‘Don’t get me started on bloody remote work!’
‘Sitting at home mouse hovering, more like!’
‘It’s transformed our business!’
‘I will never go back to sitting at the desk all week like a sap!’.
These are just some of the utterances I’ve heard in my research.
My favourite is ‘Our performance reviews showed that those who were lazy in the office were lazy remotely, those who worked their socks off on-site did the same remotely’.
The Irish Workplace Relations Commission recently published a code of practice for employers to manage employees’ right to request remote work compliantly.
This right became law in March of this month. Employers say they’re concerned about the cost of ergonomic assessments, health and safety provisions, security, and cost of compliance. What they are not directly saying is that they’re worried about productivity.
According to Forbes, 98% of survey respondents said they wanted to work remotely, at least some of the time, for the rest of their careers. That’s a pretty indisputable figure. But so many employers are still baulking at this thoroughly modern way of working.
And it’s not just the reasons stated above.
Trust
At the core of all remote working discussions is one beautiful five-letter word: trust. It takes a lot of trust to wave someone off into the middle distance, perform duties out of sight, and pay them as though they were under your nose. And if trust isn’t there from an employer’s point of view, it will not be there with the employee either. When we look at the Gallup State of the Workplace Report 2024 and see that 77% of workers are either not engaged or actively disengaged, there is a definite issue with trust and the psychological contract between employers and employees. But that doesn’t mean that it’s an issue for every company.
Model
Your business’s model may not lend itself to remote working. Elon Musk says that it’s ‘morally wrong’ for people to work remotely when his workers have to show up to build his cars (unconfirmed reports from a Tesla event in Shanghai claim that their Gigafactory Shanghai is now “95% automated”). He says the laptop class is living in La La Land.
Whether it’s a moral issue or not, the reality is that (for now) some occupations require physical presence. Jobs in caring, medical, hospitality, transportation, agriculture, and others are challenging to perform remotely, although not impossible. Innovations already provide remote and automated solutions to specific tasks required for the above roles. In his book A World Without Work, Daniel Susskind details how using AI to strip out automatable tasks can offer new efficiencies and, more importantly, social opportunities and innovation that transcend financial profit.
Scale
A large enterprise is defined as having 250 or more employees. The World Trade Organisation cites 90% of the global business population as SMEs for scale and comparison. I spoke to the COO of a fully remote online accountancy firm during the week, and she explained how they had built a model of remote working for scale, a way of being with trust at its core. Ok, their headcount is small, 75 employees, but they plan to increase that by 50% in the next eighteen months. They feel sure that their cocktail of technological tools and defined human interaction creates a strong starting point for fuelling international growth.
I’ll be diving into this model in detail in my book Work’s Not Working
Fixed costs.
Start-ups and small businesses are the speedboats to multinationals’ supertankers. They have agility and adaptability. They likely have something else, too, particularly if they were born in the last four years: a mindful aversion to accumulating punitive recurring fixed costs. That means hybrid, remote and shared workspaces deployed in a variety of ways. If a company has invested in an urban glass palace and that cost is baked into the business model, you better believe you want to sweat that investment. An empty and echoing office block is a stark reminder that you’re wasting money and didn’t see the tide turning.
The cost of absence.
Of course, there is a human cost behind these individual decisions and evolutions. Traditionally, women have adopted flexible working more than men. Research from The Centre for Progressive Policy in the UK reveals that women are three times more likely than men to work part-time or in flexible work arrangements. I’ve got a pretty good idea why. Despite all of the wins and progress, the ESRI say that, on average, women spend double the time of men on caring and more than twice as much time on housework. Face time, holistic human interactions, networking and innovation are all potential collateral damage in a fully remote workforce. That’s fine if we’re dealing with a level playing field. The contrast is even more stark when we realise that the women are at home spinning plates while the men are choosing chilled or room temp. Even playing field, it is not.
How has the rise in remote working affected you, your business or your life? If you can point to positives or negatives, or better yet, share what you’ve done to crack the problems, please contact me at [email protected]
