Micro-Nudges > Macro-Corrections: What In-Person Work Enables That Remote Work Does Not
Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash
Working in-person enables teams to realign continuously instead of having to make major course-corrections
It’s Monday morning, and Shannon strides into her company’s office in the Nomad neighborhood of New York City. En route to her desk, she pauses in front of a whiteboard listing out another team’s goals for the quarter. “I need to circle up with Jim about that,” she thinks to herself. She then runs into some colleagues by the coffee machine and falls into an impromptu discussion of an issue highlighted in last week’s all-hands meeting. A few minutes later, as she sits down at her desk, her supervisor remembers a bit of feedback she wanted to share with Shannon about a client interaction on Friday.
Up until a few years ago, this would be a fairly typical start to the workday. In today’s “remote first” workplace, however, most office workers’ days begin by pouring a cup of coffee in the kitchen, sitting alone on the sofa with a laptop, and jumping right into email, Slack, and to-do lists. No chit-chat by the company coffee pot, no spontaneous alignment sessions with team members walking by, no quick comments of feedback or encouragement from the boss. No micro-interactions at all, in fact.
While the rise and perpetuation of remote work has given many employees a level of flexibility no one could have imagined pre-pandemic, it’s also cost us in grave ways that we are not talking about enough: Without the hundreds of micro-nudges and coincidental interactions we used to experience on a daily basis, employees today are much more likely to focus on the wrong things and less likely to get important context and feedback on their work.As a result, they tend to need more significant macro-corrections to get back on course when things have gone awry. (Although no studies have yet been published on these specific points—there have been plenty published about remote work’s effects on mental health and productivity, on both sides of the spectrum—anecdotally, we’ve seen an abundance of evidence of these effects in our work with numerous executives and their teams.)
As it turns out, micro-nudges aren’t so micro after all. Brief in-person interactions in the workplace keep us more focused and aligned in our work, engender more trustful and transparent relationships with our team members, and provide us with the feedback we need to be able to learn and make small adjustments in real-time.
Let’s look at a few benefits of micro-nudges more closely:
1. Collective Focus
Being in person with colleagues builds and solidifies a collective focus that is infinitely harder to replicate when we’re working in remote silos on our own. Each moment Shannon experienced in the intro may seem fairly mundane, but taken together, they’re consequential. The whiteboard, the conversation of ideas between colleagues, the feedback—they all function as subtle but impactful reminders for Shannon of what the organization’s and team’s priorities are, and how they all work together.
In a remote setting without the opportunity for these micro-nudges, it’s easy for people to get distracted or lose sight of their team’s and company’s goals. Shannon’s supervisor may not remember to share the feedback, or she might save it for a quarterly (or, god forbid, annual) review with no context or immediacy. Shannon wouldn’t stumble upon her colleagues’ conversations, which means she’d have far less insight into what they’re working on and far fewer opportunities to collaborate or spark new ideas for her own. And she’d likely have to seek out for herself reminders of the company’s mission or current goals—and, let’s face it, no one does that very often. So many lost opportunities to drive home a collective focus that being in person naturally provides.
2. Trust
When we work in person, we have the ability to spend time together, converse easily, and collaborate at a moment’s notice—all of which builds trust. In any work setting, trust is incredibly important, not only because it breeds positivity and belonging, but also because it paves the way for people to be able to disagree and repair afterward.
Contrary to what some may think, disagreement is healthy. Renowned relationship expert and psychotherapist Esther Perel has often said that, among couples, having no disagreements is as much a sign of low relationship health as having constant disagreements is. Being able to disagree signals safety in the relationship—a comfort and confidence in sharing one’s position or idea, and a trust that doing so won’t be detrimental.The same is true for teams at work.
The key, though, is being able to repair. It’s in repairing that people acknowledge their roles and mistakes and make adjustments. At work, being able to disagree helps teams air tensions and test their ideas. Being able to repair helps them realign as things come up instead of leaving grievances festering only to explode months down the road, which can be costly for companies and employees in many ways—time, relationships, money, you name it.
It’s infinitely harder and takes exponentially more time to build the trust required to be able to manage these hard conversations well when you only see your colleagues on Zoom. In the office, it can be hard to avoid people—you’re going to run into Jim from finance at some point, and you’re going to have to hash it out. Working remotely, you can probably avoid Jim for a year if you want to.
3. Feedback
The micro-nudges you receive in person also play an important role in career development, specifically when it comes to feedback. As recently reported in The New York Times, remote workers—especially young workers who’ve only entered the workforce since the pandemic began—are missing opportunities to receive feedback.
Being in the office allows workers to get ample direct feedback in real time. Meanwhile, remote work adds a layer of friction. It’s easy to share a quick aside with a direct report or teammate with little emotional charge or drama as you walk past their desk, but it takes extra time and attention to carefully word an email or Slack message conveying the same note without sending the person into a tailspin. Often, it doesn’t get written. And setting an appointment to have a Zoom meeting to give someone feedback can make it seem much more serious than it is, so we often just don’t do it.
As a result, these moments to give and receive feedback—or, again, micro-nudges in the right direction—just pass us by. Little by little, as one small mistake after another gets overlooked, issues compound, and it takes a larger, more comprehensive (and more difficult) macro-correction later to right the ship.
Micro-nudges prevent macro-problems and deliver macro-growth
Forgive the metaphor, but working together in the office is a little like being in the same stew. You’re breathing the same air, seeing the same people, getting the same visual cues, hearing talk of the same priorities and projects, etc. While some may fear that this closeness can breed groupthink, we have observed alignment is a more likely result.
When employees share in-person experiences with their teammates on a regular cadence—whether through daily work in an office or through regular off-sites—they develop better relationships, experiment and learn with higher velocity, and deliver on an aligned vision more efficiently. Leaders are also much more likely to catch problems and misunderstandings sooner, rather than finding out weeks or months into a project that people are on vastly different pages.
Some may say that the remote work ship has already sailed, but we’re confident that the data and business outcomes will continue to show that we can’t afford to not spend more time in person together. The micro-investments we make in our relationships, alignment, and professional development compound over time, and with a long horizon ahead, they are undoubtedly worth it.