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busy office is like a food processor—it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there. Each segment is filled with a conference call, a meeting, another meeting, or some other institutionalized unnecessary interruption.
Where do you go when you really have to get work done? Your answer won’t be “the office in the afternoon.”
commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress-related ills such as heart attacks and depression, and even divorce.
Commuting isn’t just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment—it’s bad for business. And it doesn’t have to be that way.
The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration. Not only do we not have to be in the same spot to work together, we also don’t have to work at the same time to work together.
The city is the original talent hub. Traditionally, those who ran the engines of capitalism thought: “Let’s gather a large number of people in a small geographical area where they must live on top of each other in tight quarters, and we’ll be able to find plenty of able bodies to man our factories.”
So here’s a prediction: The luxury privilege of the next twenty years will be to leave the city. Not as its leashed servant in a suburb, but to wherever one wants.
Letting people work remotely is about promoting quality of life, about getting access to the best people wherever they are, and all the other benefits we’ll enumerate. That it may also end up reducing costs spent on offices and result in fewer-but-more-productive workers is the gravy, not the turkey.
Embracing remote work doesn’t mean you can’t have an office, just that it’s not required. It doesn’t mean that all your employees can’t live in the same city, just that they don’t have to.
So why do so many of these same companies that trust “outsiders” to do their critical work have such a hard time trusting “insiders” to work from home?
Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust.
As Chris Hoffman from the IT Collective explains: “If we’re struggling with trust issues, it means we made a poor hiring decision.
That’s just it—if you can’t let your employees work from home out of fear they’ll slack off without your supervision, you’re a babysitter, not a manager.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you.
Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling. And if you’re stuck in a dead-end job that has no prospects of being either, then you don’t just need a remote position—you need a new job.
One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.
Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF. If the office loses power or Internet or air conditioning, it’s no longer functional as a place to do work. If a company doesn’t have any training or structure to work around that, it means it’s going to be unavailable to its customers.
Too many meetings can destroy morale and motivation.
