Remote Work: Moot Points

We know what are pros and cons of remote working model, however world sin’t black and white and there are plenty of aspects which cannot be clearly categorized as and advantage or disadvantage.

We have combined a list of aspects which handled correctly can become a huge advantage of remote work, and at the same time, ruin entirely remote working model.

Remote work is cheaper / more expensive

When you work remotely you don’t have to rent an office, buy a desk or have cleaning service. You don’t need to buy a coffee machine, supply an office with coffee grains or tea, not even a paper toilet. This can save you some money.

However, some of entrepreneurs which run totally remote companies (i.e. Janek Zborowski a co-founder of fully remote software house softwaremill) claim that it doesn’t work that way. If you want to keep motivated and integrated team, you have to organize recurring gatherings so that people could see each other. Organizational cost is very high (you have to cover all train/plane tickets, hotels, venue etc).

Even if you won’t organize such an expensive integration events you might, and probably will spend a lot on your remote tools. Trello – $10 USD / user, GSuite – 12$/ user, Zoom / $15 / user etc. Suddenly you may realize that cost of remote software become an significant part of your monthly cost.

Of course it doesn’t necessarily have to be related to remote working model only. Many companies which didn’t work remotely before, were still using mentioned solutions so this may simply mena that there won’t be extra cost at all.

Work-life balance

This is one of the most popular advantaged in all remote work guidelines. When you work remotely, generally from home, you get much more flexibility in your schedule. You don’t have to race out the door to catch a bus, or get to the freeway by a certain hour lest you risk rotting away in traffic. You can arrange everything to maximize time with your family. Give a lift to your wife in the morning or go our during the day to pick your children from school.

If you have infants or small children you can arrange your time to work when they are sleeping and enjoy time when they awake. Since you can work from anywhere you can start your holidays earlier, let your family enjoy a sunny beach and join them in the after noon on Friday for a 1-2 days before your actual 1-2 week long holidays begin (although it’s extremely risky to mix holidays with work and some say you should definitely avoid it)

But it can also go very wrong. Instead of work-life balance you may end up in work-life shake where everything is so mixed that it’s impossible to separate it anymore.

If you don’t have work hygiene and self discipline you can easily end up spending much more time on work than you would normally do while leaving to the office. When we work in the office we naturally feel that we have to finish our work before certain hour. While working from home there is no “leaving office” hours.

In the aforementioned report, 76% of remote employees say they work beyond their set hours on a weekly basis. And 25% of remote employees work beyond their scheduled hours every day.

It is not for everyone

We already talked that some of the professions are more eligible for remote work than others but what we have to say very explicitly is that even if your position can be done remotely it all depend on you and your chatacter.

In hour company we allow people to choose whether they want work from home or come to office and yet still around 30% comes to the office. They clearly say that they prefer to commute and still come to the office cause they simply cannot work from home. They have tried and they failed.

And this is the biggest take-away from this article – not everyone is capable to work remotely. Even if everything is in place (equipment, software, accesses) , it doesn’t mean that it’s gonna work.