoring remote work preparations, depending on the type of company you’re running. That said, some prep should have taken place as a fallback (just like companies have disaster recovery databases).
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Investments in office design, furniture, and perks
Companies invested a lot in their offices and now want employees to use them. But this is a relatively new thing. Until the turn of the 21st century, offices were vast cubicle stations with maybe a bad coffee machine. It wasn’t until Google and other tech darlings proclaimed the ‘open office’ as the cure for inefficiency that companies began to invest a lot in the office experience. Unfortunately, the open office assertion is pretty much totally wrong. And yet people continued, even as work culture advocates clearly stated that company culture is not the office foosball table.
Tax savings
When a company spends money on things that are clearly and solely for the business, it can deduct that spend against its tax bill. Offices are a clear fit for this type of rule. Remote workers - and any money given to remote employees for individual office setups - are potentially more murky. While the tax codes are evolving, this is a strong incentive to keep all spending clearly within the bounds of ‘tax deductible.’
The psychological reasons
Sometimes, we do things because it feels right.
The prestige of an office
The working world was, and in many ways still is, split between those who use their body versus their brains to work. By and large, those who used their brains worked in offices, were paid significantly more, and were held in higher esteem than those who used their bodies to work.
While remote workers almost exclusively do brain work, there is still a powerful association between work prestige and ‘the corner office.’ Even among those who never got that coveted corner office, there’s a belief that not seeking it means your work cannot be of the same value.
Surveilling work and believing remote workers are lazy
Regardless of intention, many leaders hold a belief that if they can’t see their employees working, they must be slacking. Or, at the very least, seeing the boss walking by would snap those slackers back into working productively. We’ve even seen this practice continue in the COVID remote world.
It’s part of an underlying belief that remote workers are lazy. Even as a Stanford study emerged in 2017 showing remote workers are significantly more productive, many leaders simply held onto their old beliefs until COVID forced them to make a change.
Work-life separation
Some people like the idea of having a physical space for work and a separate space for home, both from a balance perspective and to combat feelings of loneliness and isolation.
This is completely understandable, but similar to initial beliefs of open offices is unfortunately incorrect. On one level, being surrounded by people in an office doesn’t stop loneliness - it can even cause it. On another, working remotely is not about isolating yourself, but having the freedom to design the kinds of interactions you need to feel fulfilled.
The problem with COVID is that it hides these two realities, associating remote work with isolation and suggesting that this is what remote work is really like, even when it’s evident that COVID lockdown is not real remote work.
Remote work’s fractured origins
Before it hit mainstream, remote workers were often seen in a handful of niche categories, all outside the norm:
A hippie nomad who couldn’t settle down.
A sleazy salesperson who needed to move to keep up the con.
A freelancer with limited growth potential.
A wealthy individual who could hire a person to manage for them.
The only attractive option here was the rich person, and even that wasn’t actual remote work - they had someone else in-person on their behalf. While freelancers had more freedom, it was seen by many as a stop gap or thing you did if you couldn’t get a job.
This isn’t to say remote work wasn’t real in the past (for example, I featured a 20-year remote entrepreneur in a previous edition of this newsletter). Just that the prevailing assumptions around remote work were not inviting to high-performers across the board.
Modern remote work was leveraged as a privilege
After people realized that remote work was not all hippies and sleazy salespeople, it became a privilege granted to the most ‘productive’ employees. If you were a rainmaker, you could work from home for a day or two. If you were a ‘trusted’ road warrior, you could extend work travel by a day or two and ‘work remotely.’ Executives could work remotely, safe in the knowledge that they just had one line of communication - from their home office to the whole office. Everyone else needed to be present and accounted for.
On some level, I’m sure all the people who were granted remote work privileges would feel their privilege was being taken away if suddenly everyone could do it. As with any form of prestige, a big part of it is the fact that others can’t have it.
The touchy reasons
The ones that make you go ‘oop.’
“Good enough”
It’s touchy because it forces us to confront the idea that we do many things… simply because we do them. People were comfortable in their office habits and didn’t seek information on how things might be better or more productive - leaders included. In business terms, working in an office was simply a “good enough” method and, by comparison, trying remote work probably felt like work.
Remote work advocates are annoying
I say this half-sarcastically, but also with a tinge of truth. Remote work advocates (the loud ones on social media, anyway), typically come in two forms:
The “You are a dinosaur that will be made extinct if you don’t support remote work” type.
The “I’m living my ~*best life with remote work and can’t believe people haven’t gotten on this bandwagon yet. Poor fellows!” type.
If that’s what you’re confronted with when looking up remote work on the social web, what are you going to do besides groan, eye roll, and go back to the comforts of your office? Heck, I don’t even blame you. I gagged a little bit just writing this section.
Remote work forces us to talk more frankly about mental health
In an office environment, it’s easy to hide behind smiles and for CEOs to talk about supporting weekly office yoga as the equivalent of having in-depth mental health discussions.
The reality is that offices do provide a ready-made social life, even if it’s not always the highest quality. Going to remote work means that mental health conversations will come to the forefront, as perks-that-act-as-veils don’t really apply here.
