Prepping for Working in Quarantine? Think Like an Anthropologist

By Jonathan Lowndes

It looks like we’re going to be working from home a lot in 2020. Nearly every company is building contingency plans, piloting remote protocols or already requiring employees to work from home, while some have even made pronouncements about how coronavirus will be a litmus test for a new “working from anywhere” paradigm. Advice abounds about how to set up your business and teams to function remotely, much of it focusing on productivity management (how can we ensure we still get everything done?) and tools (what do we need to buy in to make sure we can still do the same things)?

Working remotely successfully isn’t easy. Large companies like Yahoo and IBM have suffered from failed experiments in implementing remote working protocols. And the stakes are high: employees miscommunicating, and thus working less productively, cost US and UK businesses $37bn in 2018. How much worse will the bill be in 2020?

Alongside the large-scale corporate confusion, the internet is exploding with memes describing the weird behavior to expect in a near-term future in which we’re all working from home:

Source: Instagram.com/litquidity

For a few years, we have been examining remote working as anthropologists - not focusing on the management problems and toolsets, but on how group behaviors in specific social and physical contexts change with remote working. Here are three principles you can follow in using tech if you’re managing, or part of, a team poised to get sent home for the spring.

1. Don’t let the camera run the meeting

We’ve observed repeatedly that cameras have a lot of hidden impact on the dynamics of a meeting, impact that people often aren’t aware of. One of our research subjects (Jeremy, 28) used to use his laptop camera at all-hands meetings when traveling, until his COO joked he was the ‘Voice of God’ whose enormous face on the VC was being scrutinized for his nuanced expressions and theatrical gestures of approval. Now he just dials in, sharing just the agenda through his screen.

Cameras can make people feel over-exposed, invisible, or both at the same time. Some tech like the Microsoft Teams’ background blur feature is trying to address this, but we’ve seen people who want to share nothing but the background: one young remote coworking couple that we observed turns on FaceTime then point the camera at the ceiling, wandering in and out of each other’s view.

Instead of thinking of cameras as ways to make people feel connected, think of them as a tool to focus the whole attention of the whole group on one thing – and, when that attention doesn’t help the meeting, perhaps the camera is getting in the way.

2. Don’t let demonstrating productivity get in the way of getting things done

We expected remote workers to feel more relaxed and less ‘on’ than workers in office, reveling in increased flexibility and self-determination. In fact, often the reverse is true: the absence of constant confirmation that other people are working – butts at desks, chatter, the squeaks of whiteboard markers – leaves many in constant anxiety that others are doing more than they are. It’s been widely reported that remote teams are more productive but less innovative; we saw how this phenomenon feels to teams. For example, Annalise, 34, works for an arts organization (all work remotely) and she talks of “the flurries” that drive her day. She’s had a dress at the dry cleaners for four months “because each time I carve out twenty minutes to get it, something goes up on Slack, there’s a flurry, I have to respond, I send whatever comes into my head, then I need to go back and actually think about it and edit the shit I wrote.” American culture greatly values productivity, and people like Annalise feel the need constantly to be performing it – even if this means sending half-baked ideas.

You may fear that your workers will prioritize the drycleaning over work; you should instead worry that they will prioritize what is visible over what is thoughtful, and incentivize teams to focus on output and deadlines, rather than response times and workflows.

3. Do as much ‘social work’ as ‘real work’

People in a room together, even if we are not directly interacting, do a lot of quiet, implicit work to make ourselves understood: eye contact, mirroring body language, communicating at an organic time that we want to speak. Remote teams have to work hard to avoid misunderstandings.

But many of the things we do to make ourselves understood make us feel like power-grabbers, mansplainers, or aliens. Pete, 54, VP of Sales at a Fintech firm, calls the Webex presenting ball the ‘Ball of Death’ because his junior team use it to interrupt each other and grab attention. “They’re all showing the same pages, but they fight over this thing like it’s Lord of the Flies. In the room, they can just take their goddam turn.” It’s very hard in remote meetings to avoid talking over each other, or jostling for attention; email is an inherently passive-aggressive medium; we need to do a lot of explicit work that our bodies do implicitly for us.

Pete fixed his problem by now sending, along with the agenda, a list of roles to play: he’s the Referee, the Goalie keeps the meeting on track, Midfielders contribute discussion points and Strikers make decisions. His clarity, not only about what needs to get done, but how the team should interact, helps the team avoid thinking the worst in each other.

Tech companies have been making large bets in remote working for decades (did you know Herbert Hoover made a video call in 1927?), but the tools are dangerous if you let them work against the way people collaborate in the real world.

The next few months promise to be an enormous challenge for companies who don’t work remotely. Thinking like an anthropologist can help you make the best of the months ahead, and help you avoid your employees turning their time in quarantine into a meme.

[Banner image by Simon Abrams via Unsplash]