I'm in a back of house IT role at a public university, and the state government's reluctance to embrace remote work, among other things, making it difficult for us to compete with the private sector for talented job candidates is a common watercooler topic. On the surface, I feel like we should be more flexible, but only to a point... when I imagine doing a 100% remote job for an employer on the other side of the country, it's pretty depressing. My field has a disproportionate number of recluses who love this, but I don't personally.
My ideal for jobs like mine would be in-person by default, with the option to take remote days in whole or in part as needed, no questions asked, no anxiety-inducing hard limits on the number of days per week or year or anything like that. Furnish people with office space, expect them to live locally, but don't nitpick over where they are at any given moment, so long as they are consistently reachable during core operating hours. This is based on a premise that people actually like being there and won't just never come in if left to their own devices, but sometimes they need to run an errand, or receive a package, or give someone a ride, or claim a little extra time that day by not getting dressed for the office, or sometimes someone just wakes up with an inexplicable but clear feeling that they'd do better work if they sat down and got right to it in the quiet of home instead of going through the morning ritual and traveling to the office. People are different, and some may do this more often than others, but I don't see a problem with it if they are generally "around." Maybe somebody needs a change of scenery to refocus and takes what they're working on to the coffee shop down the street for a couple of hours... or maybe that goes so well that they stay there for the rest of the day.
Some will certainly raise concerns about abuse, but we've already run the experiment that remote work in and of itself doesn't destroy employee productivity. Why not offer a flexible middle ground that acknowledges the importance of in-person communities without making people feel like they're being shoved back into a box? Some places are already de facto somewhat like this, but I'd like to see it more openly acknowledged, rather than being something your boss might let you do if you're lucky enough to have one who finds it reasonable, or you have some kind of personal capital that earns you extra leeway.
I guess what this amounts to is a different kind of hybrid approach, where instead of saying this person is remote on these two or three days a week, the default is in-person every day, but someone may be remote on any given day, if they don't have any in-person obligations on the calendar and they determine it would help them out. I'd really like to see us move towards stronger location-based communities while also moving away from the old industrial era mindset that people need to be punching in and out all at the same time, with tedious allotments of 15 minute breaks and one hour lunches and so on. Managers should be able to know their employees and gauge whether they're taking care of things sufficiently well. Really, though, over and above any of this, we need to fix our cities as you say, so going to the office isn't something so many people find onerous.
Great article! One of the challenges that RTO has faced at Austin's City Hall is that so many city workers got priced out of the city. In the same you can't have community policing if police can't afford to live in their community, your local government will not be as responsive to the needs of its citizens if city employees aren't themselves invested in the community. I also think that, for reasons of accountability and transparency, it's really important that citizens know where their government is—which means where the people who comprise it are—and have the means to access it. A remote-working government is a government that's remote from the citizens it represents.
I'm in a back of house IT role at a public university, and the state government's reluctance to embrace remote work, among other things, making it difficult for us to compete with the private sector for talented job candidates is a common watercooler topic. On the surface, I feel like we should be more flexible, but only to a point... when I imagine doing a 100% remote job for an employer on the other side of the country, it's pretty depressing. My field has a disproportionate number of recluses who love this, but I don't personally.
My ideal for jobs like mine would be in-person by default, with the option to take remote days in whole or in part as needed, no questions asked, no anxiety-inducing hard limits on the number of days per week or year or anything like that. Furnish people with office space, expect them to live locally, but don't nitpick over where they are at any given moment, so long as they are consistently reachable during core operating hours. This is based on a premise that people actually like being there and won't just never come in if left to their own devices, but sometimes they need to run an errand, or receive a package, or give someone a ride, or claim a little extra time that day by not getting dressed for the office, or sometimes someone just wakes up with an inexplicable but clear feeling that they'd do better work if they sat down and got right to it in the quiet of home instead of going through the morning ritual and traveling to the office. People are different, and some may do this more often than others, but I don't see a problem with it if they are generally "around." Maybe somebody needs a change of scenery to refocus and takes what they're working on to the coffee shop down the street for a couple of hours... or maybe that goes so well that they stay there for the rest of the day.
Some will certainly raise concerns about abuse, but we've already run the experiment that remote work in and of itself doesn't destroy employee productivity. Why not offer a flexible middle ground that acknowledges the importance of in-person communities without making people feel like they're being shoved back into a box? Some places are already de facto somewhat like this, but I'd like to see it more openly acknowledged, rather than being something your boss might let you do if you're lucky enough to have one who finds it reasonable, or you have some kind of personal capital that earns you extra leeway.
I guess what this amounts to is a different kind of hybrid approach, where instead of saying this person is remote on these two or three days a week, the default is in-person every day, but someone may be remote on any given day, if they don't have any in-person obligations on the calendar and they determine it would help them out. I'd really like to see us move towards stronger location-based communities while also moving away from the old industrial era mindset that people need to be punching in and out all at the same time, with tedious allotments of 15 minute breaks and one hour lunches and so on. Managers should be able to know their employees and gauge whether they're taking care of things sufficiently well. Really, though, over and above any of this, we need to fix our cities as you say, so going to the office isn't something so many people find onerous.
Great article! One of the challenges that RTO has faced at Austin's City Hall is that so many city workers got priced out of the city. In the same you can't have community policing if police can't afford to live in their community, your local government will not be as responsive to the needs of its citizens if city employees aren't themselves invested in the community. I also think that, for reasons of accountability and transparency, it's really important that citizens know where their government is—which means where the people who comprise it are—and have the means to access it. A remote-working government is a government that's remote from the citizens it represents.
“A remote-working government is a government that's remote from the citizens it represents.”
Well said indeed!