Should all work that is capable of being done remotely, actually be done remotely?

Some of you (statistically more individual contributors) are nodding your heads emphatically. Some of you (statistically more managers) are shaking your heads no. And some of you (statistically more wishy washy) are shrugging your shoulders and giving a bold “Maybeeeee…..?”

So who is right?

Unfortunately, that’s the wrong question to ask, because all of these people are right some of the time. Instead of starting with that specific question, let’s start with what we know.

Statements we can all agree on:

• Some people are more productive working from home.
• Some people are more productive working from an office.
• Some people are more productive at home some days, and in the office other days (that’s me)

These are not controversial statement because they are all simply acknowledging that people are different — and they all confirm what we see with our own eyes.

We all know some people who are extremely productive working from home (maybe too productive, when we notice they’re still on chat at eleven o’clock at night). We also know some people who probably take it a bit too easy at home. And we know some people who work great at home some days, and can’t get a single thing done others.

Let’s look at some more statements we can all agree on:

• Some work can be done anywhere.
• Some work is better done in a specific location.

We’re really rolling now! Let’s look at a few more:

• Some managers are great at outlining work for their team and leaving them to do it.
• Some managers need to interact and observe more to make sure things are going the way they expect.
• Some managers can only trust that things are going well if they hover.

Nobody likes that last kind of manager, but they’re out there. Hovering.

The point I’m trying to make is that remote work or in-person work isn’t a binary thing. The question is entirely contextual. It depends on the people, it depends on the manager, it depends on the kind of work being done, it depends on the organization … it depends on things as simple as the quality of internet connection at someone’s house (or wi-fi dead spots at someone’s office)!

There’s no hope, then. We’ll never know if remote work is good or not

Let’s not be so hasty! There is a great book for navigating your way through ambiguous circumstances: Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata!

Toyota Kata is a book about improving things. Or, as Rother puts it, it’s about: “… the ability to move toward a new desired state through an unclear and unpredictable territory by being sensitive to and responding to actual conditions on the ground.”

Rother actually cautions us on the people who claim they have definitive proof of which “solution” is right (for example, whether remote work is right or wrong for your company): “If someone claims certainty about the steps that will be implemented to reach a desired destination, that should be a red flag to us.”

I’m not going to go through the whole Toyota Kata book to talk about how you use it to solve the remote work question, I think you should buy it and read it! But I would like to give you an idea of how solving this question using Toyota Kata might look.

The five questions

A key part of Toyota Kata is “The Five Questions.” They are:

1. What is the target condition (the challenge)?
2. What is the actual condition now?
3. What obstacles are now preventing you from reaching the target condition?
   Which one are you addressing now?
4. What is your next step?
5. When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?

Let’s look at question one: What is the target condition (the challenge)? Is the answer to that question: REMOTE WORK!

No, that doesn’t really work syntactically. What about “Is remote work good?” Nah, that also doesn’t really work as an answer to “What is the target condition?”

See, remote work is a solution (or countermeasure in Toyota talk). It’s not a challenge. It’s not a target condition. It’s a fix.

So what does remote work fix? It could fix a lot of things! Here’s a few target conditions where remote work might be a potential solution:

• Our employees are 10% more productive
• Our employees are 10% more satisfied
• We are able to fill empty positions 20% faster
• We reduce salary costs 10%

Employing remote work is a potential solution to these challenges. It could potentially make people more productive, or happier. It could help fill empty positions. It could help reduce salary costs. Will it? We don’t know, but it could!

Before we ask ourselves “Is remote work good” we have to figure out the challenge we’re trying to solve. During the covid pandemic the challenge was very clear:

Continue working without our employees contracting a dangerous disease and potentially dying.

Remote work was one of many solutions to this! Others included changing shifts so fewer people worked at a time, adding partitions, having everyone work in masks, etc. etc. You get the idea.

When you know the target condition, you can then determine the answer to question 2: the actual condition now.

If you want people to be more productive, you first must be able to measure their productivity. How do you measure that?

Measuring productivity is SUPER tough

Well, it turns out it’s super easy for some roles and super difficult for other roles. Think about your role. How would you measure productivity?

Productivity should be based around output, but unfortunately that can be really tricky. Take coding. If you based it on “lines of code” then people are incentivized to create inefficient code. If you based it on number of functions then people are incentivized to break everything out into functions (even when that is, again, inefficient). If you based it on “features added” then people are incentivized to throw lots of tiny, useless features onto the page.

You get the idea. Anything you measure can be gamed, so setting one measurement just sets you up to measure the wrong thing.

Because of this difficulty, people often measure proxies for productivity. The most common one is “hours worked” and the most common way to measure that is the ol’ “butts in seats” method. You’re not measuring productivity, but you’re measuring something that is fairly easy to measure. You’ve fallen into the trap of the drunk guy looking for his keys under a street lamp because “that’s where the light is.”

Unfortunately, this blog post is also too short to get into measuring productivity. A good start on that is Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything.

You can’t figure out if it’s right, but you can figure out if it’s right for you

There is no answer to “is remote work good” or not, but you can answer a better, more specific question: does remote work help me reach my goals?

Start by —

(Well, start by reading Toyota Kata, but after THAT)

Start by defining the target condition. What are you actually trying to change? Is it productivity? Job satisfaction? Retention? What?

Next, figure out how to measure the target condition.

Then, look at what is keeping you from reaching that target condition. What are the obstacles? And what are the potential solutions?

Pick a solution and make a hypothesis. How will this solution affect your measurements?

Then DO IT, and measure it, and see if it did what you thought it would. It will take a while. It will also take a lot of different potential solutions and modifications thereof.

Can you see how much of a pain this can be? It takes a while, and it takes measurement, thought and deliberation. But the upside is that you would KNOW whether or not it’s right, you wouldn’t be guessing.