Remote work and the importance of writing

The written word will flourish in the post-pandemic workplace writes Bartleby in The Economist

The pandemic has given a big shove to all forms of digital communication. Video-conferencing platforms have become verbs. Venture capitalists make their bets after watching virtual pitches. Products like Loom and mmhmm help workers send pre-recorded video messages to their colleagues. More than a third of Slack users each week are now “huddling”—using the product’s new audio feature to talk to each other. And all this is before the metaverse turns everyone into an avatar. 

A workplace dominated by time on screens may seem bound to favour newer, faster and more visual ways of transmitting information. But an old form of communication—writing—is also flourishing. And not just dashed-off emails and entries on virtual whiteboards, but slow, time-intensive writing. The strengths of the written word have not been diminished by the pandemic era. In some ways they are ideally suited to it.*

The value of writing is a staple in management thinking. “The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen,” reckoned Lee Iacocca, a quotable titan of the American car industry. Jeff Bezos banned slide decks from meetings of senior Amazon executives back in 2004, in favour of well-structured memos. “PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas,” he wrote.

Some executives write for themselves. Andrew Bosworth, a bigwig at Meta (formerly Facebook), has a blog in which he muses interestingly on many topics, including on writing itself: “In my experience, discussion expands the space of possibilities while writing reduces it to its most essential components.” Others do so to reach an audience. Shareholder letters from Larry Fink and Warren Buffett are the corporate equivalent of a blockbuster book launch.

But the move to remote working has enhanced the value of writing to the entire organisation, not just the corner office. When tasks are being handed off to colleagues in other locations, or people are working on a project “asynchronously”, meaning at a time of their choosing, comprehensive documentation is crucial. When new employees start work on something, they want the back story. When veterans depart an organisation, they should leave knowledge behind. Writing everything down sounds like an almighty pain. But so is turning up to a meeting and not having the foggiest what was decided last time out.

Software developers have already worked out the value of the written word. A research programme from Google into the ingredients of successful technology projects found that teams with high-quality documentation deliver software faster and more reliably. Gitlab, a code-hosting platform whose workforce is wholly remote, frames the secret of successful asynchronous working thus: “How would I deliver this message, present this work, or move this project forward right now if no one else on my team (or in my company) were awake?” Gitlab’s answer is “textual communication”. Its gospel is a handbook that is publicly available, stretches to more than 3,000 pages and lays out all of its internal processes.

The deliberation and discipline required by writing is helpful in other contexts, too. “Brainwriting” is a brainstorming technique, used by Slack among others, in which participants are given time to put down their ideas before discussion begins. Lists of corporate values can make greeting cards seem hard-hitting. But thoughtful codification of a firm’s culture makes more sense in hybrid and remote workplaces, where new joiners have less chance to meet and observe colleagues.

Purists will sniff that none of this counts as writing. But good prose and useful prose share the same essential qualities: brevity, structure, a clear theme. Cormac McCarthy, a prize-winning novelist, copy-edits scientific papers for fun. Ted Chiang says that his science-fiction short stories and his technical writing both draw on a desire to explain an idea clearly.

Writing is not always the best way to communicate in the workplace. Video is more memorable; a phone call is quicker; even PowerPoint has its place. But for the structured thought it demands, and the ease with which it can be shared and edited, the written word is made for remote work.

What's behind the headlines demanding a return to the office?

Instead of reimagining the world of work, our censorious press backs those whose wealth depends on the commuter-driven status quo writes Hettie O'Brien in The Guardian

‘Nobody can think that risking their health to save a multimillion-pound sandwich chain is a sensible endeavour.’ Photograph: Peter Summers/Getty Images

 With a deadly virus smaller than a speck of dust still circulating, it’s natural that many office workers would rather be doing their jobs from home. Though this inadvertent mass experiment in home working hasn’t been universally enjoyable, particularly for those living in cramped accommodation or juggling work and children, it has at least freed many from commuting, allowed some to spend more time in their local communities, and made cities less congested as a result.

