You’re on mute

Since COVID, working from home became normal almost overnight, and in a lot of ways that's a genuine improvement. No commute, more flexibility, meetings you can join in your slippers. I'm not arguing against any of that.

But there's something remote work took away that nobody seems to talk about enough, and it isn't productivity. It's the ability to actually read a room.

I think about the Friday breakfasts we used to have back when I was building yachts, an hour before the workday started, at a small restaurant around the corner from the shipyard. Anyone on the team could come, free entrance, nobody was required, no agenda, just coffee and bocadillos before a single tool had been picked up. (I wrote a longer note about that one if you want the full story). More then half the good ideas that came out of that team never came from a meeting at all, they came from someone mentioning something over breakfast that led somewhere nobody had planned for. You can't schedule that on a video call. A Teams meeting has to be booked, has an agenda, starts and ends on time. The best conversations I ever had with that team happened before the day had even officially begun.

Or take walking into someone's office. If a piece of work that normally took two and a half hours suddenly took four, I could just walk over, no calendar invite, no "have you got five minutes," just show up and ask what's going on. Problems are always solved over coffee, not through some scheduled check-in that both of us had been dreading since Monday. You cannot recreate that on a screen. You can't walk into someone's home office the way you walk into someone's workshop, and even if you could, it would feel like an intrusion instead of just how the day worked.

The title isn't only about the technical kind of mute either, the frozen screen, the bad connection, someone typing "sorry, you're on mute" while everyone waits. It's the other kind too. Even with a perfect connection and a working microphone, there are things a person simply won't say into a camera that they'd say without thinking twice over a cup of coffee. Something about a screen changes what people are willing to let out, the hesitation before an honest answer, the half formed thought that only comes out because you're standing next to someone instead of being watched by a small green light. That kind of mute has nothing to do with your internet connection.

You can run a team remotely. Plenty of companies do it well. But you can't fully feel a team remotely, not the way you can when a five minute detour past someone's desk tells you more than a scheduled one on one ever will.

I still believe working alongside people, physically, in the same space, gets more out of people than any amount of team calls ever will. Not because remote work doesn't work. Because there's a layer of a person, and a layer of a team, that only shows up when there's nowhere to hide behind a mute button, in any sense of the word.