What Dual Modeing Taught me about Remote Work

"I go into the office for collaboration" - the collaboration...

I suppose the title should be "some of what I learned...," since I probably can't fit everything in a blog post, but let's begin and see where I end up ;-)  

The TL;DR: be careful about the word "choice," while choice is good, you might get results that you didn't expect and are ill-equipped to handle.

I follow a Twitter personality who evangelizes about the remote office. I admit, I am biased and lean toward positive views of the remote office and remote work in general.  This morning one of the Twitter posts went like this:

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Personality:

Old people: young people need the office for social contact

Young people: actually we'd like to live closer to our friends and family

Respondent 1 (toward personality):

My 20-year old son old prefers to go into the office and doesn't enjoy working from home the one day a week. People need choice. Working from home is not for everyone. Would I go back to an office? No.

Respondent 2 (toward respondent 1):

That's the point: choice. Employers, instead, impose office or hybrid. Should be a choice. X wants full time/hybrid office? go ahead. I want full-time remote work. Employers can impose office/hybrid, but they will lose talent attraction over time, and die.

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I think that choice in life is important, but what overrides a choice (or personal preference) sometimes is a critical mass!  Take my dual-mode institution for example. Back in 2008, I was pursuing my last 2 master's degrees concurrently.  Both programs had an on-campus variety and an online variety. If you lived within 20 miles of the campus (within the I-495 belt, for those familiar with the region), you were required to apply to the campus program, you were simply not going to be accepted into the online variety. I suppose that some small exceptions were probably made for people with disabilities or "extraordinary life circumstances," but those students really had to parade their special needs to be accepted into the online version (or so it seemed to me). At the time, I was working on-campus so leaving work and stepping into the classroom 50 meters down the hall wasn't a big deal. The late nights were a bit of a problem, but I still had the energy to just do it. There were differences between the two master's programs, of course. Here's how things started when I was a student:

MEd program: More courses were offered online than on-campus.  On-campus offered 2-3 core courses (required) regularly, and the 1-2 electives per semester.  Online offered 2-3 core courses each semester and 3-4 electives online.  The electives on-campus and online were never the same, so students picked both based on modality and on the topic (if they could make it to campus).  You could complete the majority (75%) of your degree online (as an on-campus student) if you wanted to since there were only 4 core courses.  As an online student, there were two classes you needed to complete in person, but they were offered in a blended format with a 1 week residential (for each course). You could not complete the degree purely on-campus, some courses needed to be online (course offerings were not as plentiful on campus, so you always needed at least 1 elective online). I was a campus student but completed ¾ online. Campus classes had a healthy number of students (about 15 per class), but the late nights eventually got to me.

MA Program: Distinct on-campus and online populations. Online students were in a cohort setting, and there was no class variation possible.  Everyone took the same courses. No electives were offered online (electives were essentially preset, canceling the notion of an "elective").  Campus students had more flexibility in their electives, and more electives were offered. Classes both online and on-campus had a good number of learners in each section (about 20), but some of the campus numbers were sustained by external funding which attracted more students to campus. I was a campus student and completed all courses on-campus. By and large campus and online populations didn't mix

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OK, so - fast forward a few years (circa 2013).  The being forced into a specific modality based on your location element was dropped for both programs (and mostly across the university I think). Do you know what happened?  More people started applying to the online programs while fewer applied to the campus programs! This was true for people who lived a few miles from campus! How did this impact the two programs?

MEd Program: Campus core courses were down to 1-2 per semester, and maybe 1 elective.  Electives had a hard time getting enough students to run.  Eventually, all electives ran online-only, and by 2015(ish?) all courses were also online-only.  The program still required a blended residential component, but as soon as other institutions started offering similar programs without the residential component, that was dropped as well. It was undeniable that student enrollment had gone down, and the attitude that some folks had of "oh, but students crave the social experience of in-person, so we need to keep our residential requirement" rationale didn't have any proof to support it. Currently, the program is fully online. Some folks do need a campus residence component for work/grant/financial-aid requirements, but it's not possible to offer that to folks. There simply isn't a critical mass of people to offer that.

MA Program:  More students applied to the online program than on-campus. External grants also dried up during the Trump years. More electives were offered online, online students now had options for electives, and ultimately electives were offered only online (so the elective situation flipped from the original state in 2008). It became easier to offer electives online because both learner populations (campus and online) could participate in an online format. Additionally, there was a critical mass to offer more than 2 electives per semester if student populations combined, and to try some new things out!  Alone, the campus population wouldn't be able to sustain 1 elective offered on-campus. All core (required) courses were offered in fall and spring for both online and on-campus, but eventually, the campus had to pare down and offer courses in alternating semesters.  There just wasn't enough of a critical mass to make courses run on-campus.

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Now, from my examples above, it might seem like there is no interest in the on-campus programs.  That's not the case.  For both programs, there is interest by some learners to be on-campus. The problem is that there aren't enough people to have a critical mass to run the courses and to have a learning community. Personal choice is important, but it doesn't mean that the economics and the community mechanics work out to the degree needed to make the learning experience happen.  It's like having a *flex class where the instructor and 3 students are in a room, while 25 other students are on zoom or asynchronous.  At that point, you decide that the weekly F2F doesn't make sense for the amount of effort you put in.

This is my parallel to remote work: You can have employees who can work remotely (based on the job needs) but want to be in the office.  Fair enough (I have colleagues like that), however, is there enough of a critical mass within an organizational unit (those people you work closely with) to be in the office? 

Many people who talk about remote work seem to frame it as a matter of choice.  I suppose it can be a matter of choice whether you are 1 day, 2 days, 4 days or 0 days in the office, but it depends on which direction you are coming from.  If you're coming from a "butts in seats, on-site" mode of thinking, sure - remote is probably a choice.  However, if you're coming from a remote-first frame of reference, then I am not convinced that for your average team that choice + critical mass complement one another.  The numbers might be there for an organization to offer hot desking accommodations for anyone in the company who wants to work at an office setting, but being in a space, and actually cognitively being with a community of peers is not the same.  If you work with others this kind of flexibility means that unless there is a critical mass in the office you are essentially a remote employee but not at your home (or preferred location).

For certain jobs remote (with maybe a little hybrid) is the future, and people need to develop interpersonal and managerial skills to work in both environments.  Just going into the office won't be the panacea that you are looking for, if what you are seeking is collaboration. The physical office could provide a quiet space, a non-distracting space, a whatever space to get your work done. It may provide you with a cognitive break between work and life (if you haven't developed that and need some external stimulus to activate it), but it's important to understand that there needs to be a critical mass of people who want to be in-person to make it happen, and this takes critical leadership skills to make telework and in-person work seamlessly together.  This comes not just from observations during the pandemic years, but from observations working in an academic department for the past 11(ish?) years with mixed-mode faculty, being a learner both online and on-campus, being an adjunct who teaches online, and a person who collaborates and chats with colleagues across campus academic programs.