Poor Transit And Output-Based Work Explain America's Remote Work Boom

2016-09-23 original Teams & Careers

The other day someone asked me, “Why does America have so much remote work?”

I didn’t have much time, and looking back, I don’t think I gave a very good answer, so I’m putting together a proper version here.

Let me say up front: just as I couldn’t come up with anything particularly interesting on the spot, taking the time to write this out doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve come up with anything interesting now either.

That’s my excuse.

It may partly be because the place I’ve spent time is Silicon Valley, but a friend of mine running a startup in LA told me his whole team works remotely, and the remote members at my job before last were based in Boston and Texas.

I also had a friend who said “I want to live in a house with a yard,” switched to remote work while keeping the same company and department, and moved to Arizona.

There are other cases too — someone telling me “the bridge on my commute gets jammed, so I work remote two days a week” — and honestly there’s no end to examples like this. My impression is that remote work has become the norm across the whole of America.

This was a while back, but when Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, became CEO of Yahoo, she made the move below. It shows that America, or at least Silicon Valley, may have come full circle to a phase where the tilt toward remote work is being reconsidered.

“Return to office for all employees starting June” — Yahoo’s internal memo makes headlines http://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASGM2600T_W3A220C1FF1000/

Even so, as the controversy that move sparked shows, America still widely credits remote work with major social benefits.

So, as for the reasons why, let’s start with the textbook answer.

Despite its vast land area, the transportation network, including public transit, is poor
Because it’s an output-focused, discretionary labor system, freedom in how one works is guaranteed

Point 1 basically means commuting is inconvenient, an extremely simple and rational idea along the lines of “if you’re going to make someone commute for two hours, it’s more productive to just have them work from home instead.”

Point 2 is about values around how work gets done. In America, at least, I’ve never seen anything like a time card. People working hourly jobs in factories or stores probably do something close to it, but if you tried to introduce a “time card” system for people doing R&D or product development, you’d get a chain reaction without question:

motivation drops
some people start cheating the system
output quality ends up dropping

and the whole thing would get scrapped in no time.

The logic is simple: “If you’re telling me to commit to the short term (hours worked), then I’m not going to commit to mid- to long-term output. Because all that matters is that I show up, right?”

In other words, only commitment and output are considered meaningful, and anything else that interferes, whether from the company or another individual, is not something to be tolerated. This comes directly from viewing the relationship between employer and employee as a “contractual relationship.”

In Japan too, say you outsource a drafting job and the deadline is this Friday, and you check the contractor’s Facebook and see they’ve apparently been out drinking every night. Is it right to take some kind of action over that? Honestly, even in Japan that would probably be seen as overreach. The moment to take action or press the person is when the drawing doesn’t show up on Friday, or when it does show up but it’s garbage.

In America, this same kind of sensibility exists, not exactly but not far off, even in the relationship between “company and employee.”

What I felt especially strongly in America was a shared underlying understanding:

“The weak, the incompetent, and those who don’t use their heads have no right to survive.”

It’s actually a very cold country. America may be the only developed country where people die of pneumonia from an untreated cold because they couldn’t afford medical care. (I suspect a certain large country has plenty of that too, but I’ll leave that alone, lol.)

But this is precisely what cultivates “market sense.” People become extremely sensitive to their own value and how the market evaluates them. They become sensitive about money too, and about all kinds of benefits and discounts. I think this is part of what keeps the American economy stable. Because the environment is severe, everyone keeps their antennae up.

The high fluidity of employment reinforces this further. Changing jobs is easy, and the flip side is that layoffs are an everyday occurrence.

So everyone is disciplined about raising their own value, and correspondingly eager to command a high salary.

And conversely, if you get evaluated poorly, falling on hard times is simply taken as a given. People accept that and live with it.

So that’s roughly the model answer.

Below is purely a comparison with Japanese people, but I want to raise one point about America that I’ve felt firsthand:

“Remote work works in America because of this.”

I don’t want this to be misunderstood: fundamentally, Americans are warm by nature.

People will strike up casual conversations with you on the street without any hesitation, and if you’re picking something out at the coffee shelf, a grandmother behind you might recommend her favorite.

If you’re out with your kid in a stroller, one out of every ten people passing by will say something like “oh, he’s so cute.”

If a pregnant woman or an elderly person is carrying something heavy, someone will definitely help them, and my wife has been told by everyone in a long supermarket line, “go ahead, go to the front!”

Being nosy, caring, and full of volunteer spirit is the true nature of Americans.

But when it comes to work, it feels like a switch flips.

On the surface, nothing changes. People are still frank, warm, communicative, and friendly.

But underneath that, a colleague is, at bottom, a “teammate.”

And specifically, a member of a shared-fate community within an organization built around clear goals to achieve, a plan, and benefits produced through output.

Now, let me shift the angle a bit: what kind of organization is actually “unified” enough to properly hit its targets?

An organization that gets along well and communicates smoothly?

No, that’s not it.

An organization that is truly unified in the real sense is “an organization where everyone is sincere about the mission.” Whether people get along, whether communication flows smoothly, whether attendance at the drinking party is good, none of that matters at all.

The thinking that comes out of this is:

“As long as you’re faithful to your own mission, you don’t need to say anything about how the person next to you behaves.”

Depending on the situation, the phrasing might differ:

“There’s no time to say anything about it.”

“Rather than saying something about it, you should put that effort into improving the quality of your own work.”

“There’s no motivation to say anything about it.”

This is the root of indifference in the good sense.

So the typical drawbacks people associate with remote work only get this much consideration:

“It’s hard to communicate.” → That excuse doesn’t fly, so people make every effort they can, using tools, breaking tasks down clearly, both to keep their own performance from dropping and to demand the same of others. And frankly, management is watching for exactly this, so people take it seriously.

“Discussion decreases.” → Performance actually improves the more you cut discussion down to the bare minimum. Meetings, too, are unnecessary.

“You can’t really tell if someone is slacking off.” → As long as the output shows up, nobody cares.

“There’s no sense of team unity.” → Surface-level unity is unnecessary. The real unity people are after lies at the crossing point reached once each individual’s performance and output quality has been pushed to its limit. That’s enough.

The reason I said at the start that “this won’t turn out to be a very interesting story” may be that these sensibilities are so far removed from traditional Japanese organizational theory that they come across as almost absurd.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2016/09/340/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.