Every Office Worker Will Demand the Choice to Work From Home
Jan 2, 2020
The ongoing situation has accelerated remote work 10 years in 5 weeks
Now that workers have experienced the benefits of remote work it's going to be incredibly difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. They know they can operate more efficiently and effectively from home. Collaboration on Zoom has been great and very similar to in-office collaboration. We are beginning to realize that offices are not necessary to do great work.
The reason is incredibly simple: flexibility and quality of life.
Flexibility
Operating 9-5 from an office every day limits what you can do. Never getting to drop the kids off at school, being late to eat with your partner each evening, lacking the opportunity to fit the things into our life we love doing most. Office work shackles us to a specific geographic location – typically a city with a high cost of living – which forces us to accept several things. Remote work break us free from that:
⚖️Balance
The ability to organize work around your life rather than life around your work may be the most liberating change in work history. Remote work lets me work when I am most productive, setting the schedule that suits me to do my best work.
Life-work balance replaces work-life balance.
🗓️Permission
Asking your boss to go to a doctor's appointment is like sending a note to the principal to get out of school. Life doesn't have to be like a continuation of your education living style.
I now do the things I need to do, while still getting my work done.
🚘Commute
Wasting 25 total days of your life each year sitting in a pollution emitting steel box is a massive waste of your time. Working remotely immediately gives you all this time to use however you wish.
I now workout, read and eat with family IN LESS TIME than my previous commute!
Quality of Life
People will realize that the freedom from being expected to occupy a seat for 8 hours a day enables leads to a massive quality of life increase. Being able to do what you want when you want while still being able to operate and do better work than you've ever done in your life, which has several massive benefits:
❤️Family
Working 40 hours a week in an office while having to waste 10 hours a week on top of that commuting limits how much time we can spend with the people we care about most. Our main social contact comes from people selected by our bosses hiring policy.
Remote work lets me have deeper meaningful relationships with friends and family.
🧘Health & Wellbeing
Sitting in a car, to then sit in front of a screen all day is terrible for our health and wellbeing. We don't have time to improve our health and our wellbeing suffers because we don't have the freedom to detach from the things we have to do.
I can run at lunchtime if I need to recharge, take time every day to focus on personal development and eat more healthily than I ever have before.
💰Lower Cost of Living
Big cities where high paying jobs are having a high cost of living which leads to less disposable income. This limits what we can do with our money because we have less of it to spend.
Remote work lets me live in a lower-cost region, increase my disposable income and have a far higher quality of life as a result.
Why Now?
Remote work is the biggest workplace revolution in history and nothing will deliver a higher quality of life increase in the next decade than this. Workers having more flexibility to decide their work schedule, able to operate when they are most productive rather than a fixed day, enables a far better future of work than the one we currently experience. Organizing work around your life is a huge transition with major implications. Gone is the requirement to beg your bosses permission to go to an appointment, it is the ability to drop and pick your child up from work every day with time in the afternoon to go for your recharging run.
Being handcuffed to an office and expected to live in a high cost of living city with a low quality of life is a remnant of the industrial revolution. The devolution of offices into almost factory-like conditions as distraction factory adult kids clubs is complete. The office has become the worst place on the planet to get the isolation and focus you need to do deep work.
Make no mistake, remote work is exploding to prominence right now. We are living through the inflection point today. Shortly, workers will realize their power and influence to demand remote work.
How Do I Develop a Remote Strategy?
We built an all-in-one provisioning platform that lets companies develop a remote work strategy instantly.
We provide all the practical equipment remote workers need at the touch of a button. Firstbase takes care of everything as a monthly subscription per worker, including delivery, upgrades, maintenance, repairs, and collections when a worker leaves. We help you:
- Be more cost-efficient
- Comply with regulation
- Save time on onboarding
- Slash your real-estate costs
