Worth Reading – The Remote Reality Check

I think Scott is on to something with this paragraph. It’s something I’ve been trying to tell people who refuse to let anyone work from home, because they need that in-person collaboration, but have team members in various offices.

Hear me out: if you have even one person working from a different location than you, you’re part of a distributed team. If your employer houses employees at multiple addresses, in the same city or across time zones, you’re in a remote workplace. Your meetings aren’t all in conference rooms, but when they are, there’s someone on a video screen from across the street or halfway around the globe. When you chat with someone on Slack or Teams, you’re chatting across a geographic boundary. You are all working remotely.

https://scottpdawson.substack.com/p/the-remote-reality-check

Many managers make no change in how they interact with their team, even though they are in different locations, but blame remote employees or technology for the increasing disengagement and retention issues. Many leaders demand that everyone return to the office because they don’t know how to collaborate when people aren’t in the same room with them, and they see no improvement because there still isn’t a single location where the team interacts around the water cooler. The water cooler is online, regardless of whether your team is in 2-3 office locations or 17 different states.

Perhaps we should learn to adapt to this world instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

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