Don’t call me an overseas voter. I’m a remote citizen.
Disconnected.
Out of touch.
Disengaged.
It’s how too many people describe their experience of remote or hybrid work — and it’s also how it feels to vote from abroad as an overseas citizen.
Next week is the first time my kids will vote in a US presidential election, and the process of registering them to vote reminded me of where too many organizations have gone wrong in their approach to remote and hybrid employees. Instead of asking how citizens — or employees! — can be meaningfully engaged and included, we follow a formulaic approach that is often a recipe for alienation.
What I’ve seen in organization after organization is that hybrid arrangements are only successful if they take account of where people actually live: Enforcing a mandatory three-days-in-the-office rule is a recipe for attrition among employees who live outside the range of a comfortable commute.
But creating an all-remote exception for these employees is a recipe for resentment and disengagement. The employees who live 49 miles from HQ are annoyed that the colleague who lives 51 miles away gets to stay home full-time, and the employees who live 500 miles from HQ feel excluded from a company culture that once again revolves around in-person interaction.
The reality of geography.
I saw these problems anew when it came time to register my 18- and 21-year-old kids as first-time presidential voters. Thanks to growing up around the nightly news and daily political discussions, my kids can talk intelligently about issues ranging from climate change to A.I. regulation, and present a coherent case on the relative strengths and deficiencies of the two leading Presidential contenders. Thanks to our monthly grocery runs, they can tell you which Seattle suburb has the nicest Target store, and which Bellingham parks offer the best spots for a picnic.
What they can’t tell you is the name of a single neighborhood, politician or ice cream store in Massachusetts — because they’ve never set foot inside state lines. And yet Massachusetts is where they’ll be voting, because Americans who are born abroad must vote in the state of their parent’s last U.S. residence.
The perversity of making these two West Coast kids register as East Coast voters doesn’t feel a whole lot stranger than telling a productive remote employee they need to relocate to keep their job…or a whole lot stranger than my own situation: I’m still voting in Massachusetts, 26 years after moving to Vancouver, Canada.
I remain a deeply engaged American. Even though I only lived in the U.S. during college and grad school, I have family and friends all over the country, and do most of my work in the States. I do the vast majority of my writing for US outlets, served on the board of a national non-profit, and regularly donate to a range of American charitable organizations and political causes. Since my home is only 45 minutes from the border, it’s rare for me to go more than a couple of months without popping down to Washington to top up our supply of Peet’s Coffee or Tillamook cheddar. But I’ve only been to Massachusetts once in the past decade.
A better model for work — and voting.
The solution for both remote work and overseas voting lies in flexible approaches that foster engagement and community. In hybrid organizations, that often looks like moving to a hub model where every employee spends some time in their nearest regional office, even if that’s not where their closest colleagues are based. This has the benefit of keeping the employees connected to the organization, and building the kind of inter-departmental ties that fuel collaboration and innovation.
The same principle could transform overseas voting: a hub model would allow us to establish our voting jurisdiction based on where we regularly spend time, participate in community organizations, conduct work or sustain close relationships and ties. This would create more informed voters, just as hub-based hybrid work creates more engaged employees.
Just as the U.S. needs voting laws that foster engagement and community among Americans who live abroad, employers need hybrid work arrangements that foster engagement and community among employees. It’s about tapping the enormous potential contribution of remote workers, who are worth a lot more than the occasional Zoom call or whatever deliverables they submit from afar.
The power of global engagement
At a time when America is tottering towards renewed isolationism, remote workers and overseas citizens can serve as eyes and ears around the world. We can bring our daily experience in Jakarta and Paris and Puebla and Vancouver, and share it with our colleagues, friends and family in San Diego and Miami and Buffalo and Bellingham…or wherever we have consistently sustained relationships, in-person visits or professional ties.
The same is true for organizations with dispersed, global or nomadic workforces. Instead of seeing geographic dispersal as a liability, we can see it as an opportunity to get a more holistic perspective on partners, clients, customers and competitors, and a broader view of the world in which we all operate.
The future of both democracy and business depends on recognizing that meaningful participation isn’t determined by geography. It’s time to update our approach to both voting and remote work to reflect the realities of global living and working. Only then can we create organizations — and a democracy — that fully engage all of us, no matter where we live or work.
This story originally appeared in the Thrive at Work newsletter.
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