Weak Transit and Results-Based Work Culture Drive US Remote Work

2016-09-23 original Teams & Careers

Why Does the US Have So Much Remote Work?

The other day someone asked me, “Why does the US have so much remote work?” I didn’t have time to give a good answer on the spot, and thinking back on that, I decided to put my thoughts together here.

Let me say up front: just because I’ve taken the time to write this doesn’t mean I’ve come up with anything more interesting than what I failed to say on the spot. That’s my excuse.

This might be partly because the place I’ve spent time is Silicon Valley, but a friend of mine running a startup in LA told me every single member of his team works remotely, and the remote members at my job before last were in Boston and Texas. I also had a friend who said “I want to live in a single-family house,” and switched to remote work without changing companies or departments, moving to Arizona. There are other cases too, like someone who said “the bridge I commute over gets congested, so I work remotely two days a week.” Examples like this are endless, and my impression is that remote work has become the norm across the entire United States.

This was a while back, but when former Google executive Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo, she made a move that shows the US — Silicon Valley at least — may have come full circle to a phase where the overemphasis on 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/

That said, the controversy sparked by that move shows that remote work in America is still widely recognized as producing major social benefits.

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

Despite its vast land area, transportation infrastructure, including public transit, is weak.
Because it’s a results-based, discretionary labor system, freedom in one’s working style is guaranteed.

Point 1 basically means commuting is inconvenient, which leads to an extremely simple and rational idea: 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, but in any case, I have never once seen a time card in America. People working hourly jobs at factories or stores are probably doing something close to that, but if you tried to introduce something like a “time card” for so-called R&D or product development people, the following chain reaction would follow without question:

Motivation drops
Some people start cheating
Output quality ends up declining

and the whole thing would quickly be scrapped. It comes down to a simple line of thinking: if you’re telling me to commit to the short term (hourly work), then I’m not going to commit to mid-to-long-term output — because all I need to do is show up, right? In other words, the only things that matter are commitment and output, and interfering with anything beyond that — whether by the company or by an individual — is not tolerated. This is precisely because employer and employee are viewed as being in a “contractual relationship.” In Japan too, say you outsource drafting work to a contractor, and the deadline is this Friday — if you look at that person’s Facebook and it turns out they’ve been out drinking every night, is it right to take some kind of action about that? Even in Japan that would probably be seen as excessive interference. The time to take action or grill someone is when the drawings don’t show up on Friday, or if they do show up but they’re garbage. In America, this same kind of sensibility, if not identical, exists even in the relationship between company and employee.

What I especially felt in America was an underlying shared 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 might be the only developed country where people die of pneumonia because they couldn’t afford medical treatment for a cold that got worse. (I suspect a certain large country has plenty of that too, but I’ll leave that alone lol.) But thanks to this, people develop a “market sense.” They become extremely sensitive to their own value and how they’re evaluated in the market. They become sensitive to money, and to various benefits and discounts. I think this is part of what keeps the American economy stable. Precisely because things are severe, everyone stays sharply alert. The high fluidity of employment reinforces this further. Changing jobs is easy, and conversely, layoffs are an everyday occurrence. So everyone is disciplined about raising their own value, and correspondingly eager to earn a high salary, and conversely, it’s taken as a given that if you’re evaluated poorly, you fall. Everyone lives their life accepting that.

Well, that’s about as far as the model answer goes.

Below is strictly a comparison with Japanese people, but I want to raise one point about America that I’ve felt firsthand: this is why remote work works in America.

I don’t want this to be misunderstood — fundamentally, Americans have a warm disposition. People will casually strike up conversation with you on the street like they’ve known you forever, and if you’re picking something out at a coffee display, a grandmother behind you might offer a recommendation. If you’re out with 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 says that once, when she was standing in a long line at the supermarket, everyone told her, “go on, go to the front!”

Being nosy, attentive, and full of volunteer spirit is Americans’ true nature.

But the moment it becomes about work, something flips like a switch.

On the surface, nothing changes. People are still frank, generous, communicative, and easy to warm up to. But underneath that, a colleague is, in the end, a “teammate” — specifically, a fellow member of a shared fate within an organization where clear goals to be achieved, plans, and the benefits brought about by output all exist.

Now, let me shift the angle a bit: what kind of organization is truly “united as one” in properly achieving its targets?

An organization that gets along well and communicates thoroughly?

No, that’s not it. An organization that is truly united in the real sense is one where everyone is sincere toward the mission. Whether people get along, whether communication flows smoothly, whether attendance at drinking parties is high — none of that matters.

The mindset that comes out of this is: “As long as I’m faithful to my own mission, there’s no need to say anything about the person next to me’s behavior.” Depending on the situation, the ending might be phrased differently. “There’s no time to say anything about it.” “Rather than saying anything about it, I should be putting that effort into raising the quality of my own work.” “There’s no motivation to say anything about it.”

This is the source of indifference in the good sense of the word.

So the typical drawbacks people associate with remote work are only thought about to this extent:

“It’s hard to communicate” → That kind of excuse doesn’t fly, so people make every effort they can — using tools, breaking down tasks — to keep their own performance from dropping, and they demand the same of others. Management watches for exactly this, so people genuinely work hard at it.

“Discussion decreases” → Discussion should be cut down to the bare minimum anyway for performance to improve. Meetings, too, are unnecessary.

“You can’t really tell if the other person is slacking off” → As long as the output is there, no one cares.

“There’s no sense of team unity” → Surface-level unity isn’t necessary. The real unity people are actually looking for exists at the point where each individual’s performance and output quality has been pushed to the absolute limit. That’s enough.

When I said at the start that this wouldn’t turn into a very interesting story, it might be because these sensibilities are so far removed from traditional Japanese organizational thinking 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.