☕️ (R)emote Expresso #73

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

The best meeting on my calendar is a book club. Some people will understand that immediately.

For eight years, the best meeting on my calendar has been a 30-minute book club call with three women I used to work with at Accenture.

I haven't actually read one of the assigned books in over a year. The pandemic did something to my ability to fall into a new book and it hasn't come back.

Doesn't matter.

We spend about five minutes on the book anyway. The rest is the point.

We're scattered across countries. Any book we pick has to exist in English and Spanish, sometimes French. Three of the four of us have been laid off at least once since we started. The call kept going.

A few years back, one of us went through a serious health scare and a long recovery. Months of it. We pooled together and got her a gift card so she'd have new books to load onto her Nook while she healed.

The book club doesn't actually run on books.

It runs on each other.

We renamed ourselves the Champagne or Espresso Book Club somewhere along the way. Felt right.

It's the only meeting I rearrange other things to make.

We've all heard you spend a third of your life at work. Ninety thousand hours. The number that gets thrown around in graduation speeches and HR slide decks.

Turns out it's a back-of-napkin calculation. Forty-five working years times two thousand hours. Nobody actually measured it.

The real numbers are messier. The US Time Use Survey says full-time workers averaged a little over 8 hours on workdays in 2024. Eurostat says EU workers averaged 36 hours a week, ranging from 39.8 in Greece to 32.1 in the Netherlands. Country, gender, class, whether you commute, whether anyone in your house needs care - all of it changes the math.

So pick a number you like. Whatever fraction of your life is in this thing called work, it's a lot of waking hours.

The interesting question isn't how many hours.

It's what makes them survivable.

There's a study out of Israel that followed 820 employees for twenty years.

The researchers controlled for everything you'd expect to predict who dies first. Cholesterol. Blood pressure. BMI. Smoking. Drinking. Depression. Anxiety. The whole list.

After all that math, one thing stood out as keeping people alive:

Peer support at work. The coworkers next to you. The ones who weren't your boss.

People with strong peer support were about 41% less likely to die during the study. Coworkers, statistically speaking, were keeping each other alive.

Having a supportive boss? Did not move the needle.

Read that twice. I'll wait.

A 2024 review of workplace friendship research came back with the same finding. Workplace friendships and wellbeing have a real, repeatable connection. Not soft anecdote. Actual signal.

Three decades of HR slide decks about manager engagement. Twenty-year mortality study. The boss isn't what's keeping you alive.

The people beside you. Not above you.

This is why the Champagne or Espresso Book Club is on my calendar in the same place a 1:1 with a VP would be. The book is the alibi. The relationship is the thing. The thing that has, in some quiet biological way, kept four of us going through three layoffs, one health scare, and a whole lot of half-finished books.

In 2020, Microsoft got to do something scientists almost never get to do. They ran a natural experiment. The whole company went remote at the same time. They had data on 61,182 employees - emails, calendars, messages, calls, all of it.

Then they watched what happened.

People stopped meeting people they didn't already know.

The connections between different parts of the company shrank. The accidents stopped happening. Who-talks-to-whom got smaller and tighter and more locked in.

A 2024 study of German hybrid workers caught the same thing in plain language. One of them said:

Another said the workplace as a social circle had been "diluted." That for some people "this social circle is obviously crumbling."

Weak ties used to happen by accident. The hallway. The elevator. The bathroom line. The half-conversation at the coffee machine. None of those were on anyone's calendar. None of them produced deliverables.

But that's where you found the people. The ones who would later be sitting next to you, statistically speaking, helping you not die.

The Book Club women started as accidents. Three different teams. Three different reasons we ended up in the same meeting one Thursday in 2018.

Remote work didn't kill office friendship. It killed the accidental machinery that made office friendship possible.

Which is where the group chats come in.

I think we've been treating them wrong. The DM during the meeting. The side WhatsApp. The four-person Slack group named after an inside joke from 2022. The one chat your team has that HR doesn't know about.

We call them distractions. Background noise. The thing your manager would side-eye if they saw your screen.

Look at what they're actually doing.

They're carrying the weak ties.

They're where you ask the question you wouldn't ask in the meeting. Where you check whether you're the only one who thinks the new policy is wild. Where you find out someone's mom is sick. Where you crack the joke that earns you a person. Where you all chip in to keep someone in books while she heals.

They are doing what the office hallway used to do. Without anyone planning it. Without anyone budgeting for it. Without anyone in HR aware of it.

The group chat is the rebuilt infrastructure of remote work. Most companies have no idea their workforce wired around them.

So let me say this plainly:

The time you spend in your group chat is not stealing from your job. Your group chat IS the protective factor. Your manager's 1:1 is not the protective factor. The Slack DM where you and one coworker are quietly losing it together IS the protective factor.

Defend it accordingly.

One thing before we wrap.

More contact is not the same as connection.

