some notes/musings on remote work, hybrid work, work from home, and work from anywhere

Some notes/musings on remote work, hybrid work, work from home, and work from anywhere. My thoughts only, not representing anyone. Love to hear yours.

• IT issues: A potentially good employee benefit could be one of the new subscriptions that have been launched where people get IT support for all their devices (work computer, work phones, non-work phones, non-work computer, etc.) all combined for about $200 year.
• Backups: Backing up your computer, e.g. Time Machine. It can be a challenge. Backup drives seem to fail surprisingly often and the backups to those backups fail. Especially non solid-state. Helping people find the best backup and possibly subsidizing backups either online or on a hard drive could be a potential employee?benefit.
• Zoom: The baffling over-emphasis on using Zoom in lieu of the phone continues to hurt working parents or people handling elder care, who can no longer use the phone in their school’s parking lot (or the parking lot of the dentist, kid’s recital, game, whatever) to contact people, but must drive somewhere for a Zoom meeting for a conversation about something that could’ve and should’ve happened prior via phone. One possible benefit here could be subsidizing in-car wifi for maybe $25-ish a month, available on some cars, and standard on some like GM.
• Exercise: If companies pay for gyms, could they / should they pay for online fitness memberships that can be done from home?
• Seeing humans: For some people “work from anywhere” is a real thing and not just a slogan, as opposed to work from home. Since you can gain and learn a lot by being around humans in person, there are ways companies could facilitate it. Example: facilitate the setting up of groups of “locals” … e.g. Chicago friends of the company (employees, alumni, customers, suppliers, contingent workers, etc) to communicate online and possibly get together for socializing, sports, and so on. Or, have employees in different locales add to an online crowdsourced calendar of local networking events, such as a list of upcoming Austin happy hours, Meetups, roadshows, classes, breakfasts, lunches, and other ways to get out. Possibly subsidize gas or otherwise encourage employees to attend a certain number of local events, e.g. one weekly.
• Communication: It’s hard to know how people are communicating. If you leave a voice mail, will the recipient even know you did? If they know you did, will they even listen to it? Some information on how an individual communicates could go a long way. How often do they check their texts or their "Slacks"?
• Calendars: It’s hard to know when to block off one’s calendar. Say you work on and off for, say, 17-18 hours a day (with periods of work and non work during that time). But you have a pilates group every other week at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, a monthly hair appointment at noon the first Monday of the month, visit your elderly relative daily at 3 p.m, and so on. And say you can move or cancel those appointments for a good reason, but you’d prefer to not move them for a meeting that could or should be asynchronous. How do you indicate that? It could be useful for people to indicate worse, best, and better times to have meetings, rather than a really binary system. In other words, many people can miss the monthly rummy game with mom or weekly gymnastic meet of the daughter, for the job they care a ton about and are dedicated to, but don’t want to miss it for a Zoom meeting that could’ve been a call, chat, or message any time, as opposed to that exact time.