But this isn’t what you’d think from the censorius press coverage of home working, which has treated it as a collective sickness that is stalling Britain’s recovery. Last week, the Daily Telegraph ran a piece stating that workers remaining at home will be more vulnerable to redundancy, with bosses finding it far easier to hand P45s to employees they haven’t seen during the pandemic. Its language was telling: people must “go back to work”, as if they are not already working.

An article in the Daily Mail reprimanded office workers for “boasting smugly about their exciting new ‘work/life balance’ and the amount of money they are saving on their railway season tickets”, as if these were morally reprehensible acts. “If your job can be done from home it can be done from abroad, where wages are lower”, TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp warned on Twitter, adding: “if I had an office job I’d want to be first in the queue to get back to work and prove my worth”. The meaning of these veiled threats is clear: if you stay at home, expect to lose your job.

Beneath this scolding is a message directed at those who aren’t complying with the old status quo. The service economy in financialised city centres depends on the consumption patterns of office workers: commuting every day involves not just buying a sandwich or a coffee from Pret, but helping to prop up an entire system. Were it not for the vast numbers flowing out of stations every morning, the capacity to extract astronomical rents, both from commercial and residential properties, would shrivel – and city centres would no longer be soulless corporate landscapes where multiple franchises of the same chain restaurant can be found within walking distance of each other.

Warnings from the CBI that city centres could become “ghost towns” if commuters never return belie reality: these have long been sterile places devoid of character – it’s just that in the past, it seemed unlikely they might change.

A recent YouGov poll gauging enthusiasm for this back-to-work mantra found that support for workplaces “encouraging [workers] to return to the office” correlated with age: 44% of over-65s agreed with this statement, while only 25% of 25- to 49-year-olds did so. That the over-65s, the age group least likely to be returning to the office, are the most enthusiastic supporters of this principle is unsurprising. The idea that you’ve got to be physically present to prove your value to your boss encodes an entire attitude to work – one firmly rooted in the Taylorist management doctrine of the 20th century, when employees were expected to conform to the objectives of the firm in exchange for a permanent contract. Today, the expectation of worker “flexibility” is more widespread, and surveillance that once relied on office overseers can now be conducted online (indeed, since the start of the pandemic, the demand for software that monitors workers while they’re working from home has surged).

Despite the media paranoia over home working, many managers don’t really seem to care that people aren’t back in the office. Some companies have said they will move to remote working full time, or at least allow employees to work this way some of the time. The people who seem most concerned about going back to work aren’t workers, or managers, but rentiers – a category that applies to many retiree readers of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, a demographic that is likely to have paid off mortgages, receives generous pensions and contains a higher proportion of private landlords, and to the rentiers who have funneled their wealth into assets such as real estate and office spaces concentrated in urban centres. Until recently, both of these groups were relatively insulated from economic shocks affecting the labour market, their wealth dependent on the continuation of an old normal that now seems more precarious than ever.

The monstering of home working doesn’t really stem from concern about workers’ productivity or mental wellbeing. Instead it’s an attack on those who dare flout the rules that sustained the old normal. The survival of city centres, and by extension the businesses that extract rent from them, relies upon everyone playing their part – most of all workers. Telling people they must return to the office whatever the circumstances is a way to circumvent critique and insist upon the old normal returning, as if repeating a mantra were all it took to make it true.

When newspapers shriek that workers must return to the office, despite the reality that many don’t want to, they’re voicing what the sociologist Luc Boltanski called a “system of confirmation” – an utterance that is neither truth nor fact, but rather a way of reinforcing the status quo. But nobody can think that risking their health to save a multimillion pound sandwich chain is a sensible endeavour.

Since the pandemic began, societal changes that were supposed to be impossible have happened with relative ease. Workers were sent home overnight, and it now seems that many can do their jobs, if not fully remotely, then at least partially from home. Already, many people are talking of moving away from big cities to avoid the costs of high rent and long commuting times. And behind the claims of economic catastrophe caused by a drop in commuting, some independent businesses have reported that they are thriving. Instead of asking what will happen to city centres if the commuters never returned, we should be asking: what would the city, and the economy, look like if they weren’t organised this way?