A New-Ish Work Moral Panic

I think I can keep this one pretty short, actually.

About eight-nine months ago, there started to be more attention to “the hush trip” in “zany” CNBC segments and business journalism. A “hush trip” is where you’re based in Denver or somewhere, but go to Hawaii for three weeks and work from there without telling anyone you work with. You just hop on calls from the beach or whatever. Or you go to Europe. The principle is: “I went somewhere else and didn’t tell my bosses.”

This shouldn’t matter, of course. What should matter is whether the work you are assigned to do is getting done. If that’s happening, I don’t care if you’re in Iceland or Ithaca. But of course, some bosses do.

This article claims it’s creating additional stress, burnout, and lack of trust within HR teams.

I could see that, but my follow-up questions would be:

1. Who exactly trusts HR teams?
2. Who would ever tell HR their location vs. their direct manager?
3. Why is HR even involved in this discussion? IT can be involved in terms of multiple devices, and the direct manager should ideally know where you are, but why would anyone get HR into this?

This is an “interesting” (I use that word loosely) modern case study of work because it speaks to a lot of bigger issues about work, namely:

• How do we actually measure productivity?
• What is the point of one’s life? To work, or have experiences?
• Why are managers so obsessed with knowing where people are?
• The role of trust in teams
• What HR actually does

I think what’s happening with “hush trips” is unfortunately what happened with most of the RTO vs. WFH debate: managers often don’t know how to measure productivity aside from some time metric of “ass in chair” or whatever, so they want you tethered to something they understand. If you’re in Hawaii, even if you’re there and still the most productive member of the team, the manager cannot compute “Hawaii” and “productivity.” The automatic assumption is “Hannah is slacking off,” not “Good for Hannah for doing this for herself.” That’s the core problem. In all honesty, that’s always been the core problem.

You cannot solve this without more self-aware managers. However, the good news is that it’s relatively easy to take a “hush trip.” I’ve done it dozens of times. I worked for a lady in early 2023 who went from CA to Hawaii for four weeks and no one knew. On video calls, she just did them from a hotel room or conference room with no beach shots visible. She was still turning stuff in and “producing,” so no one questioned anything.

It’s kinda similar to the “multiple jobs” discussion.

If you think someone works “full-time” for you and they still have time to add another 1–2 jobs on top of that, then in my mind the problem is with you and not them. You don’t understand job role, priorities, what constitutes a full-time job, productivity, how long things take, etc. You’re upset because you feel the employee is “stealing,” but in reality the employee with 2–3 jobs is just working the system as he/she knows best.

And as long as he/she is being productive at multiple jobs, who cares? You’re getting some value out of ’em, right? So let it be.

Same with hush trips.

If the targets are being hit, the discussion is a non-starter.

True?