For years now, critics of remote work have been circling the same argument. Productivity suffers, young workers fall behind, and careers quietly stall when people aren't physically together. And here's the thing. I don't think those critics are wrong, but I do think they're looking for solutions in the wrong place. A recent opinion piece in Fortune by Justin Harlan, who leads Tulsa Remote, made the case so clearly that I had one of those moments where you're not along thinking like, yes, exactly. I felt like I could have written the piece myself. He argues that remote work isn't failing workers, but that we're failing to create a context that values human connection.

And today I want to take that idea a step further because if we're honest, the real question isn't whether remote work can work anymore. It's whether most organizations are actually willing to do what it takes to make it work well, whether that's once in a while, whether that's a hybrid schedule, or whether that's a fully remote organization. Now, Tulsa Remote, I talked about it in a podcast episode. Gosh, it was like a couple of years ago. By now it was episode 154, called Tulsa pays you $10,000 to move there. And again, it was episode 154. We'll link it up in the show notes, which you can find @janelanderson.com/253 for episode 253. And I explained all about Tulsa, Oklahoma's initiative to bring remote workers to Tulsa.

It started in 2018. It's been a highly successful program. Again, go back and listen to that episode if you're not familiar with Tulsa Remote. But Tulsa Remote works because it rebuilt the sense of place. Or as Harlan says in his opinion piece, quote, our program overcorrected for the deficiencies of remote work, investing in person experiences and human connection. Now, he goes on to explain a number of the specific things that they did to create that sense of human connection that people don't get when they're working remotely. Now, people were invited to come to Tulsa and you had to apply. You have to apply.

The program's still going on, but you have to apply to get the money. You have to live there for a certain amount of time. But they have all this infrastructure for remote workers. They have free co office space for you to be in. They have mentorship programs. They have all kinds of activities up to create the context of having, if not actual co workers at your same company, at least a sense of community of other remote workers. Now, again, when we take a step back and we don't look just specifically at what they're doing in Tulsa. But when we look at remote work in general and as, as Harlan outlined in his opinion piece, critics are right about the risks of remote work, especially isolation and career dragon, but they're wrong to blame the model itself.

And we, and I've talked about these drawbacks and pitfalls of remote work here on the podcast before, about careers stalling out. You don't get the visibility, you don't get the mentorship and the learning through osmosis and all of that. And Harlan talks a lot about some of those same issues in this piece. Also, that the real failure is leadership and infrastructure organizations remove the office. And again, we know that the pandemic had a lot to do with how all of this escalated so quickly and took on such a rapid transformation from in office to remote work. But the office itself was removed without replacing the connection, the mentorship, the sense of community, and the, you know, learning through osmosis that the actual office space provided it didn't get replaced with anything. And we know that when human connection is intentionally designed and supported, we know that remote work can be effective, it can be engaging, and it can be sustainable, both for workers and organizations. So I agree with everything that Harlan has to say in his opinion piece.

Now, I do, though, think that there is more to the argument than just what Harlan says. So I want to extend Harlan's thinking a bit because agreeing with him is quite frankly, the easy part, because he, as I read it, it's like preaching to the choir, um, saying leaders need to invest in connection. Well, that's absolutely true, but I think it lets people off the hook too quickly and too easily. So hybrid work doesn't fail because people are not in the same physical location. Let me just repeat that. Hybrid work, or fully remote work doesn't fail because people are not in the same physical location. That doesn't really matter. Hybrid work fails because connection is treated as optional instead of as structural.

Yes, you heard me right. It fails because connection is treated as optional instead of as an important structure like scaffolding of the workplace. If you tried to build a building without putting up any scaffolding, the walls would just fall right down. And so it has to be thought of and treated as an integral part of organizational life and of how we create work, how we create organizations, and how we get things done. Now, for hundreds of years, ever since the Industrial Revolution and probably even to some extent before that, work had a built in social contract, you showed up and connection happened. You worked alongside of people who were doing similar work in your same company, organization, what have you, you were visible. Learning happened. If you made mistakes, somebody was there to guide you and correct you in your mistakes and show you how to do it.

