Transactionality in Remote Work

One of the things that’s been on my mind with the great shift to remote working is how transactional work can become. When I changed companies, I remarked that all that had changed for me physically was that a new MacBook Pro arrived and the old one got boxed up and shipped off. I was still sat in the same room as I was before, this time doing stuff with and for a different bunch of people, who were represented by pixels on a screen and nothing else.

Yet something had changed. Yes, there was the excitement of starting a new role in a new company, but towards the end of my first month I had a few difficult moments where I felt like work had become, well, transactional. Fortunately for me, enough stuff happened in quick succession that it turned it around, but as a manager I’m really interested in thinking about how we can avoid this happening in the first place.

Transactionality?

First off I want to define what I mean by transactional work. I define work as being transactional when it’s done for no reason other at all other than the fact you’re getting paid for it. Someone asks you to do a thing, and you do the thing in a reasonable time because otherwise they’ll stop giving you money. That’s the end of your engagement with the process.

The opposite of transactionality is, indeed, engagement. An engaged person feels an emotional connection to what they’re doing. They can understand why what they are doing matters, to themselves and to the people that they work with. Their work scratches some kind of psychological itch for them. They believe.

Why does remote work encourage transactionality?

My premise is that the lack of engagement that remote work can bring is rooted in Maslow’s oft-cited Hierarchy of needs, which looks like this:

If we accept this premise, then it becomes clear that the ‘higher’ needs in the Self Actualisation part of the pyramid are particularly susceptible to not being fulfilled with remote work. This is because remote work is far more vulnerable to not fulfilling people’s Social needs than in person or hybrid working.

I think this has the potential to happen for a few different reasons. The first is that going to a physical place with everyone else is easy for our brains to understand. You are here. So are they. You are like them. You belong. In a shared physical space like that it’s easy for getting-to-know-you type conversations to happen, and for you to immediately feel like you are known as a person rather than as a cog in a machine. It’s also easier for you to feel inclusion from being part of random work discussions that happen in an office context. When working remotely, those conversations tend not to happen since every meeting effectively happens in a private space.

A lot of the foundational technologies that are used in distributed companies also really don’t help. Slack and email are the biggest offenders, it’s super easy (and often even encouraged) to be succinct and to the point. Fundamentally this is because it can be annoying when someone DM’s you with “hey, how are you?” and doesn’t ask for what they want. You might not see it for hours, and by then they might not be around, time is wasted this way. But interacting this way is deeply unnatural for us. Very few people get straight to the point in person (in fact it’s unspeakably rude to in a lot of cultures), so working this way over text based media can be quite jarring, whether consciously or not.

So What?

On the off chance that you’re not immediately persuaded that fulling people’s social needs are important, I’ll spend a few moments describing why this is such a problem, especially for innovation led companies.

Firstly, it rather obviously increases staff turnover. This is cited in this Wired article, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t require a citation to convince you that people who feel that their colleagues are their friends are much more likely to hang around when the going gets tough. Viewing your colleagues as friends also makes jobs more ‘sticky’ because it creates a real cost to leaving - not getting to see and work with those people every day any more. That kind of team cohesion also encourages people to go ‘above and beyond’ in the service of their team’s goals, much in the same way that the armed forces encourages unit cohesion for the same reason.

A lack of social cohesion also has a corrosive effect on innovation. This is because people who lack social bonds with their colleagues don’t feel ‘safe’ in venturing forward risky ideas. Since almost all good ideas start out sounding risky/crazy, this is terrible if you’re in the business of coming up with new stuff, which we almost all are these days.

So what can we do?

Meet ups

The answer to this question is still very much an evolving field, but I’ll share my thoughts as someone with skin in the game. The most obvious answer is to spend some of the money that the company is saving in real estate bills on in-person meet ups for the team. It doesn’t need to be the whole company in the same place, what’s initially important is forming relationships with people you speak to regularly, and I would say that this needs to happen quarterly at least. Having said that, I think that doing and all-company off-site at least once a year is desirable to try and break down some of the siloing that remote work creates, but that’s solving a different problem.

