The office, but on a screen

I’m now at five weeks and I have this idea that my laptop’s camera is like a window to an abandoned building. Every morning we all crawl through the window and pretend that the hallway exists again.

That’s what most teams seem to be doing in March. Meetings are exactly the same, just made of faces. The expectation for quick answers is the same. The tendency to make decisions in a conversation without half of the team present (which was a pain in the ass but is somehow worse now because there’s no hallway afterwards where you might have heard it). We loaded up the office (including the building) and tried to force it through the webcam. Of course it doesn’t quite work. Everybody is a bit sore from being squished.

I hear people talk about this as an experiment in working remotely. Is it? It’s office screen during a crisis with kids popping into calls and some other half having another call from the same kitchen table. Everyone’s worried about someone. It’s a bit like evaluating a restaurant based on that night the kitchen burned down. The food sucked. Was it the recipe?

I’ve been trying to imagine what a deliberate separation would be like. I think most of it has to do with writing.

I mean, I can’t think of status that needs calling really. Just everyone leaving a few words a few times a day on the written thing. And at a specific time. Then, for those people in other timezones, or the ones with a toddler with an opinion about 9am, they can check the written thing. Write down the decision before the meeting ends, a paragraph of what we chose and what we didn’t, and why. So that half the team that missed the meeting doesn’t have to infer from emoji. And, you know, you could allow the response times to be slow unless it’s actually on fire. Too many people having chat up all day just to prove that they’re there. Very exhausting way to prove you’re there.

Oh, and the dark side to all of this that I’ve been hearing is people with managers that get anxious because they’re not seeing anybody installing stuff on their laptops to measure activity. Ok, I get the anxiety. Just very precise on the wrong metric. If you need a graph of mouse movement to know if anything’s going on then you probably didn’t have a good idea of what the work was before March. And the building was obscuring it.

I can’t think of one meeting I’d touch off of the one on one. That’s where you hear that someone is struggling before it’s visible in their work. So many people struggling right now in ways that won’t show up in a sprint. But, even with that, I’d take the boring stuff and put it in writing. A shared document where the person takes a minute to write what they did and what’s blocking before the call. Then use the call to talk about how they’re actually doing. Is the kid asleep? Is the parent ok? Are you eating lunch? Or are you sort of standing near the fridge at 2pm?

Some people will walk away from this and conclude that remote work didn’t work. Other people will conclude that the office was always worthless. It seems a bit premature. Really, hardly anyone has ever done the writing thing. All we’ve done so far is try doing the office with the walls off. It’s largely just weather.

I’d love to try the other thing for a month. To see if the calendar thins out. To see if the folks who missed the conversation still have some idea of what got decided. To see if I’ll miss the hallway. Or just the coffee.