So much of what marginalized people go through at work comes down to the workplace environment: how people in the office get along with one another, who asks whom out for lunch, who gets along with whom, and so on. Unfortunately, even if you’re objectively the most skilled and the most experienced person on your team, if you’re being marginalized because of your race, your gender, or your disability status, there’s nothing you can do to keep the cliquishness of that culture from seeping into your work and preventing you from doing your best.
But in the early months of 2020, much of that changed. Many of us suddenly went from working in offices all the time and having to navigate the politics of being seen, being a superstar, and making a show of ourselves and our work around others, to working at home, quietly, behind a screen, and only being seen by others for Zoom meetings and conference calls that were prescheduled. The pandemic threw a wrench into office cultures around the world, and some companies have permanently given up their office space. Others have used this moment to drastically rethink remote and hybrid work possibilities. The bright spot of this tragedy may be that there is a little more empathy for the worker. Or at least a little more flexibility.
When I felt at my lowest as the Smarter Living editor at The New York Times, I loved my work, but I had a hard time doing it. Some of that was my own shyness and difficulty advocating for myself, but some of it was the very closed-off, cliquish nature of a few of the teams I worked with. So I rather enjoyed the flexibility of being able to do my work from home, listening to music if I chose to, and using a computer that was far more powerful and flexible than the laptop I had been issued at work (and one with a way bigger screen). What’s more, I had a more comfortable desk and chair and all the other personal touches I had already put into my workspace at home—something many of my colleagues had to scramble to do when the pandemic set in and they were suddenly forced to set up home office spaces where none existed before.
I enjoyed the peace and quiet, because here’s the thing about being a marginalized person, even if you’re going into the office: You feel that you need to be there to be seen—to be recognized as a member of the team or even as someone present, available, and willing to collaborate and help out on all the things you’re being excluded from—but you also hate it. You hate being there, being seen, and going just to be seen. Those feelings come with a level of paranoia about what’s going on behind your back when you’re there and when you’re not there, the meetings that could be happening right now but that you weren’t invited to, and the anxiety of wondering how you’re perceived when you’re present and also when you’re not.
Working remotely can alleviate this anxiety a bit. Not entirely, and it has its drawbacks, but there are ways to use remote work to your advantage as a marginalized worker. After all, when the currency of being present and being the loudest person in the room is diminished by the fact that everyone’s remote, you have a unique opportunity to shine. And the same is true if you’re on a hybrid-style team, where some people are in the office and others aren’t. Hybrid-style teams can give rise to some misunderstandings and communication breakdowns, but even so, there are moves you can make in silence to protect yourself.
Melanie Pinola, a senior writer at Consumer Reports, is a veteran of remote work. Before her current gig, she was at Wirecutter, the product review site owned by The New York Times. I’ve worked with Pinola in some form or fashion since both of us were writers at Lifehacker in 2011, and I was lucky enough to work with her again eight years later when she started at Wirecutter and I was its liaison to The New York Times newsroom. She’s been working remotely for various employers since 1998, “as a telecommuter for a small marketing agency for over a dozen years, as a freelance writer working on remote teams like Lifehacker for five years, as part of the fully remote tech company Zapier for three years, finally at Wirecutter for almost two years now. So, a long time,” she says.
Not that it takes more than 20 years of remote working experience to understand exactly how difficult it is to work remotely as a person of color or as a marginalized person in the workplace, but Pinola definitely has all the above. “I think remote work’s emphasis on text-based communication (e.g., Slack and email) is great—no one is focusing on what I look or sound like, even though there are still clues, like my profile photo and my name,” Pinola explains. “I feel less self-conscious, though, and more free to speak up, stripped of the physical cues to my age and race (and, if I changed my name, my gender).”
It’s not all good news, though. After all, the social baggage that marginalized groups carry doesn’t go away just because your colleagues can’t see you all the time. Even if they only see you in Zoom meetings, it doesn’t change their social conditioning (at best) or their prejudices (at worst). “It also depends on how the company and the people within it handle communicating remotely,” Pinola continued. “In my experience, there are some managers who, after switching to remote or being unfamiliar with remote work, insist on having more video meetings, and everyone having their cameras on during those meetings, negating those benefits. Also, if a company is only partially remote, it can be alienating for people who aren’t in the office and aren’t getting that face time that management seems to love—conversations and decisions happen in the office without them. That’s not a diversity thing per se, but people with disabilities, people who are juggling work and parenthood, or those who have other reasons to want to work remotely can be at a disadvantage if the culture isn’t truly remote-friendly.”
People who have the option to work remotely and take it also have to deal with office cultures that don’t always support the decision to work remotely. I continue to hope that the Covid-19 pandemic and the lessons we learn from it will smooth over those cracks and difficulties a bit, but we’ll see. Even if the problems of remote work do improve somehow, the benefits will probably come to marginalized people last.
In the meantime, there are things marginalized workers can do to improve their experiences of working remotely. First of all, use the time away from your usual team and your usual colleagues to foster relationships with other people that you actually do want to work with. If you have a problematic colleague that keeps you marginalized, or keeps excluding you from meetings and projects, working from home gives you an opportunity to avoid that person and instead put your energy into organizing cross-department projects that advance your career. Instead of spending time in Zoom meetings holding your tongue because you know someone will steal your idea, instead send an email to your work friend on a different team—or better yet, that team’s manager, in case they have openings they can fill internally and are looking for good candidates.
Another important thing to do when you’re working remotely, especially if you’re a member of a marginalized group, is to make time for a one-on-one with your manager. I know, no one really likes those meetings, including your manager (take it from me!), but they’re the only times you can get regular feedback from them on what you need to be working on and how they can help prioritize your work and give you the tools you need to thrive. If you’re like me and allergic to meetings, make it every other week, and don’t let your boss slip out of it: You need time to connect, especially if you don’t get to see each other and catch up often.
Finally, use every opportunity to relax, take breaks, and recharge when you work remotely. I’m a proponent of afternoon naps, but even if you don’t have that luxury, make note of the times of day you feel most productive and the times of day you feel like you’re dragging along. When you start to drag, don’t try to power through it, you’ll just wind up doing subpar work that you’ll have to correct later. Instead, take a break, go for a walk around the block or a quick drive to get a cup of coffee. Grab your laptop and sit in the window instead of at your desk. Change the scenery. Do small things to help you recharge, and then turn those small things into rituals that will give you some solace during the day. If anything, we all need more of that right now.
Adapted from Seen, Heard, and Paid, copyright © 2022 by Alan Henry. Used by permission of Rodale Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
