Is remote work bad for introverts?

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:01:09 +0000

Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And as Susan Cain argued fairly recently in The New York Times, the current management mania for collaboration, is making matters worse for the quiet ruminators among us. Is remote working the solution to the problem?

We tackled this question in relation to the coworking movement previously, soliciting opinions from space owners and users. Many of them argued that, though coworking spaces have a social element and stress togetherness and connection, the fact that the user sets their own level of contact, as opposed to having interactions dictated by a boss, means coworking provides a good balance of interaction and alone time for introverts.

But how about remote work itself, without considering coworking as a mediating factor – does work location independence further isolate the already socially distant or help them better modulate their level of connection? That’s the question an interesting post on Workshifting by Natalya Sabga tackled recently. In it Sagba focuses on her personal experience as an introverted “workshifter,” relating her ups and downs as she’s attempted to strike the right the balance between solitary work and social interaction:

I’ve been dipping my toes into the workshifting pool since 2009. It’s been an ideal set of circumstances for an introvert like me, as I work in a quiet space where I can control my daily dosage of interruption and interaction. Ideal, that is, until too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

Introverts need interaction, too. That is just human nature 101… Introverts who work in a standard office setting get their daily dosage of interaction by default. Introverts who workshift have it harder – it’s too easy to focus on a project or assignment and forget that there is an external world that we need to be part of, too!

So, after basking in every introvert’s dream for the past three years, I realized that I needed some balance. Sometimes, my workdays are intense, and I really can only focus on work. I don’t fight my introverted habits on those days as that would adversely affect my productivity. Other days, when my schedule is lighter, I remind myself to explore new spaces to workshift from, make time to see friends or volunteer.

A couple of points are worth noting here. One is the danger that the ability to work from anywhere might enable more withdrawal than is healthy among introverts. While loneliness is an often-cited drawback of working from home, the idea that someone could like the alone time but suffer for it professionally and psychically in the longer-term is a subtly different point that’s worth bearing in mind.

The second aspect of Sabga’s post worth pondering is the fact that she has both the awareness to notice her own excess of solitude and the freedom, due to technological empowerment, to correct it. Too often, many have argued, we choose our work environment on autopilot and fail to both recognize the degree to which the location of our work affects us and manipulate how we work by manipulating where we work.

Do you think remote work presents special challenges for introverts?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pascal Maramis.

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Bars beat boardrooms for generating business ideas, survey claims

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:00:24 +0000

Here on WebWorkerDaily we recently posted on the musings of Harvard Business School professor and partner in FutureWork Forum Jim Ware, who used a recent blog post to urge knowledge workers to shake up their routines and work in a greater variety of spaces. But what sort of spaces might improve your creativity? Ware throws out various possibilities from outdoor places to libraries and even sailboats. But a recent British study offers another suggestion: pubs and restaurants.

Information and communication technology company 2e2 asked nearly 2,000 workers how they experience the nine-to-five grind. The responses confirmed the results of earlier polls and studies showing workers are actually more productive away from the office: 55 percent of those 2e2 asked said they got more done working from home.

Slightly more surprising was the respondents’ choice of the location where they’re at their most creative. Where do they feel they get their most innovative ideas?

47 percent said the best discussions about business ideas come when people get together in a pub or restaurant.
24 percent said the office boardroom.
Online discussions were chosen by 19 percent.

This will be great news for knowledge workers looking to convince the boss to splurge on working lunches and a few rounds of drinks (though, it’s assumed, creativity falls off pretty sharply if you overdo the libations). It’s also food for thought for the laptop addicts among us, suggesting making time to get away from our screens and talk to actual humans is valuable and often overlooked.

But even if these less-than-rigorously scientific findings confirm the enduring affection of Brits for the pub more than any hard and fast intelligence for business leaders, the idea that place influences creativity and that our choice of locale is often knee-jerk and uninspired is worth considering.

Where do you get your best business ideas?

Image courtesy of Flickr user @rgs.

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Is remote work bad for introverts?

Bars beat boardrooms for generating business ideas, survey claims