In case you missed it, I shared a few shoutouts over the weekend.
Also, after publishing last week's post, I realized that HBO Max is rebranding to Max. What a mind-boggling choice to remove the “HBO” brand from the name.
I’m currently writing this piece from sunny Santa Barbara, California, so my apologies on the late delivery. I’m here on a work team trip, which inspired the topic for today’s piece. Without further ado…
I am not going to lie. I’m sold on return to office.
This was not something I could’ve imagined saying two years ago. Or even six months ago.
I joined my current company, Jackpocket last August. At the time, we were working fully remotely. While we did have an office in New York, I went in less than a handful of times, each time to an eerily empty WeWork space in midtown Manhattan.
I was drinking the remote work kool-aid. It just made sense. I could run errands when I needed to. I could get a work out in during the work day. I could do my dishes or laundry. I could even slip in a quick nap between meetings.
The convenience was unparalleled.
Then at the end of January, our company announced that we would be returning to the office for two days a week. Every employee in the greater New York area would need to come in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
I wasn’t sure how to feel. It could be worse I told myself.
Three months later, I can confidently say I’m a fan. It’s a game-changer. What makes in-person work so great?
Productivity
I won’t sugarcoat it. I am significantly more productive in the office. I see everyone around me working, and that motivates me to work harder. Conversations that would otherwise require multiple back-and-forth over Slack or email can be had in a two-to-three-minute conversation.
As a Product Manager, my role is—in essence—to bring everything together to solve a customer problem and achieve a business outcome. This means working with developers, designers, marketers, data analysts, you name it. Much of my job is about identifying edge cases and strategies for nuances and complexities. Talking about these in-person leads to more productive decision-making for me.
Once I’ve talked about something, and I have the context of the person, the place, and the time, I tend to remember it more clearly. In the remote world, I’m trying to remember an old Slack conversation buried behind hundreds of other conversations or trying to find a ticket in the backlog of JIRA, a universally despised tool.
Collaboration
In-person works best for brainstorming, launching new projects, and the one-off ideas. When I have a new interesting idea, rather than having to try to set up a meeting and jot down the details before I forget it, I can talk it through with someone and validate or invalidate it immediately.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve needed to have a discussion with certain stakeholders where the scheduling and coordinating has taken weeks. On top of that, once I actually have the meeting, it’s much harder for us to stay on topic remotely and accomplish the goal of making a decision. Meanwhile in the office, I’m not relying on a calendar; I can see who is available at any time. I grab a few people at their desks, talk it out, and we can come to the decision in minutes.
On a product development team, collaboration is critical. It encourages discussion and in turn, better ideas. Engineers propose new ways to implement something. Designers propose better ways to visualize a key functionality. Together the team comes up with a better way to solve a problem than what was initially proposed in a ticket or document. As a Product Manager, I now have a clearer understanding of how it all works together, and there’s nothing lost in translation or over a spotty internet connection.
A key part of Product is driving alignment towards a decision across various, highly-opinionated teams. This is already a difficult job, given you are working across different personalities, incentives, and motivations. Doing this over Zoom or Slack makes it even harder. Having an in-person meeting and being able to feel out a person’s vibe or mood may be hard to quantify, but it’s subjectively vital to having success influencing others.
Relationship-Building
There’s a connection and rapport you establish when you talk with someone in-person because it feels natural. The conversation isn’t necessarily structured or set up in a confined schedule; it’s often light-hearted, and more organic. Once you establish this rapport with someone, it becomes much easier to build on and maintain that relationship. This pays huge dividends. Now you have a resource you can rely on for one-off questions, gut checks, or second opinions.
I recently wrote about water cooler chats. The value of these quick conversations—work or not work related—compound over time. Soon enough, you’re seeing your co-workers not as colleagues or acquaintances, but as genuine friends. In-person work creates more opportunities for these types of conversations, including team lunches, happy hours, and after-work events, only strengthening these relationships over time.
The value of working with people you see as friends is immeasurable. It creates positive momentum and inherent motivation that is infectious. I would run through a brick wall for a friend, and having that mentality with co-workers is powerful.
Work-Life Balance
For myself, going into the office creates a nice separation between work life and personal life. On days where I work from home, I’m guilty of forgetting to close my laptop at a reasonable hour. Without the commute or a forced reason to take a break, I tend to work longer hours. Well I could just get this done now I tell myself at 7 pm, and that behavior over time can definitely lead to stress and burn-out.
Meanwhile, commuting 40 minutes into the office creates a nice separation. At 5:30 pm I start thinking I need to get home and eat dinner. The office is also far enough away (a different borough) where the physical distance does wonders for the mind in terms of compartmentalizing the two sides of my life.
It’s not quite Severance, but having in-person work days shifts my mindset to turn on my work brain in the office and turn it off once I leave.
Sense of Belonging
It’s easy to feel left out when working remotely. This was especially true pre-pandemic when remote workers were few and far between. These workers missed out on the after-meeting debriefs, the in-office gossip, or the random leak in the ceiling that everyone hated and bonded over.
After a long day when I am working from home, I start questioning my purpose. What’s the point of this? Why do I even work here? Do people even like me? Could it be better somewhere else? These are questions that during the pandemic I used to think were related to job satisfaction. Soon enough, I left my job at that time.
But here’s the thing. In reality, these are questions that are related to not having a sense of belonging in the workplace. And belonging is harder to feel when you aren’t physically with people. I’m happy to say I rarely have those thoughts when I’m in the office.
There are certainly drawbacks to in-person work; it’s not perfect. The convenience of remote life is huge. Commutes are rough. My commute is roughly 40 minutes door-to-door one-way. In theory, I could spend that hour and twenty minutes working more efficiently from my desk at home.
And I’ll admit it. Some days I just don’t feel like being in the office around other people. I have never woken up Monday or Friday morning with a raging desire to go into the office.
I’m not suggesting we need to go back to five days a week in the office. What I am suggesting is that having a few days a week in the office makes a tangible difference. This is why I like the Hybrid workplace model. It allows for people to come in on the same days, so the collaboration and socializing is optimized. But it’s also flexible; if people get sick or people have personal conflicts, they can choose different days of the week to come in that is more convenient for them. And it still gives you the opportunity to have a Monday or Friday at home where you can take care of the personal stuff that you’d otherwise have to leave for the weekend.
Like anything in life, balance is key.