Why Remote Work Sucks, According To Science : Planet Money : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/04/28/846671375/why-remote-work-sucks-according-to-science
Since the birth of the personal computer, futurists have been predicting the death of the office. If we can chat over video and instantly exchange messages and files, they figured, why would we endure stressful commutes in fossil-fuel-burning vehicles just to sit side by side in brick-and-mortar buildings? I mean, we’re mostly staring at screens there anyway.
But the office has proven more stubbornly useful than we had imagined. Between 2005 and 2015, despite the spread of high-speed Internet and apps like Zoom, Slack and Dropbox, the percentage of people regularly working remotely increased only between 2 and 3 percentage points. An estimated 37% of American jobs could plausibly be done full time from home — but, before the pandemic, the total percentage of American workers that worked “at least half the time” from home was only about 4 percent.
The Stanford psychologist Jeremy Bailenson has spent two decades studying virtual communication between humans, and he’s cataloged the ways existing technology fails us. We talked with him, naturally, through Zoom. The technology is kinda awkward. And that’s a big part of the problem.
“When we’re actually face to face, we don’t stare at each other’s eyes for that long,” Bailneson says. “But the default setting on a lot of these videoconference technologies is a Brady Bunch grid, where everybody’s staring at you right in the face.” It’s exhausting and superweird to have disembodied heads just staring at you for hours.
“People have very dedicated personal norms about the proper space one should leave between themselves and others,” he says. But when you’re on a video call, your personal space is defined by how close the camera is to your face. In real life, this view of someone would be crazy. If you were regularly this close to a colleague’s face in a physical office, you’d probably have serious problems with the HR department. “We very rarely get that close to someone unless we’re in a fight or an intimate situation,” he says.
The office is also a place for social bonding, mentorship and professional development. We’re social animals with a gazillion nonverbal microexpressions that we use to communicate, and these can be lost in two-dimensional digital mediums.