I'm a former senior leader at Amazon and working in the office made me better at my job. The bottom line is if you're fully remote you're missing out.
Brandon Southern
- Brandon Southern is the former head of analytics at eBay, Amazon, and GameStop.
- He says that remote workers miss out on benefits like overhearing valuable conversations.
As someone with 25 years of experience in the workforce and a former head of analytics at companies like eBay, GameStop, and Amazon, I've seen the pros and cons of in-office work and remote work.
Unfortunately, you're probably not going to like what I have to say about remote work: Most employees, especially young-tenured employees, should work in the office instead of from home. But in order to fully benefit from in-office work, young-tenured employees also need experienced employees to work in the office as well.
Now before the pitchforks come for me, I'm 100% supportive of remote work and I'm fully supportive of employee flexibility and all the great things that come with working remotely. But while many people talk about the benefits of remote work, few talk about its consequences.
Working in-person is more collaborative
Ever since the start of my career back in 1999, I worked in an office, side-by-side with other co-workers and we'd frequently diagram problems on the office whiteboard. I could turn my chair around and talk to my team members that were sitting at a desk right next to me. As a quality assurance engineer, I could quickly show the software developers an error that I was seeing on my screen. While it sounds like an environment full of disruptions, it wasn't at all.
All of us worked very well together and respected each other's ways of working. We worked hard, we moved fast, we collaborated with ease, and we got results. Also, everyone learned a lot because they had direct and quick access to others.
I could eavesdrop and learn in-person
For better or worse, everyone also had access to overhear conversations that others were having. This was sometimes disruptive when a co-worker was speaking too loudly, but overhearing conversations had benefits, too.
The accidental eavesdropping allowed team members to hear about topics that they otherwise would have been excluded from. This increased the spread of ideas and knowledge, and for team members to interject a comment of related work being performed by other teams.
Leaders are more accessible in-person
As a leader, being in the office also allowed me to better assess the skills and knowledge of my direct reports.
I could see first-hand how they communicated, interacted, and helped stakeholders and more junior members of the team. This not only provided me with perspective and the ability to write their annual reviews, but it allowed me to give in-the-moment coaching. It also allowed me to provide additional coaching and support during our weekly 1:1 meeting. But the benefits didn't stop there.
By sitting next to my team members, I was accessible, and they were accessible. When I found something interesting that was worth sharing with the team, I could physically turn around and quickly share information to elevate my team members. My team members could also do the same.
Instead of waiting to book a meeting on my calendar or spending excessive amounts of time solving a problem, they could simply ask me. By having direct access, they weren't left guessing and implementing changes without feedback and validation.
Without the in-office interactions and physical proximity to each other, we would have created more bugs in our software, built things that other teams had already built, and slowed the dissemination of ideas and knowledge. This would have led to a slowdown in growth to the company as well as individual skills development.
Remote work creates inefficiencies
From my experience, slower growth is happening for many employees because they aren't overhearing these valuable conversations, and they aren't able to receive help from co-workers or managers quickly.
It's also leading to duplication of work and less collaboration, along with leadership challenges with being able to assess the skills of team members properly. I've witnessed frequent situations where team members are reinventing the wheel due to reduced communication related to remote work. This is a problem that existed before remote work, but to a lesser degree.
With remote work, communication is also slowed as many team members err on the side of politeness. This means that when problems occur, employees book time on another employee's calendar instead of simply turning to the person next to them or walking down the hall.
What would have taken 5 minutes to address in an in-office environment has now been delayed hours or even days.
This not only slows down progress for the employee and company, but it also creates additional inefficiencies. Without rapid responses, in-the-moment details are forgotten or require time-consuming documentation that will be needed for the upcoming meeting.
Leaders are disadvantaged as well
From a management standpoint, leaders lose exposure to their team members — they no longer get to see personal interactions, where people are getting stuck or becoming stressed. I'm not suggesting that leaders are or were micromanaging, but these small things are crucial to being able to understand and elevate team members.
As a leader, my job is to create opportunities for team members to succeed, but also to be challenged. Without more interaction, I can't help and elevate my team as quickly as I would like or as quickly as they deserve.
Some people suggest that employees need to speak up more when they are struggling or run into an issue. But this isn't very realistic and doesn't get to the root of the problems.
Admitting mistakes or failures can be a hard pill to swallow, and sharing this information to anyone can be embarrassing and even risky for your career. Also, struggling employees might not realize that they are struggling until seeing a colleague do something more efficiently.
These problems are only going to multiply
Remote work isn't going away and unfortunately the problems of remote work and distributed teams will multiply as we go forward. To solve these problems, we need company leaders to acknowledge what employees desire, provide empathy and transparency, have open dialogue, and search for better solutions for remote and distributed employees.
When given the choice to work remotely or in-person, employees should work together in the office to increase their ability to effectively communicate, learn from others, and create important relationships for success.
By doing so, these employees will likely increase their knowledge and chances for increased scope of work, which are the foundations for raises and promotions in the workplace.
Brandon Southern is the former head of analytics at eBay, Amazon, and GameStop. He also creates TikToks about data analytics and career development.
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