Remote work is different from at-office work

The recent outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus has forced many changes upon us. One of the biggest changes is the forced shift to remote work. Remote work is different from face-to-face work, as many organizations are now learning. Remote work has challenges, and it also offers the ability to change our work patterns.

Two ideas come to mind.

Companies with project teams, and specifically those with weekly status meetings, may learn that those weekly status meetings can be replaced with status e-mails. One can, of course, replace a face-to-face team meeting with an online team meeting, and I am sure many companies do. But status meetings often have one-way flows of information: individuals report on their current activities, and the manager provides information to his team. These one-way flows can be handled with e-mail, which allows for archiving and easy retrieval of content. A manager could have one-on-one sessions with individuals to ask follow-up questions, and to "touch base" with team members.

Colleges and universities, specifically those with graduate programs, may learn that they can adjust their class schedules. Graduate classes are often held in the evening, and often one night per week. The reason for this schedule is that graduate students have other commitments (such as a job) that prevents them from attending during the day. (Colleges also use the same classrooms for undergraduate studies during the day.) The one-class-per-week arrangement is also convenient, as graduate students do not live on campus and have significantly longer commute times than on-campus undergraduate students.

But with remote studies, there is no need to hold one long class per week. The time to connect to a remote session is short. One could just as easily hold three short sessions per week, instead of one long session. (The need for evening classes still holds, as many students still work during the day.) Multiple shorter sessions may be more effective than a single long session (they seem to be for undergraduate students) and may be more convenient for teachers and students.

But people being people, I expect little to change in the short term -- on colleges or in corporate offices. Professors have organized classes and materials around the one-night-per-week schedule. Scheduling systems (probably) have built-in assumptions that graduate classes occur on a one-night-per-week schedule, and changing those systems may be nontrivial. Corporate managers are used to the idea of seeing all of their employees in a single meeting (and possibly feel that they are more efficient holding a single meeting than multiple one-on-one sessions).

Remote work and remote studies do not have to be copies of their face-to-face counterparts. Someday they may not be.