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‘Working Backwards’ to finally make remote work… work
How Amazonian thinking and communication tools are turning me into a remote work optimist.
We are now working almost twice the number of unpaid hours at the office since the beginning of 2020 reports the UK Office of National Statistics.
Despite having gone through the most digitally mediated year of our existence, it appears even with extended working hours, we prefer this new normal. A Microsoft survey revealed that 73% of employees hope remote work options will continue, with some studies even suggesting we would even take a 7.8% pay cut for the privilege.
Though I enjoy my new flexible freedoms, I wonder at what cost they come. Specifically, how does working from home all the time impact our productivity and creativity?
Some evidence supports productivity gains by working from home, but the benefits don’t appear equally distributed. I’ve noticed news coverage tends to cite studies that focus on jobs with routine or repetitive tasks like working in call centres or could be attributed to panic working.
Only recently has research begun to look at jobs that require more complex or collaborative work. A study from Maastricht University and Erasmus University showed that being in-person was superior when performing complex, urgent or problem-solving tasks. Similarly, authors from a Deutsche Bank report noted that employees performing “creative and collaborative tasks without fixed outcomes” tended to struggle in remote teams.
Working as a remote-first product manager for the last 18-months, I can relate. Right now, our ways of working feel like we took the worst of the office environment and stuffed the rest with 30-minute meetings. In a scramble to embrace digital platforms from simply being in our lives to becoming our breadline, we didn’t stop to think about the best ways to improve remote collaboration.
However, I may have discovered a path forward. Upon finishing ‘Working Backwards’, a book by Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, I realised that…
