RTO

My where-we-work has always been interesting.

My first job, I was still in college in Seattle. The company was still forming. I was the first officially hired employee (the other two founders still had their day jobs elsewhere and were working with a company somewhere else who wanted to fund the whole operation).  I worked from my dorm room or the library or the computer lab until I graduated and they paid me to move to L.A.  Then I worked from my apartment until we had an office. Sometimes before we had an office, people came to my apartment for meetings.

Then I worked for a church in L.A. and I had an office. I had a few volunteers who worked with/for me, some of whom would come into the office, some of whom would do all their work remotely from home. I had a few different places where I could go and work, so sometimes I'd go and hide when I wanted to get stuff done without interruption.

Then I worked for a large non-profit in Seattle. Most of us were in the office, but I did have one person who reported to me who worked remotely from Colorado. And later an outsourced team in India who would do work overnight and I'd have a call early in the morning to accept the completed work back. We had a few buildings and I walked to a lot of in-person meetings. 

After that, an agency in Seattle. Our clients were everywhere from the floor above us to a few blocks away or even L.A. or Chicago. We did a lot of voice calls, but also a lot of email.

Then I got hired by a company in L.A. and they proposed that within a year they'd move me back to L.A.  They would fly me down monthly and I'd work in the office for a few days. I had my own desk and sometimes I wouldn't really have need to interact with anyone while I was there. My supervisor didn't have any impact on my day-to-day work and the person who directed a lot of my work sat on a different floor and never came down to our floor. The rest of the people we worked with were at an agency in San Francisco.  So we'd have some voice calls, but it was mostly email. 

Then I moved down, worked out of the office, we reorganized so that we were situated together in a quad with other people who had the same direct report as me and I started getting connected with people at work. I eventually had people reporting to me and we had our own quad. We did start having daily standups on another floor as we took more of the work inhouse from the agency.

Then I moved to a company that was only in-office. Remote work wasn't permitted at all. Until COVID, then everything changed, they started hiring people all over the country and we worked for several years with people we'd never met in person.

Until I left and started working remotely for a company in Utah. Most of the people I worked with were situated in D.C. and so I regularly went to the D.C. office and rarely Utah. Lots of Teams(etc.) calls. After COVID, they called nearly everyone back to the office so now I work remotely and have someone who reports to me in the office and someone I've never met in person who lives in Indianapolis. And I'm regularly on calls with people in D.C., Utah, Indianapolis, New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado and other places people whose location I'm not sure of.  

I had a point when I started writing this. For a moment, I had forgotten it, but now I remember.

I was thinking today about this while I was at church - remotely, of course. The church is in Ann Arbor but there's a big contingent of people who attend remotely, whether from Ann Arbor or from other places.  People today were talking about Lansing and Kansas City and one woman who said "northwest Nebraska" is as specific as she can get as the local gas station has a sign that says "You are nowhere" and there's nothing near where she lives to speak of that would give anyone a sense of location.  

Anyhow, all this to say we had an online discussion after the call and I kind of lurked without saying much.  Sometimes it is hard to put myself out there and speak up. That's a challenge when I am expected to think on my feet for a living, but sometimes if the focus of the meeting isn't on me, it's easier to just listen, or to offer up a comment in chat, letting others read what I have to say and then inviting me to expand on it, or affirming or contradicting my thoughts. I didn't feel like I could necessarily relate to the conversation so I didn't want to derail it with my thoughts. Sometimes I feel like this at work - that if I jump in, I might derail things. So sometimes I add things in chat. And it works really well. Someone will read it, call attention to it, affirm (or contradict it) and ask me to elaborate. Then it flows, I've contributed and I haven't derailed or stepped on anyone else.

If we were in person, we have less of a chance for side-conversations or to line-up potential future conversations in chat even when it may benefit the overall conversation. Sometimes you want to ask another person in the meeting if they're feeling the same way you are, so that if you do speak up with an opposing viewpoint you know you won't be out there alone - or to at least vet your thoughts and know more about why you're on your own - and if it's worth bringing up in the larger group setting, or later individually, or not at all. Because if you're on your laptop or phone in the meeting, too many people assume that it's unrelated to the meeting or because they had side-conversations and assume it's counter-productive or negative about them.

I remember the leader of Zoom saying he believes everyone should be in person (of Zoom!) because he liked the give and take of live meetings and people talking over each other and the rapid nature of live conversations, that everyone is too polite in zoom calls. But what I remember from live meetings with everyone in the room is that there is a real risk of monopolization by the extroverts and the bombastic and the narcissists. If you only value the opinions of the loudest talkers in the rooms - the ones who are fine to talk over people, then by all means, force everyone into this model. But when you do, you lose the opinions, insight and perspectives of the quiet, the meet, the thoughtful, the introspective, the introverts, the polite and the processors. 

I don't mean myself, I mean the many people I have worked with over the years who were brilliantly quiet, who did not put themselves out there - but when you talked to them one-on-one or when you conversed in Slack or email, when you gave them advanced notice that you wanted and welcomed their engagement and then made it easy for them to engage, they shone, and we all benefited from it.

But if you only want the loudest voices, the ones that are happy to tell you what they think unsolicited, the ones who are confident and self-assured that they are the smartest person in the room, the ones who are energized by the sound of their own voice, the ones who know you have nothing better to do than to drop everything when they wander by your desk, by all means, shove everyone back into the office.