How are companies faring, 8 months into the pandemic, with the resultant huge increase in teleworking, video conferencing, and remote leadership?  Anecdotally in discussions with many leaders and knowledge workers, I’ve begun to notice a consistent pattern.  In some ways, this pandemic is shaping up to be harder for leaders than workers.  Virtual communications, while convenient, and inexpensive relative to offices, travel, and face-to-face meetings, have a down side for leadership especially.

What do I mean by this rather provocative statement?  The first trend I noticed was that the leaders I talk to are often more eager to get back to the office than the workers.  Why?  It’s hard to have all those impromptu conversations, meetings, and sidebars that make up modern leadership.  It’s hard to share the EQ that is so important to leadership via virtual means.

Workers, on the other hand, are telling me, “I’m in no hurry to go back to the office.  I’d rather work from home at least a few days a week.  Not having to commute saves me ridiculous amounts of time.  I’m more productive at home because I don’t have those endless interruptions from co-workers.  And then there’s being safe from the pandemic.  Sure there are problems — child care, never leaving home — but overall it’s kinda liberating.”

These conversations have led me to realize that the modern pre-pandemic open office is maximized for visibility, not productivity.  Whereas working from home, in stark contrast, is maximized for productivity, not visibility.  Another reason why leaders are less comfortable in the home office environment.

A recent piece in the New York Times highlights a company, Ultranauts, that is thriving in this remote working environment.  How?  In fact, the company was started by two MIT grads seven years ago with the intent of always being remote.  The idea was to hire autistic people, focusing on the numeric and detail skills often possessed by this part of the diverse human spectrum, to do quality testing of websites and apps.  The company has discovered that the word “autistic” covers a wide range of skills including pattern-recognition abilities of various kinds that have proven to be highly useful in this line of work.

What’s even more interesting is the various kinds of systems the company has put in place to make remote working not only possible but highly productive, profitable, and successful in general.  All meetings are recorded, transcribed, and archived so that the entire workforce can access them – including weekly leadership team meetings.  Those sessions are made available on the company Slack channel.  Each employee’s communication, work, and feedback preferences are noted in a software program that sends out a query every morning asking how interactive the employee wants to be that day.

Could these sorts of novel management techniques work for other companies and other workers?  When we can go back to the office, what are the changes we should consider based on our experiences with virtual working?  How will the tension between leaders wanting someone in the office to lead and workers wanting to stay safe at home be resolved?

The practice of leadership is always evolving.  The pandemic has forced this evolution to speed up considerably.  I, for one, will be very curious to see how companies come back to the office, with what changes, in what form, and how soon, as the pandemic begins to wind down.

And by the way, those virtual communication tools need to improve, and improve substantially, before we would all be able to be all-virtual, all the time, and feel just as connected as we used to face-to-face.