Remote work isn't just working from home (1)

“Remote work” is usually misconstrued as a synonim for "working from home". In fact, “remote work” only means “work performed from afar”, that is, outside the usual place: the company's premises.

The Covid-19 pandemic was responsible for the outburst of working from home as a lifesaver to keep companies running during the initial lockout. However, what actually happened was the sudden acceleration of a trend that many had already foreseen in the scope of the so-called “digital transformation” but was taking longer than anticipated to achieve a significant dimension. As expected, this surge sparked a cornucopia of information on the topic, with more facts and data accruing to it every single day.

The overwhelming majority of the published material, however, tends to focus on the difficulties that workers have to face in this work regime, with an emphasis on the problems of isolation and the lack of interaction with colleagues, the blurring of boundaries between the working timr and personal and family life, etc. In contrast, truly crucial aspects of remote work have been largely ignored. The first of all is the confusion between “remote work” and “working from home”.

This is a fallacy that stems from the special circumstances in which this debate started – the lockdown triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic – when working from home was the only option. But “remote work” strictly means “working from afar”, that is, outside the usual workplace: the company's premises.

The work we do when we sit down with a laptop at the nearest Starbucks, on board a train or a plane, in a hotel lobby or in an airport lounge - it's all remote work. And it hardly new: the salesperson who records his sales at the end of the day and plans the next day in a hotel room has been doing it for decades!

What is new, on the quantitative level, is the massive scale that circumstances have forced, and on the qualitative one its extension to vast segments of dependent workers, far beyond the minority of pre-existing “digital nomads” – just a few freelancers, consultants, salespeopke and senior staff.

This association between remote work and mobility, which tends to be ignored in the current debate, is a critical factor that must be considered in thinking about the organization of work in a post-pandemic “new normal”, as we will discuss in another opportunity but won’t elaborate now.

Naturally, the type of work constrains the place where it can be performed. Any activity with a confidential content - for example, scheduling medical appointments, providing financial advice, negotiating contracts - cannot take place in a public space where, even when done only in writing, may be scrutinized by strangers; in fact, such activities, even when carried out at home, must be adequately protected and safeguarded. Others are subject to technological limitations - e.g. bandwidth, equipment size - that are cannot be reconciled with mobility: a CAD / CAM designer needs large screens that he can’t carry to the corner cafe. Many other examples of these limitations could be pointed out.

Another misunderstanding born with the explosion of the lockdown-generated remote work is to look at it from an "all or nothing" point of view: either all work must be carried out on the company's premises (which we have already seen to be a fallacy), or it has to be performed entirely outside the company (meaning at the worker's home).

Surprisingly, some companies seem to be making decisions based on this misunderstanding, preparing to permanently relocate entire job categories to a working from home environment. In this event, they would obviously save a lot of money in office space, energy, consumables (some office tales have suggested that the toilet paper race in the first days of the lockdown was triggered by the sudden realization that it would no longer be possible to bring it from the office. ..) and other costs.

However, this hypothesis is unlikely to materialize: the most successful remote work experiences are in reality hybrid solutions, with a mix between activities developed at the company's facilities and work from home (or elsewhere, if the type of work permits), in proportions dictated by the job content, the need for face-to-face interaction, access to certain equipment and facilities, and the imperative of of workers’ emotional stability. As a result, the savings from relocation risk being actually much smaller than those suggested by hasty and simplistic extrapolations.

Author's note: This article was originally published in Portuguese on July 20, 2020 on the opinion page of the website “Pessoas by ECO” (https://eco.sapo.pt/pessoas/opiniao/), and later transcribed on LinkedIn. It is now published in English for the benefit of those who do not master the original language. All five articles on remote work published in “Pessoas by ECO” between July and August 2020 will be translated and posted on LinkedIn.

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