With everything being AI - can you still be remote?
How to prove humanity when everyone might as well be an AI agent
After the pandemic, managers worried that their remote employees weren’t working. Now they start to worry that these employees aren’t even real anymore. So how do you make sure you are working with real people? And does it matter?
Some go the hybrid route. If you force everyone into the office three days a week, you can disrupt their human life, adding extra stress around school pick-up and missed gym opportunities. Disgruntlement becomes a marker of humanity.
Or you can use spy-software. Taking pictures of the person in front of the computer, or logging their activity is just as effective in creating resentment - another very human reaction differentiating your employees from AI.
And then, someday, you can replace all of them with AI and enter the nirvana of productivity and efficiency.
Or something.
The purpose of using AI gets a bit fuzzy when you start looking too hard at the promises.
AI allows you to scale everything. Including the stuff that doesn’t work.
Remote work had a mainstream moment right after the pandemic. It worked really well for a while. Colleagues still knew each other. They remembered who had which kind of humour, who had which quirks.
Companies who invested into maintaining these connections were able to shift their entire way of working. Everyone else not so much.
For remote work to, well, work, you need to intentionally design your organisation. Trust is not optional in a remote environment, mostly because total control is exhausting and quite expensive. Trust requires human connection: communication among peers, within teams, and up and down existing hierarchies.
And I am not talking about mass emails and townhalls (though these have their place too). I mean honest conversations within functional teams, among project colleagues, between team leads and their team members. Conversations where people care about each other just as much as about the results.
You can do this entirely online, though it rarely happens by accident. Or you can fast-track those connections through in-person meetups. Meeting every 4-6 months means that team members get to know each other, learn to trust each other, and remember that there’s a human on the other side, because there IS a human on the other side.
But wait, can we not just all meet in the office again like in the good old times?
AI can even scale your office inefficiencies. Yay.
One of the biggest problems of today’s office space is… the lack of space. Or rather, the lack of confidentiality. You can’t really talk about sensitive topics on a call when the entire office listening in or you are potentially disrupting the entire open floor.
Obviously, to speed up day-to-day collaboration AI tools LOVES a transcript that can be analyzed, summarized, and turned into to do lists. Everyone is in meetings all day, and those meetings are preferably online. Peak efficiency.
Also, peak annoyance. The open office isn’t great for anyone’s mental health, and that includes the neuro-normative people and the super extroverts. Yes, they can handle people, yes they love to be around people, and even they get fed up with constant background chatter eventually. If you are neurodivergent, may the Force be with you.
So yes, you can still do remote. You probably should do remote. It’s a lot easier to design proper remote operations than proper in-office operations, because there’s less “we’ve always done it this way”-energy to overcome. Either way it needs to be a decision, not an afterthought. A strategy, not a “well, if there’s no other way”.
Whatever you do, be crystal clear about what you are trying to achieve. What is your goal? Whom are you trying to impress? And whom are you trying to serve? How do you want to show up? And yes, what feels aligned with your values? “More AI” is probably not the answer.
Maybe it’s time to go for “more humanity”. Just because you can.
PS: The dimensions of distributed work migh help you understand your options: