Strengthening Community in a Distributed Workforce

Neil Miller and I talked on The Digital Workplace Podcast about something Motus had already been living for years before the pandemic made it mandatory for everyone else: a genuine work-anywhere culture, not just video conferencing bolted onto an office schedule. We'd always told employees we hired good knowledge workers and trusted them to manage their own time, so when 2020 hit, the transition was more like flipping a switch we'd already wired than building something from scratch.

I'm particularly interested in what gets lost without anyone noticing. Real estate was our second-biggest expense after people, and it had gone completely idle — so we started redirecting it into community instead. For one meeting during the California wildfires, we had a female winery owner whose harvest had been damaged by fire host us virtually, dropping into our sessions for ten minutes at a time to talk about her fields while we shipped samples of her wine to everyone's homes. We did something similar with a small family-owned chocolate shop in Chicago that had lost all its tourist foot traffic. It wasn't just a meeting anymore; it was also a way to put real money behind a local business that needed it.

We also talked about what doesn't transfer cleanly to a screen. I wrote a piece that summer, during Pride Month, about the fact that half of U.S. workers aren't out to their coworkers — and working from a shared home office makes maintaining that kind of boundary a lot harder than it was walking into an office and closing the door on your private life behind you. Video calls quietly reveal a lot more about people's homes and circumstances than anyone signed up for, and I think that's one of the real frontiers still ahead for how companies think about inclusion in a distributed workforce.