Losing nuance: Working remotely

For some time now I've been working remotely. I'm in the east - the east east, Atlantic Canada. Many of the people I work with are in the west - the west west, British Columbia. That is a four hour time difference. I'm on Atlantic Time, they're on Pacific. I also work with people in Alberta and Ontario, two other time zones.

Now, if I worked with people in India, or one of the European countries, the time difference would be much larger and, with outsourcing, many companies (and the workers they've outsourced to) have to manage that rather large time variance.

As a teleworker, there are many benefits to working this way. For myself, I think the largest benefit is time. While there are a few teleconferences I attend, for the most part I miss out on the plethora of meetings office workers get pulled into. And that means more time for me. With the time zone differences, particularly where the west coast is involved, I get my entire morning to myself - they don't get to work till about noon or 1:00 my time. So my productivity is way up compared to what it was when I was working in a cubicle in an office tower.

There are many more advantages to working from home however there are also disadvantages. I think the biggest is the loss of nuance. There is no tactile aspect where the people I work with is concerned. We're all just digital bits passing back and forth over the Internet.

What does this loss mean? Let's say someone has initiated a project and you're involved as a member of a team. The leader of the team sends an email saying something like, "We're very excited about this project. We're convinced this will result in a new and profitable revenue stream." It reads well enough, if a little bland. But ...

What if the same person made the same statement person to person, speaking to the entire team? The meaning you take from it could be entirely different because you see his or her body language and you hear his or her tone. Rather than thinking this is a great project, one bound for success, you may find yourself thinking, "It's a fiasco! This guy doesn't believe in this thing at all - he's just going through the motions! Why are we even doing this?"

Loss of nuance is not a minor thing

You may say, "Yes, but what about web cams and something like Skype? You can see the person, so where's the problem?" It's not quite the same thing. It sounds rather vague, but when you are in person the room has a certain "feel." You get vibes off of others, whatever "vibes" might mean.

Attitudes, energy, personality ... they all go into in-person communication and rarely come across digitally. Even people who write well and know how to communicate their meaning in emails, text messages and so on, often don't do so. Given the amount of emails, Powerpoint presentations, documents, links etc. that we have to go through, responses are often quickly whipped off with no real editorial scrutiny to ensure our meaning is truly coming across. Thus, we sound angry in an email when we aren't. Or we sound disinterested when we aren't. We've simply been inadvertently brusque or excessively brief.

As with just about everything, when you get something you have to give something up. Usually, when we are getting something (such as a chance to work from home), we focus on the thing we're getting and we don't pay a lot of attention to what we're losing. Often, we don't see what we lose till well after it's gone.

This isn't to say we shouldn't go for the thing we will get, like working remotely. It's just that where there's an up there is also a down. It also strikes me that as this loss of nuance grows with more and more work outsourced or done from a home office, the problem of miscommunication will grow. Yes, there is technology out there that reads eye movement, keyboard pressure, blood levels and other clues as to how we actually feel, but it won't be ubiquitous or accurate any time soon. And even if it were, I can't see it being as effective as human observation. But that may just be the Luddite in me.

I like working for home and wouldn't go back to an office situation with any kind of eagerness. But I'm well-aware of what is lost and wish there was some way to regain it. But as Neil Young sings, "They give you this but you pay for that."