On Culture & Being In-Person

Noreen Malone wrote this in 2022 in the NY Times Magazine:

Essential or nonessential, remote or in person, almost no one I know likes work very much at the moment. The primary emotion that a job elicits right now is the determination to endure: If we can just get through the next set of months, maybe things will get better.

The act of working has been stripped bare. You don’t have little outfits to put on, and lunches to go to, and coffee breaks to linger over and clients to schmooze. The office is where it shouldn’t be — at home, in our intimate spaces — and all that’s left now is the job itself, naked and alone. And a lot of people don’t like what they see.

This is a sad statement.

My takeaway: culture matters, and people matter. And being in-person with people matters. Working alone, from home, is like practicing basketball by yourself: sometimes it’s helpful so you can concentrate, but it doesn’t replace that wonderful, communal feeling of winning as a team and knowing those intricate details that only presence can relate. You can shoot hoops alone, but you can’t play basketball.

Spirit in a job matters. Caring about our coworkers matters, and that care comes from actually knowing them as people, not as task completion agents.

Stripping the humanity from work and isolating yourself is not going to make you happy medium to long term. If you work for a firm that takes that approach, you will end up like those people the writer refers to above.

We largely are an in-person firm. We are very flexible for family commitments on all days. And we do make some exceptions to this policy.

~Dan Cunningham, Founder