Remote Leadership Work is Different and More Difficult than Remote Individual Work
By Troy Campbell, PhD and Brad Robertson, MBA
“Working from home is the best!”
How we feel when we are analyzing data or writing from home.
“We need to return to the office right now!”
How we feel when we are doing leadership or culture-building work from home.
The Discussion
So many people are saying so many things about working from home versus working in the office, but there’s a nuance that seems to be absent from the conversation: Remote leadership work is more different and, in many cases, more difficult than remote individual work.
With this in mind, it’s no wonder why so many leaders want people back in the office and why so many employees don’t want to come back. And, why each of them thinks the other is confused. Of course, there are reasons for differences, but in our work with the world’s leading companies, this nuance seems largely unacknowledged.
In this article we unpack this issue, share some solutions we found can help us deal with this issue, and examine some science to see how people’s egocentric bias further complicates conversations around remote work.
The Problem
Many leaders, like those at Apple and others, are mandating that employees come into the office for at least three days a week, but many employees at Apple and other companies have not seen this as a helpful or desirable decision.
Both sides are frustrated.
So, why is this happening?
One reason may be that remote and hybrid work greatly disrupt the rhythms and norms of many styles of leadership work, compared to other types of work.
Leadership work, historically, has involved long in-person meetings, impromptu meetings, getting a feel for one’s people in live settings, and having everyone available in office for big and small emergencies, as well as sparks of inspiration. And, let’s be honest, a strong sense of control.
Non-leadership work has often involved sitting at one’s computer and doing something that is almost no different whether it is done in the office, in a coffee shop, or at home.
As the chief scientist and as a partner at On Your Feet, we’ve interacted with people at almost every level of the biggest companies in America during this time of transition and have observed this difference.
Those that seem the most “thrown off” by changes to remote work are often the leaders. The writers, the coders, the researchers, and the support staff often feel very little difference or prefer remote work entirely.
And, this personally rings true for us too. Leading our team, motivating people, and building a culture are all much harder, or at least different, than they used to be, while our personal individual work, such as writing articles like this one, has felt almost no different, if not even easier.
The Science
As research in psychology labs like Troy’s finds, people have an egocentric bias to view the world through their own perspective.
This means both leaders and employees are likely to have biased assumptions about one another and about work more specifically.
It manifests like this:
Leader: “My job is hard from home” becomes “Everyone’s job must be harder from home.”
Employee: “My job is easier from home” becomes “Everyone’s job is easier from home.”
This can have negative downstream consequences, such that leaders infer employees don’t care about working hard. And, employees infer that leaders must not trust them.
Stated more formally, leaders may incorrectly assume that because their own job is more challenging and less efficient when done remotely, that same inefficiency applies to other jobs.
Because of this bias, both groups can make errors.
Leaders may force others to leave a home desk to sit alone at an office desk in a way that may be largely inefficient or unnecessary for most of the employees.
If employees resist coming back, leaders might incorrectly assume that employees just don’t want to come in because employees are lazy or entitled.
On the other hand, employees who are individual contributors may incorrectly assume that because their jobs are generally efficient to do remotely, going back to the office has no value for anyone.
If leaders demand employees come back, employees might incorrectly assume the leaders only want this because they don’t trust them.
In actuality, the leaders may perceive that coming back will enable everyone to do better work, or at least leaders believe they themselves can do better work with everyone in the office.
The Solution: First, Everyone Talk
The first step to a solution is to deeply acknowledge everyone’s reality.
At On Your Feet, we’ve worked with many companies like Google, Nike, and Disney to navigate transitions, and so much of the process just involves intentional discussion and acknowledgement experiences. Why?
Because people simply do not understand one another’s realities, needs, and preferences.
This is not new or surprising. It is always hard to understand what others need.
But, it is harder when everyone is working in new ways.
And, it is somehow even harder when you cannot see people regularly. In these new and information-poor situations, biased-perceptions are highly likely to follow.
The Solution: Second, Help Leaders
Leaders need re-training and support with changing norms.
Most leaders never learned how to be remote and hybrid leaders. Thus, leaders in workplaces need new ways to do everything from leading meetings, to communicating with employees, to understanding what their employees need, to scheduling and strategizing.
At On Your Feet, we’ve shared new models for how leaders can effectively lead in the virtual. And, most importantly, we have helped individual companies like Intel and Nike contextualize virtual and remote leadership to their specific, evolving organizational realities.
Leaders need people to help train them and to guide them through practicing new skills, not just a forwarded message containing “tips for distributed work” like this one we wrote and this one, and this whole toolkit we made. Of course, forwarding articles-”hint, hint”-is helpful; it’s just not sufficient.
The Solution: Third, Help Individual Contributors
Don’t forget the things that are better for individual contributors.
Doing some work can be better at home, and not just because you don’t have to commute to the office or because you don’t have to find childcare or dog care or because you can nap more easily, but because individual work can be done by many at home without distractions.
The same isolation that makes some leadership work much harder makes some individual work much easier.
Many people have discovered flow states they never achieved at the office. It would be inefficient and wrong to throw all that away. And, as many companies are discovering, if you don’t offer people flexibility, another company just might.
Conclusion
The answers to most questions about modern work require us to see how remote and hybrid forms work differently for different people.
Until we understand that leaders and employees have different realities and need different things, our transition to whatever comes next will be slower, more biased, and less effective.
