Elijah you need to unmute

Photo by Lukas.

"Do you want us to dial you in for seder?"

It's Passover this week. And our family in the states is all getting together. In person. Mask free. Post vaccination. To dip twice. To eat matzo ball soup. To sing an Aramaic song about a goat. You know, the usual.

The seder they've designed has a lot in common with the one from 2019. They'll open all the windows (just to be safe). But otherwise, it's almost indistinguishable. Except...

Except that the Canadian cousins aren't there. We're still on the other side of a closed border. We still haven't had shots. And we're still waiting to see how the next little bit shakes out.

And so the question facing us this week is the question facing a lot of folks right now...

What do we do when some people are able to gather again but not everyone? Do we do it fully in person but know that some folks won't be able to join? Do we go fully remote again and relive the seder of 2020? The one where no one could hear because our relatives had not yet mastered the unmute button. The one where no one could hug because Zoom instances are a poor proxy for in person gathering.

Fully remote, fully in person, or a mix of the two. This is the question that will dominate the rest of this year and into the next. The extremes are the easiest to navigate.

If it's in person only, either you figure out how to get there or you don't. Either you're vaccinated or you're not. You move back to the city to come into the office every day. Or you don't. You travel for the big conference or you stay home. It's not inclusive, but it's clear.

In the remote only version, everyone is welcome to have the same subpar experience. We're all invited to stumble over the same technology, stretched to it's limits. We get the shittier version, but it's inclusive. You can join if you're unwell, unvaccinated, home with kids, far from transit, or unable to cross a border.

The mix of the two, well, that's where it gets messy.

Hybrid orgs are doomed

We came up in internet-enabled hybrid work 1.0.

At Mozilla, we'd hire folks wherever they were in the world. And that's on top of inviting in a global open source community. The sun never set on the Firefox empire.

Before Zoom was a glimmer in its founders' eyes, every Mozilla meeting had remote participants. Every office had multi-camera video rigs and boom mics in the ceilings. We beta-tested skype-driven telepresence robots that would roam the halls in Mountain View. Until someone inevitably drove them into an elevator and they lost wifi.

The technology we have today is so much better, and so much more evenly distributed, than it was back then. But, outside of robots stuck in elevators, technology is never the problem. The problem is deeper.

Here's how it went down back then.

The people in California work at headquarters. Most, but not all, of the people they work with are in the same office. They have a question, they walk over to a colleague and ask it. They own the calendar invites for a lot of the organization's meetings. All of those meetings default to PST business hours.

The Californians also have a lot of hallway discussions. Those discussions build ambient awareness. Not only about what other folks are working on but also the general direction of the business. That ambient awareness helps the Californians get promoted, disproportionately. Those promotions further concentrate power within HQ. Remote employees complain that they have fewer opportunities for advancement. They aren't wrong.

Some of the Californians start managing people in Germany. Working with no overlapping daylight hours means a bunch of lag on simple questions. The Berliner has a question at 9am their time and has to wait until 5pm their time for the boss to wake up on the West Coast. This leads to a bunch of sleeplessness for the Californian and a bunch of resentment for the Berliner.

And even when you're not trying to hybrid org across the globe, there are still major issues. Like forgetting to put a zoom link in the calendar invite. Forgetting to capture the hallway conversation so someone who isn't in the office knows that the feature's been killed. Forgetting to order the laptop for the new hire who is onboarding remotely. Forgetting to onboard that person at all.

None of these problems are about malice. And they aren't about the tech stack, either.

The biggest impediment to the future of work is how easy it is to remember the people close to you, and how easy it is to forget those further away. These are the problems that stem from a lack of care.

Humans can function in a lot of different contexts, but it takes care to help them thrive. It takes thoughtful, deliberate design to ensure that your people – all your people – feel heard, included, and supported.

Offices aren't great at this, to be clear. Modern, open-plan offices in particular have a set of norms that can work directly against these things. But if you plow ahead into remote/hybrid set ups without thinking it through, you can do so much worse.

Hybrid orgs are the future

On the one hand, we have this once in a generation opportunity to invent a different way to work. We get to decide which things we take from the last year, and the years before that, and which things we leave behind. And on the other, we know that there's the potential to do a lot of harm. The good version of hybrid organizations is inclusive and dynamic and individual. The bad version is ambiguity and gaslighting.

So let's talk about how to know which one you're building.

It starts with showing your work. The best predictor of where your culture will be in two years is the care you put in today. Not the pithy Future Of Work quotes that CEOs give to the press. What's the careful, deeply-thought-through version? And how clear is it to everyone?

Can your remote staff really be anywhere? Anywhere? Do you have expectations around timezones? Will you tie compensation to my location? What if my location changes? Can I move around? Can I move to a jurisdiction with different labour laws? Some countries have very exciting labour laws, so this is worth getting right.

And how about inclusion? If we leave in-person/remote up to individual choice, will it suck to make a different choice? If I am a remote-only employee on a team of choose-to-be-in-the-office colleagues, do I have a second class experience? Am I choosing that with eyes open, or is my company telling me that I am an equal employee but giving me unequal opportunity?

What's our plan for communication and coordination of effort? If it's "slack and jira and zoom" do we have a plan for everyone hating that idea? What structural supports are we going to build to bring every employee into the future of work? Or, failing that, how are we going to tell the employees we're leaving behind?

This list isn't exhaustive, even if it's exhausting. There are great, fair, honest answers to all of them. Answers that are true to the company you work in. That are clear and inclusive and full of care. Answers that can withstand sunlight.

There's such an aching, powerful need for work to change right now. Your organization can be part of that. You can be part of that. But it will take new, thoughtful answers to these questions. Or else inertia will have us filling in the old answers again. The same work done the same way. Except maybe with the windows open.

- Melissa and Johnathan