Remote Working is Almost Perfect
You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
You might be someone who can’t wait to get back to the office when you’re allowed to, or you might be an employer eager to get your employees back, but just stop for a moment and think about some of things that you might miss when you’re not remote any more.
1. Your home office is really nice
If you’re lucky enough to have enough space in your home, then by now you will have made yourself a very nice home office. You’ll have a comfy seat, a big desk, multiple screens, your favourite mouse and keyboard, and have nice homely things surrounding yourself.
Your office will be so nice, you will feel like you’re the CEO.
2. Meetings are really easy and more efficient
You may not remember how difficult meeting in a meeting room could be. One person will need their laptop so they can connect it to a bigger screen in the meeting room, and take you through a presentation, document or Jira board. There will be a few minutes wasted while they set that up.
The rest of the people in the room will then be trying to read the screen, which some people will find difficult to see, because it’s not big enough. Then you’ll need to take notes, so someone will have to go and get their laptop.
With all this fussing, you’ve probably wasted 10 minutes and you also need to be aware that the next meeting might be on another floor or the other side of the campus, so you need a bit of time to get to it.
This process probably seems a bit alien to many people now, because all these problems have gone. You join a Zoom or MS Teams meeting, and the presenter is ready to start straight away, everyone can see everything clearly and anyone can take notes.
You can have back to back meetings with no travel time too.
3. There’s no commute
This is obvious, and surely won’t be something that people will be happy to give up. My commute was only 25 minutes when I was in the office, but I still want to avoid it, and for many people a 1 hour commute would be typical. How can we justify wasting that much time every day?
4. You can focus more easily
If you’ve got the perfect office at home, then focussing is easy. You can put some nice music on, and settle down with a nice drink and a task that will take you a few hours and be certain that you will have no distractions.
This just isn’t possible in a typical office. People will come up to you and talk to you, your colleagues on the desks around you will have annoying habits which distract you or the generally conversation around you will draw you in.
5. Breaks are better
Breaks in the office quickly get monotonous, you go to the same place with the same people. If you’re lucky, you’ll be in a city centre with nice places to go, but if you’re not you’ll be on a very dull industrial estate with nothing interesting to see.
At home, on the other hand, there’s plenty of variety. You can go to the nearby shops, go to the gym, cook a nice meal, take the dog for a walk, have a bath, watch a short TV show… the options are endless.
6. The food is better
When you go to an office it will probably have a sandwich shop or two nearby, but you’ll quickly find the range is limited, and ideally you don’t want to eat loads of bread all the time.
At home, though, you get the full variety of food that you typically enjoy, with a full range of cooking tools so that you can have a much healthier and more satisfying meal.
Are You Ready to Give This Up?
So, I know what you’re thinking. We need to see people face to face for more social interaction and collaboration. And you’re right, but how much do we need this? Every day, a couple of times a week, or once a month?
I think we don’t need it very often, and this list of benefits of working from home is a lot to give up, just for a bit of face to face interaction. I would rather stay at home most of the time, and only meet up occasionally to chat and socialise. In fact, if you don’t do it this way, then your “hybrid” remote office will probably fail.
Have a good think about the things you’ll be missing when you head back to the office.