The title of this post is a phrase I heard on a video call the other day. I’m sure it has been around for a while, but I hadn’t heard it or didn’t remember it.
It refers to the ubiquity of video calls and the need to only look good from the waist up. Look nice on the top and sweats or PJs on the bottom. Business Mullet.
Just don’t stand up during the meeting.
When COVID came through, I stayed in the office as we needed to keep the manufacturing plant running. There were a few times I worked from home and I didn’t care for it. Video calls were a big part of that. I suppose if I had done hundreds of them and everyone learned how to make them effective, that would have helped. But it felt impersonal compared to in person meetings.
My personality is more comfortable with in-person than remote. There are those that are quite happy and quite productive working remote, but I am not one of them. For me, the reasons are (1) the social connection to the rest of the organization, and (2) the surprising connections you make while waiting at the coffee machine, walking by people’s desk, or fixing problems in person.
One of my concerns is how connected a remote employee feels with the organization. If you aren’t seeing others on a regular basis, what sense of the larger organization can you get? Seeing a production floor gives me more of a sense of a place than hours of video calls.
One of the people I worked with had a saying: If you don’t see or hear that anything is being done, people won’t believe that anything is actually happening. He was talking about status reports, problem management, and other things, but I think it also applies to remote work.
Being retired, I don’t have to make any of those decisions. I even work remotely doing book layout. But when I was working, I liked being in the office and being located into the middle of whatever was going on.