A 2023 study followed about 3,000 adults in Germany and the UK in real time. Pinged them at random moments. Asked how they felt.

For people who weren't lonely, being around others made things better.

For people who were already lonely going in, being around others did nothing in two studies. Made things worse in the third.

The researchers' explanation: when you're already lonely, being around people makes the gap between the connection you want and the connection you have feel even sharper.

This is why "just schedule more meetings" doesn't fix it. Why open Slack channels with 53 people in them feel emptier than a DM with two. Why team-building exercises with an outside facilitator can feel like loneliness with witnesses.

You know the kind. The breakout room. The fun fact. The icebreaker that's somehow worse than ice.

The US Surgeon General put out a workplace mental health framework. It included a mid-career worker saying it in plain English:

You're not in a group chat to perform. Nobody is keeping score there. The version of you that shows up is the actual one.

So the question isn't "do you have community at work?" That's the wrong question and you already know it.

Try this one:

Who's in your group chat?

You know which ones. Here are some of them. The list is incomplete on purpose.

The 2 AM Laundry Group - Four people from a consulting job that ended in 2019. One of you moved to another country. One of you doesn't work in that industry anymore. The thread is technically about kid logistics, snowstorms, and where to buy a specific brand of cracker. Functionally, it is the reason you have not gone fully feral.

The "We Are All Quietly Looking" Thread - Three people. Encrypted twice. Started during a reorg none of you survived intact. The job updates are honest. The ratings of recruiter outreach are vicious. Nobody has joined in two years. Nobody has left. There is no chat name, only a list of three first initials.

The Single Emoji Reaction Chain - Four years. One emoji. Someone reacts to a message in the parent thread with a seal, and four people in a separate four-person chat immediately escalate it. The original message has nothing to do with seals. There has never been a reason. There will never be a reason.

The Work Slack DM That's 80% Not Work - Officially: project coordination. Actually: a running commentary on the meeting both of you are currently in. The 20% that's work is the cover. The 80% is the reason you trust this person enough to do the 20%.

The Family WhatsApp - Three generations, two languages, six time zones if you count cousins. You wake up to forty-seven unread and fall asleep with twelve more on the way. Voice notes from your aunt that are technically four minutes long. Birthdays remembered without fail. Misinformation forwarded with full conviction. Nobody joined this by choice. Nobody would leave it.

The WhatsApp From the Country You Used to Live In - Maybe Berlin. Maybe Singapore. Maybe Bogotá. Maybe a Slack workspace from a six-month rotation you were sure wouldn't matter. People type in three languages. You read in two. Someone sends a photo of a bakery you used to walk past, and you lose ten minutes you weren't planning on losing.

The Group Chat That Saved Your Life in 2023 - You know which one. Or you don't have one yet. Both are true at the same time, for different people reading this. The ones who have one tend not to explain it. Don't ask them to.

Last week I asked: what button do you wish you could have pressed? Three answers came back. None of them stayed buttons.

S: "Hellooowww!!" The greeting button. The one that says I see you, I'm here, it's 8 AM somewhere and that's all I've got.

Me, replying: "Ermegherd. LIFE!!!" Not a button. A reaction. The thing you say when the only honest response is everything-at-once.

C: "You get me! You finally get me!" The recognition button. The one that's been missing since 1998.

S, the next morning: "I want a button that says ADD. Add pasta to your plate. Add hours in your day. Add money in your bank account."

This is what I mean about the side channel. I asked for buttons. People sent me their lives.

This week, send one unsolicited check-in. One person. One of your group chats. The "thinking of you" you've been drafting in your head for a month, the one you keep almost-sending and then closing the app. Don't rewrite it three times. The wording was never the point. Send it ugly.

Open your AI of choice and paste this:

Then send what it gives you. Edit one word if you have to. The point isn't the AI. The point is the send.

A note on the format:

You may have noticed this isn't a full prompt with Role, Objective, Context, Output brackets. That's on purpose.

The feedback I got, kindly and accurately, was that a prompt without a sample of what it produces is just a recipe with no photo of the dish. You'd open it, mean to come back to it, and never come back to it. I get it. That's how I treat most "this week's tip" sections in newsletters too.

So I'm trying something lighter for May. One line. One nudge. Something small enough you might actually do it before you close this email.

If it works, it stays. If it doesn't, I'll go back to the longer format with sample output baked in. Tell me which.

The Book Club started in 2018. Before any of the layoffs. Before any of us knew the company was about to do what it did.

There's another one. Accent on Our Future. Started after one of the layoffs landed. We meet every Thursday. Going on three years.

Different triggers. Same mechanism. One group that holds people together while the job is still running. Another that starts the day the job ends. Both still going. Neither one was supposed to be infrastructure. Both became it.

The most durable things in my working life were not the things I was hired to do. They were the things three or four of us decided to keep, after.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: The Book Club thread doesn't always light up. We're all still in it.

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.