To facilitate this, if you’re an international company, then I think it’s important to pay attention to people’s geography when building teams. You need to make it easy for people to meet up, and it’s a lot easier for 5 people in the same or neighbouring states (in both senses of the word) to meet up than it is for people spread across 3 different continents. (And it’s cheaper too).

Weekly 1-1s with a manager who personally cares

Outside of onsites and meet-ups , I think the next most valuable thing is weekly 1-1s between managers and their reports. I’m as guilty as the next manager of sometimes turning 1-1s into mini status meetings, but from my research on this topic I’m more determined than ever to not do that and really use those sessions to get to know people properly. 1-1s over a web meeting have a very different quality to them, even with people you know well. People approach face to face meetings differently in my experience, they feel more able to wander (conversationally), for things to get off topic a bit, which is usually where you get to actually know them. Recreating this over a web meeting is really hard, it takes persistence, and there are some people who will never want to open up to you regardless. Despite this, I think it’s on each and every manager in a remote company to really make sure that they work towards fulfilling those ‘belonging’ needs for everyone who reports to them, it’s really a fundamental part of the job.

Give careers structure

On reflection there could well be a link between the size a company reaches and the work starting to feel transactional to new joiners. This occurred to me because my next point, giving people a career ladder/structure, doesn’t really apply in a company of 20 people, but does when you start to get to 100. One way in which I think you can make people feel like the company cares about them is by showing that it is invested in their career growth. This can be a hard thing to demonstrate without some kind of ladder to climb (I can feel a post on engineering ladders coming on already), since it gives both managers and their reports a shared language by which to talk about this stuff.

For the same reason, as much as goal-setting is dreaded by everyone everywhere, deploying something like OKRs can maybe help people feel like their work matters for reasons other than simply not getting fired. Even if you can’t bring yourself to require individuals to set them, I think there could be real value in getting them set at a team level as it creates a shared sense of purpose and team cohesion that I was harping on about above.

Focusing on onboarding

When thinking about the experience of joining a new company, if you can’t get your new starter to a meet up / onsite meeting in their first month, I think it’s really important for the company leaders to reach out to them and set up time to talk in their first few weeks. As with the manager 1-1s that I mention above, the objective of those meetings is to foster a sense of belonging and inclusion. Use them as an opportunity to find out about the person, and also for them to find out about you, both personally and professionally. It’s a great way of working out where the new starter fits (as you might not personally know), and whether you can include them in any other regular meetings / get togethers. I suggest this approach rather than suggesting meeting everyone in the company for two reasons. The first is that once you get above a certain size it becomes hard for that to happen in a reasonable amount of time. The second is that you can coach your leaders on what kind of meeting this needs to be, what the objective of it is, in a way that you can’t coach the general population of your company.

Remote team building

After this my mind turns to the slightly murky world of all the ‘remote team building’ apps and services that have sprung up since the pandemic. I’m talking about virtual escape rooms, virtual coffee breaks, virtual water coolers etc. I think the jury is still out on how effective a lot of these things are. There are few things more alienating, after all, than sitting on a zoom call with 50 other people whilst someone talks at you. I think the one-on-one virtual coffee break idea potentially has legs as long as people are helped to prioritise it, otherwise it’s just another nice idea that doesn’t have legs. I have seen small-group virtual coffee breaks work well too. Something as simple as a web meeting twice a day with the explicit expectation that it’s a break from work can be a great way of bringing new people into a team and making them feel like they belong. For this to work though people need to be in about the same time zone, which echoes a point I made earlier about that.p

I think it’s all going to be ok

Ultimately it seems like solving this problem is eminently doable in a world where COVID is merely endemic rather than pandemic. I think it’s really challenging to do it in a 100% remote environment, but even then there are a number of things you can do that really help. What is clear though is that successfully running a remote company takes sustained focus and effort from the company management, otherwise you’ll never manage to hire people faster than you lose them.