Postdigital reflections on remote leadership, belonging in the workplace, and the cultural and psychological impacts of remote working patterns.

Before I start, I should make clear that this is not a parable, a cautionary tale, or some kind of cosmic apology for being a crappy leader to a remote team. It’s a reflection on a time before the post-COVID days in which we live, and before the postdigital workplace they created. I regret plenty. I learned plenty. And I also realise what an impossible position I was in.

I do offer a few lessons I learned from it all, if you’ll wade with me through the memories.

A few years ago, in my first formal leadership role, I took on managing a team who had become accustomed to working from home. This was a couple of years before COVID, before lockdowns. And then my new boss decided they wanted me to get my team to start attending the office in person.

Spoiler alert: it was not a success.

I wasn’t just a hapless messenger. I agreed with my boss that my team needed to spend more time onsite. All other staff (including me) were required in the office at all times, while my team came into the office for perhaps three or four hours a week to attend the department standup and have lunch. I can still picture one of my team arriving at 10.30 am, taking off their sunglasses as they stepped out of the elevator in front of all the other people who had been there for two hours already.

In this case, as with all other cases of knowledge work, returning to the office was a question of optics. We had Zoom. We had Office 365. It wasn’t a matter of work not getting done, or not happening fast enough. It wasn’t about accountability. For me, the concern was this: our stakeholders did not like or trust our team. Their lack of physical presence made them “other” in an office culture where showing up was the way things were.

(For context, we worked in online learning, so our stakeholders included internal teaching staff and administrators, contracted subject matter experts and other industry contributors.)

In many ways, my team were pioneers. They implemented a Teams workspace long before anyone else in the organisation even realised we had access to it. This wasn’t an initiative of mine — they set it up themselves and tailored it to their needs. Course content writing was a major part of their work, and they used the collaborative document functions to co-write and quality-check materials with subject matter experts.

From their vantage point, everything was ticking along fine. From mine, it was terrifying. I was turning myself inside out trying to compensate for their invisibility. I organised various events involving external stakeholders — demonstrations, ideation meetings, design workshops, media production sessions — to try to create meaningful reasons for physical presence.

I also mandated two days a week onsite.

These days were semi-flexible. One, of course, was the day of the department standup. The other time they spent onsite was their choice, and I didn’t care about start and finish times, but of course I encouraged them to schedule collaboration work on those days, and use it to connect with stakeholders.

So what happened?

Accident, injury and disability claims. Members of my team began to voice their need for flexibility on grounds of physical and mental health concerns. As well, some of them had moved house to locations over an hour’s drive away from our office.

The HR department were, of course, on the side of onsite work. It was pre-2020, and in an organisation with over a thousand staff, no other team had carte blanche to work wherever they liked — this was a very uncomfortable situation for them. Especially when it got legal.

I wasn’t thirty yet. Honestly, I was young, impatient, and furious about the whole situation. You could say “brat” (I wouldn’t blame you). I did my best to behave professionally with them, but the mask slipped plenty of times. I silently, unfairly, blamed them for their anxiety and my own.

I was able to hire six new people into my team, and hoped that fresh faces would not only balance the load but renew the culture. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. At least one of the new staff became resentful of what seemed unequal arrangements (but were in reality HR situations being managed). Workload allocations were a mess, and I was losing the debate about the scope and inherent requirements of their roles. I became the enemy, and once that happened, it was over.

So what?

Well, eventually I left. I felt I’d made terrible mistakes, caused pain, damaged my own career, and failed to understand what was really going on.

But despite this — and the truth is I still feel this shame — I do believe the team needed to find their way back to the office. I don’t think the situation was the same then as it has been following COVID lockdowns, though it’s related.

I think it’s similar to post-COVID return-to-office mandates because the long-term remote working period led to psychological and cultural changes that were stronger and more pervasive than any management policy. I left, my boss left, and the team went back to 100% remote work.

This was the hardest lesson I learned about leadership: nothing matters more than culture, and nothing is more real than feelings.

And, I think it’s different to post-COVID because the culture around us was different. I write a lot about living in a postdigital society, and I think that was actually it. Our organisation wasn’t yet postdigital: the other teams, departments and external collaborators were not also remote-first, and so these relationships were at real risk of damage. The team had, in a sense, amputated itself from the embodied organisation.

I’ve worked in remote-first organisations since then (haven’t we all?) and I know physical proximity can be utterly irrelevant to good work and healthy cultures. Some of my fondest professional experiences involve working, learning and laughing with people I’ve never “met”. But the difference was one of symmetry: they were as far away from the “office” as I was. We were experiencing place in the same way although we were in different places, and so we were together.

Return-to-office mandates are still trickling in across the world, and commentary along with them. There’s a great deal of othering still going on, and everyone thinks God’s on their side. I don’t need to rehash any of the arguments you’ve already seen about equity, inclusion, flexibility, autonomy and all the rest — this isn’t about any of that.

What I believe, based on what I’ve experienced, is this:

1. Remote culture is supremely powerful.

People working remotely build rich, complex, precious, dogmatic cultures around their work practices. As with any culture, there are invisible but rigid norms and it is as important to know who’s in as who’s out. And if your leader is out, then your team will begin to fall away from the organisation.

2. Visibility is non-negotiable.

That’s not about being onsite — it’s simply about being where others can see us. If the only way for them to see us is in the office, then we have to go there sometimes, and be aware of what side of us they’re seeing. Of course, in knowledge work this is often the opposite of the case, and we need to be visible on Slack, LinkedIn, the staff directory, the intranet. This goes for leaders, and it goes for everyone else too.

3. Not everything we want is good for us.

Please don’t misunderstand me — this is not suggesting employers should be able to disregard employees’ requested accommodations if they wish: they legally and ethically cannot. But working in isolation for the long term can have severe mental health consequences, and it’s troublingly easy to begin losing empathy for others when we don’t see them around. (I would know — I think what I’ve written above shows a terrible shortage of empathy.)

Ultimately, no matter whether our bodies are home or in an office, we are in our bodies and we are online. It’s not a question of where we are, but of what we do there, and how we treat one another.