This is NOT remote work!

This is NOT remote work!

This is NOT remote work!

I keep stumbling upon polls asking people following 2020 they prefer working from home, in the office or some hybrid of the two. Last year was hard and for many it was their first taste at escaping the office, but let's be clear, this was not remote work. This was something else!

Remote work is a conscious choice. A decision made by employer and employee to focus on the work and the people doing the work, not the colour on the wall in the break room. It is premeditated and requires careful consideration. You are freeing yourself from so many of the restrictions and giving or claiming back that which is most valuable, time. However, something else is taken away and that thing is community. We need to feel close. We need to collaborate and the collaborations require relationships. Relationships don't happen on their own. Effort is required. This is true whether you work in an office or remotely, but the ingredients required to allow relationships and, therefore, collaboration to flourish must be present. If they are not, it's called isolation.

So, before you elect for any of the options, remote, office or the hybrid, consider have you been given the tools and support to expect any chance of success in the remote environment. I'd also ask you to consider whether you are given those things in the office environment, but that's another matter.

I'll say it again, for most people, this is NOT remote. Forcing people to work from home with insufficient support, using unfit tools that they've never used or even seen before whilst their manager scrambles to cobble something together having been as ill-prepared for this as their team is closer to torture than it is an example of remote work.

If you've felt stressed by it all, I'm not surprised. It all could have been so different.

Rodrigo H. M.

Lead for DevOps, SRE & Cloud Engineering Teams | Driving Scalable Cloud Solutions in Enterprise Environments | Strategic Technical Leader | Cloud-Native Engineering & Product Innovation Architect | Connecting the dots! ?

4 年

Totally agree! "It all could have been so different." - Here in Argentina a lot of teachers tried to do remote learning with their students. The government didn't give any tool or training to the teachers to do so. Most of the kids (even when they say they are 'digital 100%' :rolls-eyes) don't know how to collaborate remotely (or remotely collaborate haha) so basically, kids were forced to assist to a videocall with lots of people who don't know ettiquete (and weren't teached so) like muting microphone, not interrupting, etc, also not coached into time management which ended up in a complete and total disregard of humanly endurable time schedules and resting hours, and last but not least, they weren't prepared to be productive in the time they put on, so basically they were wasting time generating frustration. I wonder why the suits in charge of these policies (or the head of private schools for that matter) hire remote work coaches and people prepare to do this. Anyways, i totally agree that remote work is not home office :)

Renan Bandeira

Engineering Manager leading software innovation with ReactJS expertise

4 年

"we are working remotely because of Covid consequences". Really? Should I use an electronic tagging to work from home too?! This is what I think everytime I people try to explain why they have been working from home lately.

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