7 Things Remote Work is a Reaction Against

The remote work movement is gathering pace. Everywhere you look, companies are considering their strategy while workers increasingly look to inject it as a condition of employment. The 2020s will be remembered as the remote work decade.

Below is a list of 7 things which made the rise of remote working inevitable

1. ?? Expensive cities

Who wants to have a high cost of living while having a lower quality of life than they could have elsewhere? That's practically every city in the world.

The smartest people I know are moving out of these metropolia in order to have more control, flexibility, and autonomy in their lives. They are stipulating remote work as a term of employment at the point they join companies.

This will become an increasing trend over the next decade.

2. ?? Time in office as KPI

Time spent in the office is the worst metric every used to measure the performance of employees. It leads to people wasting their lives in an attempt to conform to an unreasonable metric that has no bearing on the performance of that individual

Workers are rejecting this. They increasingly want more time doing the things they love most. To achieve this we need to measure output rather than time spent.

3. ?? Bad middle management

Everyone has had a bad middle manager whose only metric of measuring performance is by how long you spend sitting in your chair. The lack of trust these people have that their workers are adults who can get their work done remotely is the thing that stops it happening at scale.

We no longer accept working for these people. Where bad middle managers hold us back, we leave in search of better opportunities. Where bad middle managers refuse to permit remote working this will become even more pronounced.

4. ?? Wasting our lives commuting

The average worker wasted 22 entire days of their lives commuting each year in total. Sat in a steel pollution emitting coffin we travel to a place to work on a piece of technology designed to be used anywhere on the planet.

This is insane. Workers recognize that the office is not a necessary destination in order to great work, and they will refuse to be there because they could do better work elsewhere.

5. ?? Having no time for friends/family

I went remote so that I could drop off and collect my children from school. Firstbase's CTO went remote because he wanted to be around the first time his son laughed or stood up and walked.

Remote work is letting people spend more time with friends and family, rather than getting the majority of their social contact with people selected by their boss. The latter leads to shallow, superficial relationships that lack depth, breadth or meaning. People need close social bonds, and this does not come from the office.

6. ?? Letting our health/wellbeing suffer

Working in an office, people sacrifice their health and well-being. We lack the time to workout or improve ourselves because we need to be in an office and commute every day.

Since being remote, I work out, read and eat breakfast with family every day in less time than my previous morning commute. I have time to go for an afternoon walk to recharge rather than being expected to be sat in my cubicle at 1 pm.

7. ?? Lower quality of life than we deserve

Office work is a remnant of the industrial age where factory working was a necessity due to the size of the technology needed to do work. We are stuck with 9-5 even though it fits nobodies lifestyle. We should be free to set our schedule, work when we are most productive, attend the appointments we need without our boss's permission.

To have a high quality of life we need to begin to organize work around our lives rather than the other way round. This lets us live where we want, travel when we want, do what we want, rather than a job dictating how we live our lives.

This is what remote work will deliver

Thinking about how you or your company could go remote?

Firstbase is the only all-in-one provisioning platform that lets companies provide the practical equipment their remote workers need at the touch of a button. We ensure your team is safer, more comfortable and productive at home than they would be in an office.

We save you time getting a remote worker set up at home, spread the upfront cost over 3-years and are responsible for delivery, maintenance, upgrades, and repairs while the materials are deployed. We also collect it if a worker leaves your employment.

If that sounds interesting, check out what we are building ????