Gradually, Then Suddenly

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s character Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s character Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

That’s how we went remote. Teams were becoming more global and distributed before the pandemic. The cloud was increasingly opening the door to working from home. Then the pandemic came along, closed the door behind us, and locked us all inside.

The cloud has made remote work possible, but it hasn’t always made it better. Many things about the way we work have gotten worse, some have made remote work harder. The meaning of how we think about “workplace” and “office hours” has changed in ways that our tools remain mostly ignorant of.

Here are a few areas where our tools are letting down our remote culture.

First: Recruiting. As I’ve written before, modern tools have made the candidate experience much worse. I think this is on its way to becoming a cultural touchstone of the pandemic, as much as hand sanitizer and Peloton. Employers are still figuring out how to integrate their remote work and workplace policies into their recruiting process, and their tools need to support them better.

I’ve suggested that vendors of Applicant Tracking Systems and Human Capital Management products should survey their users — and I mean the candidates! They should report the results of those surveys to their clients, and to the candidates themselves when they’re applying.

Cloud documents have improved collaboration, but the documents themselves are getting worse. We generally can’t use high-quality licensed fonts in cloud documents. It’s harder to make a document that looks like it was made by a professional. They’re getting good at spelling and grammar but not typesetting.

The state of the art for reading long form material on-screen in 2010 was probably the free Acrobat Reader. Today, it is probably Google Docs or whatever cloud document thing your employer uses.

Acrobat Reader is, or was, purpose-built for reading documents. It’s right in the name! Cloud document products are made for…a lot of things. It’s a tough job.

It’s not aesthetics: It takes longer to read a poorly typeset document using a badly-suited tool. Doing this repeatedly or for long periods could be bad for your vision or health. So there may be an ergonomic or workplace safety issue.

Notifications are widely understood to be problematic and many claim detrimental to their mental health. For me, Google Docs notifications are the worst. They scream out for immediate attention, asking me to log in and open a document in order to understand the context of what somebody said and whether it’s important.

Notifications generally should be more sensitive to place and time. Slack is getting good at this. Couldn’t Google Doc notifications be sensitive to the timezone and working hours of the recipient?

Those are a couple of ideas. I’ll share more in another post. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what makes remote work hardest for you.