Work, Life and Video
Some thoughts about the hidden costs of remoting, deep into the new reality
Our story
The Editor X company in the beginning of the crisis
March 2020 caught us in a pivotal moment. We concluded an intense year of building the group and creating a whole new site creation platform. We opened the Editor X closed beta and started interacting with early adopters. Our key challenges and goals were focused on stabilizing our platform and preparing it for an open beta release, and building a group structure for the next couple of years. Mandatory social distancing forced us to reconsider all of that. We recognized that we are an intense, tightly interactive group and we needed to adapt to the new reality real fast.
Managing by Squads
We organized for work during corona-times by defining feature squads around well defined scopes, with devs, product managers, UX specialists and product designers taking ownership together. We reasoned it is feasible for 5–6 remoting people to stay in close contact, and basically impossible for the entire group. We aimed to reduce, but not replace, our dependence on our management structure in day to day operations.
Cool-hand Luking
We started off in a time of great uncertainty and quite a bit of fear. However, we decided that bad odds are no reason to lower our goals and kept the work plan mostly as it was. We figured it is better to aim high and come up short than it is to back down. While it is clear that no-one can eat fifty eggs, there is pride and direction in trying just for the heck of it.
How we did and what we learned so far
Naturally, how we work changed a lot. Our interactions became shorter, more verbal and more succinct. The functional, problem solving, aspect took over. This is both good and bad.
The good news about remote work (…while never leaving home and with schools being closed and all that) is that we managed to keep a lot of the group engaged and productive. We stayed on top of the closed beta program, responding to user interactions and learning a lot. We managed to deliver progression features and onboard new staff. Specifically:
We found out that new is fun (at least in the short term). We all kept busy and were thankfully protected from financial woes. Being the upbeat folk we are, we had fun and made fun of the awkward new mode of work and this almost made it a positive.
Developers on a long term task hunker down and seem to produce no less than in the good old days of office work. Some say they are actually more effective.
New formal channels. We created slack channels for each of our feature squads and people are showing high commitment to communicating in this single channel. We also write more and better specifications, knowing this is the main mode of knowledge transfer. These are methodologies we always wanted to improve and now managed to do so.
Why this may not hold and how it costs us
So far these were surprisingly positive outcomes: almost everything changed overnight and we kept morale and productivity reasonably high. But as the weeks pass, we can detect some attrition and negative effects that we cannot avoid:
Availability disparity — Not everyone can be effective or available the same way. Many parents had to share the week with spouses. Many others got initially distracted with the evolving story. This wore down on the less available folks as they became increasingly overworked and at the same time frustrated with lower outputs (no matter how many times we tell them it is OK to just do your best in these difficult times).
The emotional effect — an in-person discussion is a mixture of professional signals (suggestions, requirements, critical thinking, design details… you know: ‘meeting stuff’) and personal signals (talking shit, facial hints, actually knowing when you lost your listener and he is deep into Instagram…).
When you remove the personal, what remains becomes condensed and, well, a lot less fun. Initially it seemed as if people became more annoying and less patient, but the effect is probably that interactions became all details and no personal redemption. (goofy Augmented Reality face masks are no help in that, even if very amusing).
The cognitive effect. With kids and dogs in the background, with communication quality problems and with plenty of distractions, a video meeting is a randomly changing event wherein participants disappear in mid-word and constantly speak over each other because of delays (and the impatience mentioned above). It is just harder to understand each other and stay focused.
But it also turns out there is a real cognitive cost to listening without seeing the face of the speaker. The McGurk effect (read more, it is super cool) is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. In other words: I cannot hear you well without my glasses!
The distance effect. Here is a theory — a team sharing a workspace will share knowledge and feedback through various undocumented, unaware channels many times a day. We are used to test driving our ideas during lunch or during a dozen chance interactions, so by the time we ‘deliver’ them we have already had some review.
This makes us, on average, much smarter (or more knowledgeable) than we are when left alone. Each of us, in turn, is carried a little bit by peers. Being socially distanced stopped all of that and is making us work harder and longer to get to the same results.
(The Dunning Kruger effect is a more cynical, somewhat related, effect that claims people grow more careful about their opinions the more they know.)
What this might mean
In a nutshell: As empowering it feels to adapt to this huge change, this is probably a short term success. We have not transformed into a new kind of society that flourishes in seclusion. Personally, I think it takes away a lot of the creative joy.
We should certainly keep some of the habits and tools we were forced to create. We will keep tight online communication in a single channel and we’ll keep improving our writing, but the creativity as we know it will require an in-person connection. At least as a dominant element in the mix.
Well, until the Singularity puts us all out to pasture.