And even, and if you were new, you watched what other people were doing and you learned how to do the work of the job and you learned things about the organization, about the beyond, your own specific job and your own specific role. You learned how other things happened in the company and how different pieces and parts move together and connected. And you just learned that big picture stuff just by being there, by observing. And now we all know if you stayed long enough, it's likely that advancement would follow. Now, not everybody gets promoted, we know that. But if you wanted that promotion and if you worked hard enough, stayed long enough, and figured out how the whole system worked, it would be likely that you would get either positional advancement or you would get compensated for staying there longer. You, your pay would increase over time. Now, hybrid and remote work quietly removed the default.

That contract that said you showed up and you and connection happened that you were visible and learning happened, that you stayed long enough and you got rewarded for it. But leaders, once that default got removed, leaders didn't replace it with anything explicit. Nobody in an organizational design capacity really took a thoughtful approach to how do we design community, how do we design that structure of human connection that we need so much? So again, hybrid and remote work just quietly removed that default. We thought that the work would still get done, and by and large the work did still get done. But the human connection suffered and the promotion suffered. People's careers stall out. All the things that Harlan said, I don't need to repeat them all. And if you want, you could go search up that opinion piece on fortune.com Justin Harlan.

H A R L A N is his last name. So you can say hybrid work didn't remove connection, it removed the automatic nature of connection. Now when we think about that, hybrid work didn't remove the connection, it removed the automatic nature of connection. It removed the structure that required connection to get things done. Because I mean, already we had all kinds of infrastructure for putting documents into repositories and connecting via teams and email and all those other things, even before the pandemic exacerbated it and made it that that was the kind of the only way to do things for a lot of organizational life. But when we removed that automatic nature of human connection, it exposed how much we rely on Defaults that we have never actually named. And that is very different from leaders are doing this wrong. Okay, So I don't want you to just feel like leaders are doing this wrong.

It's just that the system, and again, a lot of it goes back to the way it came about because we were in pandemic situation and we needed to change things quickly. But we didn't create a system that asked these questions like what assumptions are baked into our career paths that being in person facilitates? What social learning happens accidentally and incidentally in the hallways and over, you know, while we're waiting for the coffee to brew. What relies on proximity but was never redesigned to have some other sort of proximity, Whether that's proximity in the ether or proximity proximity some other way. So this also starts to explain why younger workers struggle. Because we've heard that people who never had the experience of being in an organization and having friends, having an existing social structure in that organization, had such a hard time in organizational life when it was remote or even to a large extent today hybrid, we're finding that those younger workers are still suffering when we look at their career progression, their career setbacks and so on. Um, and again, they're not necessarily doing anything wrong. But when they're in a system that is either return to office mandate and everybody sits in their cubicle and is on teams meetings all day, or whether they're working from home some of the time or all of the time, or working from other locations some of the time or all of the time, nothing is wrong with the worker. But what is wrong is that the system was not designed to support that.

So what we need to do is to take a new look at this and we need to con, I think what organizations are doing now. And you know, I've been part of some of the like, hey, return to office. We've redesigned things, we've changed up the organizational or the, the office footprint. Come back, take a look. We're bringing in Janelle as the guest speaker. All of those things are great, but they're not sufficient. And I think what some organizations have been doing is treating human connection like a benefit. Like, oh, look, we've added back place for people to congregate.

We've added back a place for, you know, like a co working type space in our organization. And in so doing, organizations are treating community and treating human connection like a nice to have or something that's going to enhance our culture as opposed to something that is structurally holding our culture together. They're treating it as optional. They're treating it as secondary to real work. Oh, there's a place for you to sit and do your real work, and then there's a place to go play with your co workers as well. Okay. It's more sophisticated than that. It is more integral and structural to the, to organizational life than that.

