The
Los Angeles Times
published a report on how remote work offers a reprieve from racism—prompting Blacks
to resist, reject, and/or hesitate to respond to RTO requests. Meanwhile, more
White advertising agencies are mandating staffers return to offices—where the
underrepresented can expect a return to offensiveness. Looks like the corporate
concern for employees’ mental
health only applies to the
exclusive majority. Welcome back.
Remote work gave them a reprieve from racism. They
don’t want to go back
By Samantha Masunaga
As LeRon Barton weighed his options, he
realized what he had to do.
If he took a pay cut of $5,000, he could have
a fully remote tech job that would let him roam the country and give him the
flexibility he craved. Or he could keep his salary and stay at his current job
— a network engineer position based at a San Francisco hospital that required
occasional site visits and kept him tethered to the region.
Patients at the hospital sometimes gave him
funny looks when he came to check their room’s Wi-Fi, recalled Barton, who is
Black, and staff members questioned his competence. Working remotely during the
pandemic showed him a whole different lifestyle: no commute, more time with his
family and a break from the onslaught of microaggressions and other racist behavior
he’d had to endure.
Barton chose the pay cut.
“You’re totally out of the rigamarole,” said
Barton, who is now a writer and technical project
manager at a Southern California tech company. “And just the quality of life
has improved drastically.”
It’s a sentiment expressed by many Black
workers and other people of color who found that remote work lessened the
racism they faced on the job.
But it forces workers to make a difficult
choice — prioritize your mental health or endure for the sake of your career.
Remote job opportunities are shrinking as more companies require that workers
come back to the office. And even in hybrid workplaces, remote employees can be
at a disadvantage for career advancement since managers sometimes forget about
them or assume they are less productive than their in-person peers, a concept
called proximity bias.
“Jobs are built on social capital. We could
miss out on those happy hour opportunities,” Barton said. But he’s willing to
sacrifice the in-office networking. “Honestly,” he said, “I would trade that in
for my peace of mind.”
Throughout the pandemic, survey after survey
showed what some workers of color have known for years: Workplace politics and
discrimination can make the office an undesirable place to be.
In 2021, just 3% of Black white-collar
“knowledge workers” wanted to return to full-time in-office work, compared with
21% of white ones, according to research from Future Forum, a project backed by
instant messaging firm Slack. The research found that hybrid or remote work
arrangements increased Black workers’ feelings of belonging at work and boosted
their ability to manage stress.
Part of the push for remote work can be
explained by the preferences of millennial and younger workers, who want the
freedom to choose where they do their jobs, said LaTonya Wilkins, founder and
chief executive of Change Coaches, a leadership development firm focused on
workplace culture.
But how supervisors evaluate workers is also
a factor.
Career coach Jermaine L. Murray said many of
his clients, relatives and friends have expressed their reluctance to return to
the office. Clients of all races have told him they prefer remote work, but his
Black clients have more frequently emphasized that continuing to work from home
allowed them to avoid office politics.
“It almost felt like the distance allowed for
a more objective environment,” said Murray, founder of JupiterHR, which
provides career development services.
With remote work, the data confirm whether
workers are getting their jobs done, and there’s less room for co-workers to
take undeserved credit since there are fewer opportunities to socialize on the
job, he said. Clients whose companies are switching to hybrid work are looking
for other jobs, Murray said. And because of the sluggish economy and cooling
labor market, he said, they’re “quiet quitting” their current positions rather
than leaving immediately.
Opportunities for remote-only jobs, however,
are starting to shrink.
In April, about 11% of U.S. job postings on
LinkedIn were for remote work, down from a peak of nearly 21% in March 2022,
according to a May report from LinkedIn. Such jobs were in high demand: Nearly
half of job applications via the website in April were for fully remote
positions, and only one-third were for jobs without remote or hybrid options.
“Professionals that have the opportunity to
be in these remote environments and not experience microaggressions at work or
not do as much code-switching or all of those things have now said, ‘Oh, that
was great for my mental health’ or, ‘It helped me be a little more authentic at
work,’” said Andrew McCaskill, a career expert with LinkedIn. “And a lot of
employees and workers just don’t want to give that up.”
For one 35-year-old paralegal from the
Midwest, remote work is now a must.
“As a Black employee and someone who is
neurodivergent, it’s just better for me,” said the paralegal, who asked that
their name and gender not be published for fear of harming future employment
opportunities. “I’m able to be more productive. I’m able to focus better. I get
so much more work done here in my own space where I’m able to be who I am and
think.”
Previous jobs often involved being the only
Black worker in the office and being judged based on social interactions, the
paralegal said.
