Remote Work for Humans

The Obviously Automated Email

The emails came each night at 1:26 am. Like clockwork, a report was sent to our team that would greet us in the morning with information. In this case, a report for the infection preventionists on our team with data about the outbreaks reported in health care settings by local health jurisdictions the previous day.

It had been like this ever since I first started my remote job at WA State Department of Health. Unlike my previous job in LA County, where we leveraged asynchronous communication to our advantage across time zones, we were all in the same time zone (though I remained in Los Angeles). Still, I never questioned the emailed report and its consistency. I had assumed the report was automated. It had to be, right?

Weeks went by as I onboarded and started to learn the ropes of my new position. I was hired for the epidemiology team, in part, because of my technical ability in R. I had been using R for about 5 years and WA State had made the switch (less than a year before I showed up) from programming in SAS to R. While my coworkers had quickly gained a lot of technical skills in R in the short time since the switch, I began to realize that this timely, consistent report we had been receiving each night was not actually automated at all.

This isn’t a story about how automation is inherently superior to manual work processes. It’s a story about how easy it can be for boundaries to erode in a remote job and a reminder of why it’s important to set and honor your boundaries early and often in a remote setting.

How Remote Work Boundaries Erode

Reading Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab early(ish) in my remote work career was probably one of the best things I could have done for myself. It helped me realize the ways in which we teach people to interact with us. If we are consistent in communicating and upholding our boundaries, we may find that people are consistent in honoring our boundaries.

Remote work forces us to define and enforce our boundaries more concretely than in office work. Gone are the days when you could put on huge headphones to discourage a coworker from engaging you in conversation, never having to actually define or enforce that boundary (but thank goodness they got the hint). It can be very uncomfortable to know that working in a way that’s most aligned for you could potentially disappoint someone.

In the case of this nightly report, my coworker said that she was up anyway at that time and didn’t mind sending the report. This is how the lines get blurred with remote work boundaries. “I’m at home anyway, I might as well…” leads to a lot of strange workflows and situations ripe for overwork and overexertion.

• I’m at home anyway, I might as well roll over and work while sick.
• I’m at home anyway, I might as well check my email just in case anything came through.
• I’m at home anyway, I might as well work on these slides for the presentation next week.

As an aside, can we please replace those phrases with ones more like:

• I’m at home anyway, I might as well make my lunch from scratch today.
• I’m at home anyway, I might as well give my dog an extra cuddle.
• I’m at home anyway, I might as well take a walk in the sunshine during this meeting.

We Create the Expectations

Once I found out that my coworker had been up and sending this report each night at 1 am, I let my supervisor know the plan to automate it. She was just as surprised as I had been upon learning that the report was not automated. Everybody on the supervisory team had assumed that the report was automated. There was no expectation from the supervisory team that someone should be up in the middle of the night to get the report out.

Sometimes, our self imposed perfectionism is what creates an unrealistic work load. We envision the gold standard of what we think should be our work product (whether or not we can realistically achieve that) and then hold ourselves to that gold standard. This becomes a positive feedback loop where you strain yourself to blow away peoples expectations and so they ask you to keep performing to that level, without a clue as to how you are straining yourself to get there.

With boundary setting also comes a healthy dose of expectation setting. I used to dread having to say “that won’t work for me”. I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t trying to be a productive member of the team. I quickly learned that people will let you work yourself into the ground if you let them.

Managing expectations is a kindness to both yourself and your coworkers. It can also spark a healthy dose of creativity. If we can’t realistically meet certain goals, what are the iterations we can take to get close? If I don’t have capacity for a certain project, how do we build it sustainably, rather than powering through?

Set Boundaries, Find Peace

In the end, the email that had long been assumed automated, finally became automated. There were many approaches to resolving the issue of having someone up at 1 am to make a work product, but given our team’s skill set, we went for automation.

To further solidify our boundaries around working hours, our supervisor made it a point to have everyone set clear expectations about their working hours. We were encouraged to choose a schedule that worked for us and our schedules were visible to everyone on the team so that we could hold ourselves and each other accountable for getting offline when we said we would. The work continued, the reports flowed, but this time, in alignment with our ideal working times.