So I think what Tulsa Remote gets right is that they're treating that human connection like infrastructure. They create activities, they create mentorship opportunities, even if they're not with employees in the same company. They're just employees who happen to live in the same location and cowork also in Tulsa. So Tulsa Remote, again, is treating it like infrastructure, and that's what we need to be doing. Because in hybrid and remote work, connection is not a perk, it's a dependency. It is a structural dependencies dependency. And when dependencies aren't designed into systems, systems fail. Sometimes they fail big and sometimes they fail quietly.

Now, when this also sheds some insight on why optional office days don't work. And again, if you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time, you've heard me talk about the days when everybody is mandated to be back together on the same day. That's what's required. And that needs to be structural. And it can't be like, oh, if you live, oh, oh, today you can't make it because you live too far. No, that's not how this is going to actually work. If we're doing a hybrid schedule where people are coming together, we have to have those days when everybody is together, because that's where the human connection, the relationship building happens. And when leaders are confused about that and let people off the hook and say, okay, yeah, this time you don't have to come in or whatever, then engagement is going to drop, output is going to stay flat, and we're going to still continue to have all of those problems, problems that we've had.

So this is a design issue. This is an infrastructure issue. Organizational life needs to be designed around. If not people being physically together, then what is the analog of that? Or I should say not analog, but what is the digital of that? What is the replacement for that so that we still have that human connection? Because the remote work debate still gets stuck on where people are physically sitting, like whether they're physically sitting at home or whether they're physically sitting in an office space. So we need to make sure we have that, that covered so that we're not. Because that's not the real question. The real question is whether we're willing to Design for the human side of work as deliberately as we design for the technical side of work. If we put as much effort into designing the human experience at, for colleagues inside the organization, for humans inside the organization, as many organizations put into designing the product for their end users, we would have a totally, totally different kind of experience.

So that work of design needs to be done regardless of where people sit, whether they're sitting in the office, whether they're sitting at home, whether it's some of each, or whether they're sitting like really anywhere in an organization that is truly designed for remote work, the human connection needs to be designed into the workplace, wherever people are working. All right, now if this episode made you rethink about how connection actually happens in your workplace, well, I'd encourage you to actually start looking more intentionally at your own work this week. Look at what conversations happen easily, which conversations, which interactions require effort, where is the communication missing? And whether that's miscommunication or just absent altogether, where is it? Because when communication doesn't happen at all, that's even worse than miscommunication sometimes. So where does community come easily? Where is it missing? Where is somebody making a half baked effort to try to bring it to life? And it's just not designed into the integral structure of the organization. When you spot what's not working, when you spot what's missing, those gaps, I want you to think of those gaps as design problems and put your design thinking hat on and start to think about how they can be redesigned. Okay? And now again, you've heard me talk about remote work in the past. You've heard me talk about the return to office mandates. And in fact, this episode as well speaks to why those return to office mandates aren't working.

Because the, the integral structure of human connection is not being designed back into the office. It is that senior leaders are thinking that that's just going to happen by default, and it's not. It needs to be redesigned back into the work that we do because we can't just sit in our teams or in our cubicles and be on teams meetings all day. That does not give us the human connection that is any different from what we would get if we were working from home or working from somewhere else. So again, if this conversation, if this episode is giving you pause, I want you to spend some time again doing a bit of your own internal assessment. What works really well, where do things fall flat? What feels missing? And then look at how can you design some little tweaks. And if you need suggestions by all means, hit me up on social media. Drop into my inbox.

I am full of suggestions about how you can start to redesign your organization's structure to have more of that human element in it. And if there's any way that I can help again, reach out. I'd love to help you on that. All right, my friends, it's messy out there. It's messy in organizational life. Embrace that messiness. Look for ways in which you can find those incremental improvements, and design that human connection back into your work. We'll link up a handful of the episodes that are related to this episode into the show notes.

You can find the show notes for this episode at janelanderson.com forward/253 for episode 253. Thanks so much my friends, and we'll catch you here again next week. Take care.