The Remote Work Identity Crisis

Freedom from commutes! Liberation from office politics! Working in our pyjamas! Petting the cat while our employment appeared entirely on screen!

It was an entertaining dream, that’s for sure. But now that remote work has landed in the middle of our economy, we’ve awakened.

A sobering reality has emerged: remote work triggers an identity crisis.

As it turns out, the proverbial banter by the water cooler and the serendipitous hallway encounters were not unproductive wastes of time. Those encounters not only held together the social fabric of company culture, they also filled our minds and hearts with their spontaneity and connection.

The Importance of Banter

Without them, we lose more than we realize. The office was always more than just a workspace. It was a stage. We wore costumes, we delivered lines. It wasn’t just about the corporate ladder. It was about us personally.

Without the stage and the performance, our humanity suffers. Our sense of identity fails to form in healthy ways. We’re susceptible to anxiety. We get disoriented.

From a personal point of view, that’s all bad enough. But from a management point of view, even while efficiency might tick up, things like creativity, innovation, and commitment all drop.

Many of my clients, especially my younger clients, face debilitating challenges in the face of all this. They often feel that they don’t know how to succeed. People question their purpose, their values, and their place. The old adage "find your passion" has taken on new urgency.

Introverts and Extroverts in the Remote World

A hybrid model now calls to us with all the glamor of the original remote model. Yet, the challenges are immense. Coordinating schedules across teams, ensuring equitable opportunities for collaboration, maintaining cohesive project management all crash into the complexities of variable schedules and weird some-remote, some-in-person meetings.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal hit one aspect of this on the head: hard work is easily missed while outrageous theatrics are celebrated. In many ways, providing people with a sense of connection, even if it's really just entertainment, does more for your career than actually accomplishing something.

This creates a significant disadvantage for introverts in remote settings where face-to-face interactions are limited. It can cost a company the buy-in of its most creative and efficient contributors.

I’ve got clients on the verge of depression because of this situation. Of course, there’s always been an element of this in the workplace, but talented workers can come to feel that management thinks of them like a gumball machine: put an impossible task into the slot and finished work rolls out the bottom.

Without the personal interaction, they get frighteningly little spontaneous, positive input. At the same time, they’re trapped in meetings where the employee who gets the laugh is the one targeted for the promotion or raise.

Meeting Agendas Can Help

If there was one piece of advice I would give managers attempting to make remote and hybrid teams work, it would be to incorporate into their meetings updates on wins and accomplishments, which requires introverts and empaths alike to toot their own horn and set themselves up for praise. Yes, it's manufactured interaction, but it still serves an essential psychological purpose.

In a real world office, every now and then a gregarious salesperson would suddenly find out about something that a quiet creative had accomplished and, realizing that this new thing would enable them to close more sales, they would go find the creative.

Whether the creative liked it or not, whether they wanted it or not, the salesperson would express their amazement and appreciation, loudly, in front of everyone, and at length.

More significantly, whether the creative admits it or not, that sort of recognition – random, heartfelt, well-deserved – feeds the soul for months.

Things like that simply don’t happen in today’s work world, and it seems like the remote and hybrid models all but prevent it from happening. If the creative doesn’t experience the salesperson’s physical presence, the whole encounter becomes far less impactful. It can seem staged, forced, or like something they were asked to do.

This is not to say that we are doomed because we don’t work in offices anymore. However, companies that find ways around these limitations – such as sharing wins in meetings, no matter if it’s formulaic – will be the ones that have the biggest impact in their market.

Creative Remote Work Management

That intense encounter between the creative and the salesperson is a caricature for a whole range of interactions that enable people to form their personal sense of identity.

It’s not just about work – it's about who we are, how we perceive ourselves, how we present ourselves to others. Identity arises from encounters like that one.

When they don’t happen regularly, and when they rarely happen in person, we suffer as human beings. An essential aspect of what it means to be a social animal goes unsatisfied. We suffer for it.

Employers can’t solve everything with policies and meeting agendas. It will take time for this new hybrid environment to work itself out.

What managers can do is be hyper aware of the strong psychological impact that these new models have on their employee’s humanity. This is especially true of young employees, who had already been deprived of normal social development by the Covid lockdown. Now they are left trying to parse emails, emojis, and 2-dimensional images as if they somehow comprised a living, breathing human being.

Managers need to be especially wary of how they go about trying to overcome the impersonal nature of the hybrid workplace. Putting something together that lacks authenticity will probably do more harm than good.

We already know that an ever-expanding mudflat of Slack channels doesn’t work. Putting everyone in a room and firing a starting gun to initiate “real interactions” won’t work. Trying to enliven the room with copious amounts of alcohol won’t work, either.

There’s no simple solution, but managers can have a hugely positive impact by being aware of these deep psychological problems arising within hybrid work situations, and simply relying on their own humanity to enable the sorts of interactions that can ameliorate them.

Say you’re in a remote meeting with the gregarious salesperson who asks gleefully, “Where did we get that new thing!?”

Say, “Hold on…” and get the creative into the meeting if you can.

Facilitate interactions like that in whatever way possible, and your solutions will continue to improve as they arise from your own intuition.