Remote Work for Humans

As a veterinarian, I am trained to look for the abnormal. Subtle, almost negligible signs of disease. If something is abnormal, we seek to restore balance using the therapies available to us. Most people can appreciate that veterinarians look for disease and seek to remedy it. What may not be as apparent is the extensive training we receive to understand what “normal” or “healthy” actually is.

Common. Usual. Typical.

The words repeated to us by the veterinary pathologist teaching us histology. You will never understand what abnormal is unless you understand what normal is.

In the medical context, normal seems like an easy definition. Look at something when it’s healthy, then again when sick and note what changed. What we have come to accept as normal or healthy has actually been defined and re-defined over the years as new information, treatment modalities, and technological advances challenge what we previously thought of as normal.

In public health, I learned as I got my MPH, the definition of healthy or normal gets even more complicated as we move from an individual to a population level. The current WHO definition of health was established in 1948. It states: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Even this definition, which has remained the same since 1948, has been debated and challenged for decades with one of the latest challenges coming during the height of 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

I say all of this to say that the way we work as remote, hybrid, and distributed teams is NOT normal AND we get to define what normal means.

Per the late bell hooks:

Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map.

The current definition of remote work (admittedly, from the first online dictionary that popped up for me) is “the practice of an employee working at their home or in some other place that is not an organization’s usual place of business.”

For public sector purposes, OPM (the office of personnel management, the Federal Government’s chief human resources agency) defines remote work similarly:

Remote work is defined as a flexible work arrangement in which an employee, under a written remote work agreement, is scheduled to perform work at an alternative worksite and is not expected to perform work at an agency worksite on a regular and recurring basis. A remote worker’s official worksite may be within or outside the local commuting area of an agency worksite.

These definitions cover where the work happens but they only invite us to imagine working the way we did in an office from home.

A lot of the things I see people lamenting about online as pain points in their remote/distributed work are the effects of this lack of imagination playing out in their lives.

• The Teams chat overload.
• The endless meetings that should have been emails.
• Feeling like your Teams status can never be “away”
• Urgency! All! The Time!

These are all symptoms of looking at remote work with a very limited definition.

What if we found another definition? This time from a company that has never met in person even before the COVID-19 pandemic?

Meet GitLab’s remote manifesto which states:

All-remote work promotes:

1. Hiring and working from all over the world (instead of from a central location).
2. Flexible working hours (over set working hours).
3. Writing down and recording knowledge (over verbal explanations).
4. Written processes (over on-the-job training).
5. Public sharing of information (over need-to-know access).
6. Opening up documents for editing by anyone (over top-down control of documents).
7. Asynchronous communication (over synchronous communication).
8. The results of impact (over the activity put in).
9. Formal communication channels (over informal communication channels).

A key feature of this definition of remote work is that it focuses on how work has to change because it’s being done remotely. This way of thinking about remote work sparked my imagination in ways that the traditional definitions of remote work never could.

That’s why I can say with confidence that they way we are working is not normal. While we changed the location of our work, we never adapted to the unique challenges that remote work brings. The way we’ve been working is getting in the way of our work and disconnecting us from our humanity by keeping us grinding.

I believe that you do not have to be a private tech company like GitLab in order to create meaningful ways of working that allow us to stop grinding and start honoring our humanity. That’s why I created this space. To build upon the work of others and imagine what it could look like for public sector remote workers, for all of our resource challenges and bureaucracy, to stop grinding and redefine what we would like to accept as normal from remote and distributed work.

Machines grind because they are replaceable. 
Humans create. We are irreplaceable. 
Work like a human.