Are you working in a remote office?

In a recent Mastodon discussion, Martin Seeger accidentally coined the phrase “remote office”. About which I then mused that it describes perfectly what’s wrong in far too many organizations: that they think they can get away with all the anti-productive nonsense they’ve been doing in offices for decades, but now with a bunch of remotees.

So, dear reader who (at least frequently, if not permanently) works from home, do you surmise you might be working in a remote office? I have a few questions you might want to think about.

• If you get pulled into video meetings with no advance notice and no chance to prepare, yanking you out of whatever you’re doing, like someone shouting down the hallway from a conference room something like “Alex, could you just come in here for a moment?”, you might be working in a remote office.

• If managers direct-message you in the company text chat demanding your attention now, like a shoulder-tapping “management by walking around” amateur, you might be working in a remote office.

• If, in the event of some important news breaking, your head honcho calls everyone into an ad-hoc all-hands video meeting rather than sitting down to write a 5-paragraph email reflecting functional literacy, you might be working in a remote office.

• If it’s tolerated for people to ignore information circulated ahead of a discussion, and to come into it blissfully unprepared expecting to be brought up to speed by other participants who did prepare, you might be working in a remote office.

• If everyone is stuck in meeting hell and hates it, and people at the top aren’t doing anything to fix it, you might be working in a remote office.

• If it’s somehow considered acceptable for people to drop comments in a long issue tracker thread that start with “I didn’t read the whole thing but here’s my take”, you might be working in a remote office.

• If you have some middle manager insisting that he¹ is expected to “lead, not read”, you might be working in a remote office.

• If managers insist on a daily scrum or standup or similar abomination, you might be working in a remote office.

• If managers get all uneasy at the idea of not being able to monitor everyone’s being “at work” for whatever definition thereof they apply, you might be working in a remote office.

• If not nearly enough people have any grasp of the importance of acknowledgment in communication, you might be working in a remote office.

• If somebody extolls the necessity of socializing with your work mates, you might be working in a remote office.

• If all coordination at your multinational company explodes in a massive fireball twice a year around daylight saving time changes, instead of everyone just using UTC year-round, you might be working in a remote office.

• If your organization’s idea of documentation is “ask Joe” or whoever the longest-serving technically capable member of staff is, you might be working in a remote office.

And in that case, here’s something else you might want to read.