The Remote Work Weekly #3

Welcome to the third edition of The Remote Work Weekly!

As a recap of Last week edition's changes. It didn't include the Tool of the Week section, which I am resuming this week with an interesting productivity tool. Also, last week was the start of summarizing some of Atlassian's Team Anywhere Lab experiments, which will continue next week.

In this week's edition, we explore the remote work adoption state in Africa with an opinion piece discussing the future of remote/hybrid work in South Africa, break down the news about return-to-office calls in the U.S. financial sector, and introduce a virtual coworking tool that can help boost your productivity while working remotely.

Is Hybrid Work Already the Norm in South Africa?

An opinion piece recently published on BusinessTech, one of South Africa’s largest news websites, claimed that hybrid work isn't going away anytime soon.

A manager at a South Africa based digital consulting agency mentioned that the majority of businesses now offer at least one work-from-home day a week. And it is a trend expected to continue. Another interesting insight mentioned was that neither a full remote work week nor a full on-site work week is seen as common now.

These remarks suggest that more and more businesses in South Africa are adopting flexible practices regarding the employee's presence in offices, moving away from micromanagement.

Wall Street Goes Back to Office

News has been coming that two large banks in the U.S. asked their remote staff to report to their corporate offices five days a week. As of last week, Bloomberg reported that Citigroup had asked 600 remotely working employees to work from their offices full-time. Similarly, 350 remote employees in HSBC's New York office are expected to start working on-site.

These changes are arguably happening due to FINRA’s adjustments to its workplace monitoring regulations. Regardless of the cause for these changes, it seems that the era of full remote work days in the U.S. financial sector is gradually coming to an end.

Tool of the Week

This week's featured tool is one that I personally use and has been of great help to keep me productive and more focused while working remotely. FocusMate is a virtual coworking tool that helps you better focus on the work at hand with the help of a coworking mate.

FocusMate works by allowing you to book a 25, 50, or 75-minute session with a coworking partner. You and your partner start by sharing the task/s you will be working on, then get down to work while having your cameras on. Once a session ends, you will briefly discuss your achievements and how the work went.

The following is an image of the FocusMate dashboard, showing a calendar and the available time slots of other coworkers. You can book sessions according to your calendar, and FocusMate will auto-match you with an available coworker:

The free account comes with three sessions per week, while the paid subscription offers unlimited sessions. You can get a free month with unlimited sessions by signing up here.

Wrap-up

This wraps up the third edition of The Remote Work Weekly. I hope it was informative, insightful, and entertaining :). To receive notifications about each week's edition, feel free to subscribe.

If you'd like to share your thoughts or suggest a useful tool, your input is always appreciated. You can reach out to me directly here.

See you next week!

Amr