If the paralegal was quiet and focused only
on work, managers said to stop being antisocial and hard to approach. On bubbly
or chatty days, the paralegal was admonished for not doing enough work. If the
paralegal participated in a passionate conversation around the water cooler,
criticism would soon follow: Don’t be so aggressive.
“There’s never really a happy medium,” the
paralegal said. With remote work, however, those problems are eliminated, and
the paralegal can focus solely on getting the job done.
Management experts argue that remote work
opportunities have implications far beyond individual work experiences and affect
corporate culture as a whole.
Eliminating remote options can also hurt
companies’ ability to recruit a diverse workforce. With remote positions,
companies can hire people living in geographic areas that are more diverse than
the communities around their headquarters.
“Companies have to recognize that if they
really want to meet their commitments to diversity and inclusion, one of the
best levers they can pull for that is remote work,” said McCaskill of LinkedIn.
Employers considering a return-to-office
mandate should make sure they are giving workers a reason to be in the office,
which can make in-person work more purposeful and give fewer opportunities for
microaggressions, said Wilkins, the Change Coaches CEO.
In a hybrid situation, managers need to make
sure employees working remotely are not left out or inadvertently penalized by
proximity bias, she said. Part of that could include creating opportunities for
employees to get exposure and recognition for their work even if they are remote
and destigmatizing mental health support, management experts said.
As senior director of talent strategy at UC
Irvine, Kimberly D. Jones made sure to have candid conversations with employees
about their concerns regarding a return to the office. One employee shared
experiences with her that predated Jones’ arrival at the department and
explained how those situations contributed to their anxiety about being at
work.
Jones said she addressed the issue with the
employee and the leadership team and now checks in with that employee regularly
to make sure they feel comfortable at work. She also makes a point to walk
through the work space and greet everyone in the morning, in part to get a
sense of the office dynamics and in part to make herself available to any
employees who might have concerns.
“You have a responsibility as a leader to
create an environment where everyone feels welcome and can be successful,”
Jones said.
Women of color especially face difficult
situations at work.
Professor Joan C. Williams and her
collaborators have built a database of more than 18,000 people as they research
the intersection of racial and gender bias in white-collar professions. In
almost every dataset she’s seen, women of color report the most bias and the
least workplace fairness, she said.
Particularly telling is a survey question
that asks respondents whether they have access to career-enhancing work. Nearly
90% of white men say yes; for women of color, that percentage sinks as low as
50%.
“No matter what industry they work, no matter
what company … it’s unbelievably consistent,” said Williams, who is a professor
at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and founding
director of the university’s Center for WorkLife Law.
Structural engineer Rapunzel Amador-Lewis has
gotten used to being one of very few women, much less women of color, at her
workplaces.
She remembers being told by a well-meaning
male mentor at her first job that as a female engineer, she’d have to “run 110
yards to score a touchdown.” After men at work sites called her “honey” and
assumed she was there to deal with office matters rather than inspect their
work, she started bringing along a male co-worker — and although that cut down
on harassment, the men sometimes assumed her co-worker was the engineer, not
her. Her confidence in her skills and abilities was misinterpreted as arrogance
and documented as such in a performance review.
“I have never had a woman engineer to report
directly to,” said Amador-Lewis, who immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area
from the Philippines as a child in 1985. “I’ve had peers, one or two peers
every now and then, but I’ve never had a mentor, a female mentor, especially
not a woman of color mentor.”
Eventually, Amador-Lewis started her own
consulting firm and began working from home to better balance her personal and
work lives. It took a lot of effort, but she relished being her own boss, she
said. She later went back to corporate staff roles at engineering firms but
said she left her last job over negotiations to add more remote days to her
schedule and resistance to changes she wanted to make to the corporate culture,
dynamics and inclusion in the workplace.
Would she ever go back to in-person work? She
doesn’t love the idea.
“If I find enlightenment somewhere,”
Amador-Lewis said with a laugh. She is currently taking a sabbatical and
embarked on a 107-day cruise around the world with her husband while figuring
out her next steps.
Maybe she’d accept a hybrid schedule, she
said. After all, remote work allows her to take care of the chronic migraines
she’s suffered since 2013 and helps her balance her caregiving responsibilities
for her husband, who has had seizures. “I would never 100% do in-office again.”
Barton, the technical project manager, is
also adamant about the benefit of remote work. Despite the shrinking pool of
remote job opportunities and the possibility for remote positions to come with
smaller salaries, he knows what’s most important to him.
“What do you value?” he said. “Do you value
your sanctity or do you value the dollar?”
