☕️ (R)emote Expresso #75

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

There's a specific moment that lives in remote work and it doesn't have a good name yet.

You finish the hard thing. The presentation. The migration. The conversation with the client who was being difficult on purpose. The thing that took everything you had for three hours and now it's done. You close the tab. You sit there. The room is the same room it was when you started.

Nobody walks past your desk. Nobody pokes their head in to say "that sounded rough." Nobody refills the kettle and says "you good?" The dog is asleep. The cat does not respect labor. The houseplant has not, in the entire time you've owned it, expressed an opinion. The win sits in the room with you like a houseguest you didn't invite, and the question you don't say out loud is: did that count.

The thing nobody tells you when you go remote is that office work ran on a low-grade nutrient called being seen doing stuff. Not praised. Not promoted. Just observed, ambiently, by humans who happened to share your air. Someone noticed you stayed late. Someone clocked that you were the one who handled the escalation. Someone watched you redraft the deck four times and said, in passing, "that looks much better." It wasn't recognition. It was witness. And it was free.

Now it's gone, and the substitutes are not good.

The Slack #wins channel where Beth from accounting has been posting all year and the only person who reacts is Mark, who also works in accounting. The async standup that reads like a hostage note: I am completing the migration. The migration is going well. Everything is fine. Please notice me. Please. The LinkedIn post that opens with "Excited to share..." which, translated, means I need this to count somewhere because it did not count where it should have. The kudos bot that randomly @s you like a needy ex. The social media post that's ostensibly about your weekend but is actually a flare gun. I have done this. I have done this for fifteen years. Receipts, because I keep them:

I want to tell you I was joking. I was definitely partially joking. The other part was a person who'd been remote since 2006, who needed someone to look at her, and didn't have an HR-sanctioned channel for saying that. So she opened her own. The Slack #wins channel is the corporate version of this. Beth and Mark are doing what I was doing. We're all asking the same question. Some of us just put it in a brand voice.

We built all this scaffolding to solve the witness problem, and mostly we just made a new problem: now you have to perform being witnessed on top of doing the actual work. BambooHR surveyed 1,500 remote workers and 88% admitted they engage in performative tactics to look like they're working. Eighty-eight. The other 12% are lying.

Witness is a weird ask. We will ask for a lot at work. We will ask for raises. We will ask for time off. We will ask for help on a project that's drowning us. We will not ask: did you see what I just did? That ask is mortifying. It sounds like a five-year-old at the bottom of the slide going "watch me, watch me." So instead we tell the dog. Out loud. Because the dog is the only living creature in the building and she at least makes eye contact.

Or we write the text to a friend, delete it, write it again, then send a meme instead, because the actual ask felt too big. Or we keep the win in our head for six hours waiting for our partner to come home so we can mention it the way we'd mention the weather. Lightly. Like we don't need anything.

Here's the part that should haunt all of us equally. While you're doing this, somebody else is doing it too. The teammate whose camera has been off for two weeks. The colleague in Singapore whose Slack updates you scroll past because you're behind on your own. The friend whose Instagram went quiet six months ago and you never asked why. Right now, in some other room with some other dog and some other cat, somebody just finished their hard thing and is sitting there with the same question.

You're not just unseen. You're un-seeing somebody.

The standard fix for all this is to self-promote more. When the visibility game is rigged in favor of one cultural type, the solution is not to play harder.

So we sit with the win and the cat and the spreadsheet and we tell ourselves we're fine. We're professionals. We don't need anyone to confirm we did a good job. We have mortgages.

Confession, though, before we get too tidy about this. There was a season of my career when I quietly LOVED being invisible. Whole years. I was a cog in the behemoth machine of a global company, doing work that had gone rote, that needed almost nothing from my actual self, and the radio silence meant I could do my own thing. Think my own thoughts. Have a life nobody was tracking. The job was a costume. Nobody looking at the costume meant I got to wear whatever I wanted underneath.

Other confession. There was a different season when my boss called me out for slacking and I felt a wave of relief so pure I almost cried. Somebody was paying enough attention to notice I'd been phoning it in. The witness arrived through criticism, which isn't how the recognition handbook draws it up. It was still real. It was not the kudos bot.

So both things can be true and it makes the whole thing weirder. Sometimes you're invisible and it's eating you alive. Sometimes you're invisible and it's the only thing letting you breathe. Sometimes the witness you get is the one telling you you're slacking, and somehow that's the one that lets you sit up straight.

We are not fine. Even with all that complexity loaded in. We are not fine.

What I've been noticing in conversations with people who quit their jobs: almost nobody quits in a moment of clarity. They quit because somebody in their life finally noticed. A kid says, "you're bringing your laptop on vacation, aren't you?" A partner asks, quietly, "are you okay, you've seemed off lately." A friend says the too-honest thing at brunch. The body breaks down at a specific, inconvenient time. The witness arrives. It just doesn't arrive at work.

That's the actual structure of the great resignation, the not-so-great resignation, the quiet quitting, the loud quitting, and the I'm-just-too-tired-to-do-this-anymore quitting. People realize they want out because somebody witnesses them. Just not the witnesses they were supposed to have.

The witness was supposed to be at work. It was supposed to be infrastructure. We didn't see it because air is invisible until you can't breathe.

