Weekend Reads: Remote Work and Free Expression
Weekend Reads: Remote Work and Free Expression
Basecamp shuts down the company group chat. And separately, almost everybody wants to keep working from home.
Thanks for being a part of Hiatus. Here are two of my recent posts in other publications that I think you’ll enjoy. Have a great weekend!
The case for talking politics at your tech company (Medium)
In this post, I discuss the recent decision by Basecamp, a major tech company, to ban all discussion of “society” and “politics” at work. I hope it goes without saying, but at my company, I value free expression and have the exact opposite policy:
“There’s no need to choose between business success and basic humanity. You can have both, and if you prefer only to have one, there’s a good chance the extraordinarily talented people that quit your company will be excited to join your disruptively humane competitors.”
The company of the future doesn’t have an office (Entrepreneur Magazine)
In this article for Entrepreneur, I dig into recent survey data showing that 80 percent of employees say they’d like to continue working from home at least a few days a week.
“For far too long, we’ve stressed about hiding the messy parts of life from our colleagues. The pandemic has pulled back the curtain to reveal that, regardless of how we present ourselves in the office, we’re all human and all pretty much the same. Some of my favorite pandemic Zoom meetings were the ones where my son popped in to meet my ‘friends from work’ and where I bonded with a colleague over our shared love of the shelter dogs sleeping soundly in our home-office backgrounds.
The ‘real’ parts of life shouldn’t be hidden—instead, we should embrace the fact that we’re all working to support our loved ones and build our ideal home. There’s nothing wrong with letting our colleagues see some of the details of our lives outside of work, even if they come in the form of brief interruptions.”