Remote Work in the Age of Return to the Office

I have worked remotely through two very different seasons: the first months of COVID, when the whole world was working it out at once, and then permanently, after I moved to Indiana to be with my wife. By now it is well-worn ground, and I have a fair sense of what makes it hold together.

The first thing is active, constant communication. Home means less direct supervision, and the easy way to fail is to go quiet and simply work. But quiet is not the same as productive in the eyes of the people in charge. They cannot see what they cannot see. So I make a point of telling them where my work stands as it moves, and of showing up fully and diligently to the daily and weekly ceremonies. If a team does not know where you are, remote comes apart no matter how much you are actually getting done.

The second thing is discipline about what you have promised. If I am going to be away at some point in the day, I see to it that everything I owe still gets finished, even when that means working through the "off" hours to close the loop. I will not let my being remote become someone else's burden.

And yet I keep a strict schedule all the same. I guard the line between work and home, because the whole reason I can do any of this is my family: my wife, our baby boy, our dog Sasha, and our cat Stella. The point of working hard is to be present for them, not to let the work quietly eat the hours that are theirs.

There is an old letter that puts this better than I can. Ephesians is a letter the apostle Paul wrote to the young church in Ephesus, a great port city of the ancient world, and it moves from the sweep of what God has done down into the ordinary shape of daily life: how a people changed from the inside should now live, speak, and work. By the sixth chapter he is speaking plainly to households and to the work of servants and masters, to the question of how you labor when someone holds authority over you. Verses six and seven cut straight to the heart of it, not the show you put on when the eye is on you, but the honest work you do when it is not:

Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people.
Ephesians 6:6-7

Remote is not a favor I am borrowing against. It is how I work, and it works because I bring to it the same diligence I would carry into any office.