Remote work changed where we work, but I’m not convinced we fully understood how it would change the way we learn, lead, and advance.
From an employee’s perspective, the benefits are obvious: less commuting, more flexibility, greater autonomy, and time returned to life outside work. But there is a less visible tradeoff, and that is visibility itself. An employee can become a name on an organizational chart, a square on a video call, or a headcount in a spreadsheet.
As a junior analyst, I learned an enormous amount simply by being present after a conference call ended. I listened to my manager and his boss discuss what had just happened, what was said, what wasn’t said, what mattered, and what came next. Those conversations weren’t on the agenda. Nobody scheduled them, and I wasn’t necessarily their intended audience. I wasn’t being taught. I was learning.
From a manager’s perspective, the tradeoffs are different. You can no longer walk over to someone’s cubicle, grab a piece of paper, and sketch out what you need. A five-minute conversation becomes a scheduled thirty-minute meeting. And then there’s what happens after 5 p.m. In my experience, that’s often when the work about work gets done: the informal conversations, candid assessments, mentoring, and decisions that don’t fit neatly into a calendar invitation.
Proximity also creates familiarity, and familiarity cuts both ways. When someone consistently contributes, solves problems, and takes initiative, people notice. When someone doesn’t, people notice that too. It’s considerably harder to hide a lack of contribution when colleagues experience your work firsthand, day after day. A camera, a virtual background, and a muted microphone can establish presence without necessarily establishing participation.
COVID accelerated the technology, but the culture was left behind.
We figured out how to replicate the meeting. We didn’t necessarily replicate everything that happened before the meeting, after the meeting, or when someone pressed mute. Organizations have attempted to fill that gap with scheduled mentoring, virtual watercoolers, collaboration hours, and mandatory office days. But can you formalize something whose value comes, in part, from its spontaneity?
I explored a similar paradox in an earlier essay about teaching people to think outside the box. The moment we prescribe a framework for escaping frameworks, we risk constructing another box.
COVID gave us the technology to work without proximity. But can employers or employees really quantify the intangible value of what was lost?