This week we observe, with no small degree of gratitude that we are alive to write and read these words, the third anniversary of the COVID-19 induced “great shutdown.” March 2023 also marks three years since for the first time in history, “remote work” emerged as a normative standard for simultaneously keeping the world’s economic engine humming and protecting us all from the ravages of the most vicious plague of our lifetime.
Once reserved for special cases and outlier organizations, the phrase “remote work” catapulted into our professional and cultural lexicon as a sort of workplace singularity. Now the standard for the majority of workers in a wide range of industries, “remote work" has flipped the workplace (or more accurately, the work place) on its head.
While remote work can mean work “conducted or working away from a usual workplace or location, making use of communications technology,” there has also remained the pre-COVID pejorative meaning: “Remotely: to a very small degree.” Thus, remote work over the past three years has required a huge degree of trust building between companies and their teams, and between co-workers at all levels and one another.
In many organizations, including Rainier Communications, that trust was established in the earliest days and weeks of the pandemic shutdown. Rainier’s daily all-hands meetings, part business, part therapeutic pandemic support group, quickly became a favorite and ingrained part of the Rainier team’s daily routine. We helped and supported one another and watched as our individual and collective productivity went up.
And now I’m declaring that it’s time to “lose the remote” for good. Whether you call it working from home (WFH), telecommuting, digital nomad or borderless business, what we are all doing now is simply “working.” Our work-place location is no longer a relevant modifier to being at “work” or “working.” While I’m certainly not the arbiter of the zeitgeist, I’m going to take a leap and declare that the “remote” is not only lost, but it’s gone forever, buried somewhere deep in the sofa cushions of a quaintly fossilized, primitive and surely obsolete pre-COVID mentality.
According to 2023 research by Owl Labs, 16% of companies globally are now fully remote, and 62% of employees aged 22 to 65 say they work remotely at least occasionally. The study does note that 44% of companies in the world don’t allow remote work (I submit that these companies place themselves on the wrong side of history and at a competitive disadvantage – TECLA found that 85% of managers believe that having remote workers will become the new normal for many teams).
Citing data from 2,118 remote workers around the world looking at the shifts and evolution of remote work in 2022, Buffer found that a whopping 99% of people said they would choose to work remotely for the rest of their life, even if it was just part-time. Owl Labs says that’s because of vastly better work-life balance including the fact that working remotely not only means you have more control of your daily schedule but that you don’t spend hours of your day stuck in traffic or on an overcrowded train. The result is that workers have more time to spend with their loved ones, on their hobbies or simply relaxing, and this is seen as the biggest perk of telecommuting. The Rainier team resoundingly agrees they are less stressed, much happier and more productive, but more productive largely on their own terms.
And let’s not forget that elimination of carbon-commuting has an incredibly positive impact on the environment, including:
- Fewer greenhouse gas emissions
- Decreased consumption of fossil fuels
- Increased air quality
- Less usage of office supplies
- Reduced power consumption
I’d be remiss if I failed to pay homage to the journalists and editors with whom we at Rainier interact on a daily basis. They began their migration long before COVID-19 to remote places where they wrote just as well or better than they did sitting in Manhasset or Chicago or San Francisco. Who in the technology world can forget the late Bernie Cole, the iconic and brilliant tech journalist who took great joy in plying his trade from a most rural corner of Northern Arizona?
And so as we commemorate three years – more than 1,000 days – since the working world turned upside down, I’ll argue that the pandemic that sent us all home from the office actually turned the working world right-side up. The placeless workplace is here to stay, not as a compromise or forced second choice. Instead, for those companies for whom it is possible, this is the way of working that is better for companies, employees and of course, clients and customers who are served by happier and more effective human beings. Happy anniversary to placeless work – today we are universally remote, and as the joke goes about the epiphany of the universal remote, “This changes everything.”
