Remote Connections
When “the plague” hit, some of us were able to work remotely.
Advances in the hardware of microphones and cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops combined with software like Teams and Zoom to create new human interfaces that allowed for better remote interaction. People could carry on in certain jobs in certain industries in certain circumstances.
Those who can work remotely will.1 There are benefits that are obvious. There are costs that are not obvious.
This was made manifest recently at my 40th high school reunion (Edsel Ford, Class of ‘83, Go Thunderbirds!). I ran into a former classmate who works as an accountant. She told me she works more, and more productively, at home than she ever did at the office. However, another friend from high school just retired after years supporting city infrastructure and performing inspections; few remote possibilities exist there.
No, not every job can or should be done remotely. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, police, and fire prevention personnel are jobs that come to mind as those best performed in-person. However, a large number of jobs can countenance a so-called hybrid circumstance, where parts of a job are done in-person, and other parts are done remotely.
The medical profession comes to mind. Take my health, for example. I used to smoke. As a result, I have some lingering after-effects, like a persistent throat clearing. I saw my ear, nose, and throat or ENT doctor recently for an exam. That exam was in-person. I have follow-up visits with a speech therapist for some behavior modification regarding my benign yet annoying condition. Those visits will be virtual.
Contagion is mitigated with remote visits. In-person visits can be reserved for diagnosis and procedure, while remote “visits” can be reserved for touch-bases, Q&A, and counseling appointments. Administrative costs decline for both sides; less office space needed for the nurse or doctor, no gasoline nor time consumed for the patient.
These are benefits that are obvious.
But hybrid work assumes everyone can “meet” or work remotely. Doctors have money and therefore laptops with cameras and software and know how to use them, or can hire people that do. Not every patient does or can. My friend is an example.
My friend is 73. She lives on social security, and takes the bus everywhere. She has a smart phone, but to say she finds its use challenging is an understatement.
Consider the medical profession once more, this time from a process perspective. Remote visits will be prioritized for all the aforementioned reasons. In-person visits will thus be given very high or very low priority based on medical urgency.
Holding urgency harmless, I suspect a strong bias towards scheduling remote visits earlier over in-person visits, given the incentive structure and the assumed “ease of meet.” That is indeed an assumption; my friend is or will be out of luck. She might be able to connect remotely with her smart phone if she could figure it out, but if she still had her flip phone, forget it.
For some of us for whatever reason, remote connections are not viable, and so remote working doesn’t work.
This is a very long-winded way (which is my way) of saying that in a world biasing towards remote connections, for social interactions as well as work, the disadvantaged will live up to their adjective.
It doesn’t matter if the disadvantage comes from the participant (poor, elderly, etc.) or the nature of work (symbol work as an accountant versus physical work as a city inspector). The people who do not or cannot connect remotely will be negatively impacted either economically or culturally or both.
These are costs that are not obvious.
Life is not fair. A future of technological Haves and Have-Nots awaits us. The societal impact will be interesting, to say the least.
But if you can connect remotely and therefore work remotely, it’s pretty nice.
It is ironic for me to say this because I have been back in the office, albeit hybrid fashion, ever since I was vaccinated on April 1, 2021. As soon as I was vaccinated I went back to the office. I suspect I work in-person at the office around 75 to 80 percent of the time during a work week, on average and in general.
I am an outlier. I work in IT, after all. I could choose to work entirely remotely, and do not.
Why?
My commute is easy at 15 minutes via bus, my office space is better for work, and I can connect with important people easily.
I work in the office because it adds value to work and the cost is low, as opposed to people that work remotely where the inverse is true.
Mostly, however, I work in the office because I believe the highest cost of remote activity is simply being remote.
I begrudge people who work entirely remotely nothing. There are real advantages. I also enjoy these advantages that not everyone can. However, I do think that we should take care.
People thrive around other people. People in isolation do not thrive.2 Remote connections and work have an inherent negative, the lack of direct human contact.
When we are with others in-person, we communicate not only with our words, but also with the intonation of our voice, the turn of our head, and the gesture of our hand. The full complexity of human communication involves not only what we say but how we say it.34
A complete human connection is not remotely possible (pun intended).
People want the flexibility of remote work, not necessarily all remote human interaction. Smart phones, teleconferencing software, and even chat demonstrate that we can and will and do socialize remotely, but for some of us our preference is only to work as remotely as possible, not to socialize as remotely as possible.
Perhaps this is why class reunions can be so emotional. Relationships that were in-person were made remote. Reunions reestablish in-person contact.
What I also saw at my reunion was the interplay between human relationships and locality. At my class reunion there were people like me who had moved away and not seen others in 40 years because of distance. There were also people who had remained in Dearborn. Most of these had friends with whom they maintained relationships. Their high school “clique” had carried forward in time. Lack of distance helped the tribe to continue. Close friends close by stayed close.
But if you were not close nor in the clique, the relationship was broken with graduation.
Hence, there were people at the reunion who had remained in town for the last 40 years but had not seen each other because high school was but a circumstance, a time and place experience, not necessarily an interpersonal one. Both can enrich each other, but that doesn’t mean they always will.
Maybe this is a warning for us as we engage with each other remotely, both at work and in our personal lives. Work, like school, is a time and place experience, and can lend itself to remote interaction.
But good and close personal relationships help make work and school better, and relationships necessitate in-person contact, or at least most of them do. In-person contact with friends, family, and co-workers deepens mutual understanding and enriches relationships. Lacking the full richness of in-person communication, it is that much more difficult to build mutual understanding.
What better illustration of this situation do we have than our recent pandemic? Isolation and lockdowns increased our fear of death from disease by adding anxiety. Isolation also damaged our interpersonal relationships with everyone. Just as a lack of practice with a musical instrument leads to a decay in skill, so too did our social skills decline with lack of practice. At that point we just needed one bad happenstance to make everything that much worse.5
But we were already getting rusty at social skills before “the plague” with worrying implications, especially for children.6 I ride the bus to work every day. The people sitting next to me are remote in the sense that their heads are bowed down towards their phones. But for the occasional shuffle one would think I ride alone, as I ride in silence. There are plenty of people on the bus, but no one is present.
The tools that give us the power to connect remotely and work remotely also have the power to isolate us. One need not be distant to be remote. This is not good for interpersonal dynamics.
The best connections we make in life are in-person. The day may come when our phones are implanted neural interfaces and the issue of locality being a precondition for full human communication is rendered moot as we “Borg” ourselves.7 That day is not today.
We should socialize and work in-person as much as possible. It’s good for us. But if we do take advantage of remote work, let us at least give respect to the people in our presence by putting our phones down and face towards them. We all deserve that.
And my class reunion? It was a great success.
Some there had been friends since grade school and had stayed in touch, and it showed. Some had been separated from close friends for a long time and were reunited, and it showed. Some, like me, made new connections with past classmates that were now new friends, and it showed.
We had been remote, but together we made connections.