Meanwhile, SHRM has a survey out there that found 42% of supervisors admit they forget about remote workers when assigning tasks. Forget. Not undervalue, not de-prioritize. Forget. There is a non-zero chance your manager has lost you behind the couch like a remote control.

The thing I want to say to you, if you're reading this on a Tuesday with coffee that has already gone cold: the win counts. It counted. The hard conversation happened. The deck got done. The difficult client was handled with grace. You were there. You are the witness.

That helps for about eleven minutes.

After that, what helps is the DM that arrives unprompted from someone you didn't know was watching: wait, that thing on Tuesday? that was you? holy sht.*

After that, you might want to text somebody.

Once you start looking for the moment people realized they wanted out, the witnesses come in different shapes. Some are kids. Some are mentors. Some are absences. Some are the people you become because the old version of you finally got noticed by someone who mattered. None of them work for the company.

The kid who clocked the laptop.

An HR director in New York. She's getting ready to go somewhere with her kids - weekend, trip, something - and one of them looks at her and says: you're taking your computer, aren't you? Not asking. Telling. They knew. They'd watched her long enough to call the next move before she made it. The realization that landed wasn't about the laptop. It was about being clocked by people who'd been clocking her for years. Maybe I don't want to be there, she said. About the job. The kids got there first.

The mentor who already burned out.

Kim works in HR in Texas. Her version of the witness is a mentor figure, someone older, someone who walked the same road and came back to report on it. You spend all the time doing the cup-filling stuff and you stop doing the bank-account-filling stuff. That's the warning. Kim heard it. The witness was a near-future version of herself, refracted through someone else's story, and the message was: I see what you're doing, because I did it too. The most useful witnesses sometimes don't see you at all. They see themselves, accurately, and let you look.

The kid who got the dad.

Miles took time off to be a dad. When you ask him what changed, the answer isn't about the time. It's about who was paying attention to him for those months. Not Accenture. Not the engagement platform. A small person who clocked, every day, whether he was actually there. An awesome gift, he calls it. He doesn't mean the kid was the gift. He means being witnessed by the kid, after years of being witnessed by spreadsheets, was the gift. Sometimes you stop looking for witness at work and become a witness somewhere else. Sometimes that's the whole exit.

The exit nobody clocked.

David is 55. He lives in the Netherlands. Over three years, he deleted his Instagram and Facebook. Quietly. Scaling them down so people wouldn't notice him leaving. That's the inverse of the flare gun. He didn't want to announce the exit. He wanted to evaporate slowly enough that nobody pinged him about it. Which is its own witness problem, the opposite kind. Sometimes the thing you want most is to not be seen leaving the room. Sometimes the witness is the threat.

The ones who can't access any of this.

Shujaat runs a community called Belong & Lead. He named the thing nobody else in any of these conversations named: the people who most need witness are usually the people too loaded down to receive any. If we're in full-time work and taking care of others, we're not going to have time. Engagement in the community is going to be low. The unseen aren't unseen because nobody's looking. They're unseen because they're holding up too much to be visible while doing it. Witness, like everything else, has an access problem.

Five shapes. None of them desk-shaped. The kid who clocks the laptop. The mentor who arrives with the warning. The child who becomes the audience. The audience you delete so they can't see the exit. The structural invisibility of holding everyone else up.

Work was supposed to be one of these relationships. Maybe it was, once. It isn't now, for most people. So the witness arrives where it can. Just usually not where you needed it most.

If the editorial made you want to do something with all those feelings: pick one person. Send them one unsolicited sentence about something specific you noticed them do.

Not "great job lately!" That's a kudos bot. Specific. I saw how you handled that thing with the difficult stakeholder on Tuesday and I would have set the building on fire so honestly, hats off. Or your update last week about the migration was the calmest thing I've read in three months, please teach a class. Or I noticed you logged off at a normal human hour on Friday and I aspire to this.

It is much easier to be a witness than to ask for one. We are going to use the easier direction this week. The harder direction is for a Tuesday when you have slept.

If you want to try something quieter: open whatever AI you talk to and paste this.

The robot is not your witness. The robot is a mirror you can ask questions of. But the mirror will sometimes show you something you've been doing for six weeks that no human in your life has clocked, because they're all carrying their own thing. That's useful information. That's also a small grief. Both can be true.

Years ago, working at the behemoth, I kept a folder in my Outlook drafts called The Wonder of Me. It was screenshots of every nice thing anyone had ever said about my work. Compliments from clients. Slack messages from coworkers. The one time a senior partner wrote, in actual email, that I'd handled an urgent request beautifully.

I told nobody about the folder for years. It felt like a vanity exercise. A symptom. A small private shame I kept in a corporate inbox.

Reader, I'm here to tell you: the folder is the point. It is not a symptom. It is a witness archive you keep for yourself because the official witness apparatus does not exist. Everyone serious I know has some version of this folder, by some other name, kept somewhere quiet.

If you don't have one yet, start one. Today. Drag in one thing. Title the folder whatever you want.

Mine is still called The Wonder of Me. I am not changing it.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: If you got this far, I'm counting it as witness. You read the thing. The thing was about you. Loop closed for the week. See you next Tuesday.

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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.