The COVID-19 pandemic brought remote work to everyone’s radar. Even if someone themselves didn’t work remotely due to their work not being suitable for it or it being part of the crucial services that needed to be kept running, nobody could avoid hearing the public discussion.
Remote work, work from home and location independent work
The remote work experience that most of us had during the pandemic was a very skewed one. It was a forced work from home situation and that has a lot of negative effects that are not present if we think about remote work with a wider perspective on the topic. Even if we’d remove all the pandemic related issues like lockdowns and not being able to spend time with loved ones, many of us were still stuck at home.
I like to use the term location independent work instead of remote work. For me, the big value of remote work is not that I can skip the commute and work at home where I have access to my personal fridge and toilet. Those are nice things for sure but there’s so much more for remote work to offer.
Choose the location based on the work being done
The key to me is not being tied to a specific physical location (like an office) at a specific time. A big chunk of my professional career, I’ve worked in very flexible situations. I like to think about the location of work being the outcome of considerations about the work being done.
If I’m going to write and send an email, it doesn’t really matter where I am as long as I can focus and keep my screen away from privy eyes. If I’m hosting an event at the company office, I better be there in person. If I’m doing work that requires tight collaboration with the teammates, I either need to be in the same physical space with them or be in a space where I can be productive on a video call.
In the Finnish media (“Etätöitä purjeveneestä ja automatkalta Lappiin – työnantaja pani pisteen oudoille etätöille”, Yle, 4.11.2024) there was a story where a CEO commented how the company had to start putting in restrictions about remote work when people started to ask if they could work remotely while sailing. They ended up with “1 day a week or 4 days a month” rule.
As I was reading that news piece, I kept thinking this is so upside down. If someone can do their work on a satisfactory level and not miss their responsibilities, why is a company so strict about where the work is being done. And if a company cannot measure if an employee is doing a good enough job in any other way than measuring how many hours they spend in the office, there are bigger problems at hand.
Knowledge work includes many types of activities
In knowledge work like mine, there are so many types of work within the daily responsibilities. While some of them require me to be in a specific place at a specific time, huge majority of the time I do things that don’t depend on time and location.
One of my most productive work days was back before the pandemic when I was travelling towards home from Copenhagen after a conference. The train from Copenhagen to Stockholm is bit over 5 hours and the internet is spotty at best. I shut down all the chats and started writing. I spent the entire time writing a playbook for one of our operations to help other office’s adopt those ideas and people who would in future participate in those operations to onboard easier.
There was no specific time or date or place when that work had to happen. So I could choose to do work like that during a time when I’m not available for meetings or have access to the web. Doing that work during the train trip also meant I didn’t have to do that work when I was sitting in the office where I could better use my time to work with other people and be reachable.
You can be social, in different ways
Tom Critchlow in Work is a Place writes about one negative side of remote work: loneliness. For a lot of people working remotely, it’s probably the case to some extent. If the company you work for doesn’t have a good remote culture for social interactions (ie. often the discussions in chat platforms and video calls are only ever about work) and if the remote work means work from home, it’s likely to get lonely quite fast.
I like how Tom categorises the socialisation into different buckets:
Here are some of the distinct types of socializing that I might be missing:
- Belonging. A sense of being part of a team and some kind of shared objectives / goals / shared values.
- Support. Being able to have people around you to help you when you get stuck with something specific.
- Jam partners. People to feel energized and electric with, to help brainstorm or cram on projects.
- Creative collisions. Existing in a space where you can bump into new people or make new introductions.
- Micro human interactions. Being able to step out and grab coffee or talk about the weather.
- Tacit experience. The experience of passively observing others at work and seeing how people structure their time and work.
- Separation of home and work. The ability to go somewhere to work.
Of course that doesn’t solve all of the types of socialisation. If everyone else in the team is at home or at the office, me being outside of them doesn’t solve the need for belonging to a team. But bouncing around ideas and learning from people outside the team can also spark completely new ideas as a tradeoff.
I like remote work because it frees me to be social in ways that I wouldn’t be if I was tied to a time and place. When I work remotely, I can travel to a place where people I want to hang out with live, work from there and spent the lunch breaks and evenings with them. I can have a meeting with someone downtown and then continue planning, designing or writing from a cafe, a pub or a train and continue to another social work interaction somewhere else.
Location independent work doesn’t mean that I’m always on the go. I still spend a lot of time either at home (or hotel, summer cabin, you name it) or at the office doing the major chunk of my work. But it opens up the possibilities for all of the work that doesn’t require me being there. And changing the environment can lead to new ideas and new discoveries so I’d recommend it even to those who otherwise work mainly at the office during the day.