How Remote Work Could Lead to a Worse Future of Work
Too many gatekeepers looking to bend remote work in ways that benefit them.
If you’re going remote and think that timezones matter, location should a multiplier for salary, and you are not becoming more diverse, accessible and inclusive as a company, you’re doing it wrong.
Remote work is about decentralization of opportunity
What stops it is fear and a lack of trust. Companies that don’t trust their teams to work will be blindly transparent as terrible places to work remotely. Surveillance capitalism will be ripe and prevent great work
Remote rejection will be a thing. ‘Remote work didn’t work for us as a company’ will likely hide the reasons culturally for the failure. Everything is about trust.
- Less trusting remote organizations will be more synchronous
- The most successful remote organizations will be asynchronous-first by design
That doesn’t mean they won’t come together physically at times – they will. But crucially they will be super focussed on what those things are for leveraging them to maximize value
Remote work will not work for every organization or worker
Some people/orgs need to work synchronously to feel productive. This has grown because we’ve grown to associate the amount of time we spend sitting in a seat in an office with being productive. Couldn’t be more wrong.
Some people/orgs like the instantaneous gratification of availability. Excuses of water cooler chat, teamwork, collaboration, and communication being better when physically together have been accepted as conventional wisdom when in reality they permit distraction & disruption
Human connection is the latest thing the office is ‘needed’ for
Like your employer’s HR team picking the people you spend the most time + the deepest common bond being the continued economic success of your company where when that changes the relationship ends is a good thing
Remote working shouldn’t be a reinvention of the things we already know. We can’t take the 9-5 and transplant it to people’s homes. Stop thinking about remote work being the future of work, it’s not. Remote work is the future of living
Stop sacrificing life for work and start living your life while organizing work around it. Spend time with the people you love do the things you’re most passionate about, cultivate meaning and deep relationships around these things
Remote could be a new operating system for living or it could be the next cage that prevents us from improving. It should lead to the most diverse organizations in history.
Whether it does is up to the people leading the transition.
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