Remote work: A Human Story

I’m not sure if you are feeling like me nowadays – I am drowning in the content flood about remote work or work from home. The number of blogs, webinars, interviews, articles, research published, the gates have opened, and there’s no stopping… as if remote work suddenly dawned on us, popped out of nowhere, and we have now come face to face with this new shiny object for the first time. As if we made a discovery.

 Ok.. really… we didn’t. In fact, you’ll be surprised to know that remote work is as ancient as us humans are.

The truth is that today’s hype about remote work doesn’t make it a new concept.

You see, remote workers were not born overnight. Nor in the last century or two. They definitely gained popularity when the internet was first created in the eighties; the rapid technological advancements made things possible for them, then social media put them on the map thanks to hashtags like #socialnomads and #workfromanywhere, #digitalnomads, and now super accelerated due to COVID19, yet no, remote work isn’t a “new” perk.

Today's hype about remote work doesn't make it a new concept.

Quick desktop research about the history of remote work yields you a surprise. Remote work has been around for the last 1.4 million years. Almost at every point in human history, there was some aspect of working from home. From early human beings foraging for plants and hunting animals with tools they carved in their places of dwelling to many millennia later, in medieval Britain, for example, where peasants lived in what is called longhouses with livestock at one end of the house and them living at the other end. Everyday life functions were carried out in and around the middle of this single open-plan space. It was a combination of kitchen and spinning/ weaving/dressmaking workshop, bedroom and dairy, dining room, butchery, and tannery. Medieval merchants traded from their homes as well. They had their shops or workshops onto the street where goods were made and sold.

Come 17th and 18th century; craftspeople continued to work from home; skilled blacksmiths, carpenters, artists, writers, potters, leatherworkers, bookkeepers, you name it, they all set up shop from their residences and sold their products or services from there. I bet you didn’t know that the name topshop comes from weavers who positioned the highly glazed workshops under the roof of the same place where they lived because they wanted to make the most of the natural light. These workhomes made it possible for them to compete with the new work organization system starting to crop up due to the mighty first industrial revolution: The Factories.

People often think that the first industrial revolution created strong social momentum towards working outside the house in mills and factories, and the middle classes commuted from the suburbs to work in the City. While this is true, less known is that a large proportion of the working population continued in home-based work, which thrived as shopkeepers, funeral parlors, and schools featured proprietors and teachers living and working in the same building.

The story of remote work takes an interesting shift in the 19th and 20th centuries with the economic expansion and the rise of corporate headquarters, offices, and the 8-hour workday. Remote work kind of took a back seat. But in reality, it never faded away.

Because, and here is where the story gets its twist. With this same economic expansion came incredible technology innovations such as the birth of the telephone, personal computers, the fantastic creation of the internet, smartphones, and Wi-Fi.

The 20th century gave us luminaries like Jack Nilles and Frank Schiff. Jack Nilles, a former NASA engineer, coined the word “telecommuting” and proposed working from home as a solution to traffic tangles and limited resources, while Frank Schiff coined the term “flexplace” in an article for The Washington Post called “Working From Home Can Save Gasoline” in response to the oil crisis in the ’70s.

What I find amazingly intriguing in this whole story, in everything I told you so far, is how intricately remote work is weaved in our human history fabric, especially in times of significant predicaments our race faced on its path to its future.

Back to the 20th century

As more people started owning personal computers, laptops, and smart devices and have access to the internet and Wi-Fi as it became public, they opted for “lifestyle work”, a term which almost becomes synonymous with remote work. And once again, remote work started gaining momentum as “lifestyle workers” thrived. Whether working from home, from a laptop at a coffee shop, or even a smartphone, the internet and Wi-Fi let employees do everything they would in their cubicle now do from outside the office, anywhere, anytime. And you know what? If I choose to work for six months from some far remote island and take the next six months off to wander the world, I can now do that.

This new reality gave rise to the virtual employee who works and stays in touch with their coworkers from anywhere around the world—all thanks to the internet. And from here on, we all know the rest of the story how incredible innovations in technology and business models gave birth to the fluid workforce and flexible workplaces and reaffirmed remote work as a lifestyle choice.

Nothing new in the 21st Century

So the takeaway here, yes, while millennials popularized the concept, and the pandemic triggered a massive shift away from the traditional workplace, the evolution of remote work began many many centuries ago. This new reality we woke up to as a result of the pandemic is really not so new.

From the world’s first offices to the social and technological shifts that spawned a remote revolution, remote work will continue to remain part of human history, becoming more engraved in our existence and forever, altering our philosophy about work.