I’ve written several times about the future of work and my fascination with what used to be called digital nomads. The idea of remote work has become so common that the term “digital nomad” no longer makes sense and there are probably people who wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you used it.
Once the concern of nerds and the publications they read, the idea of remote work has become mainstream. So mainstream that even The New Yorker is writing about it. A recent article considers the proposition that going to the office is a broken way of working. The pandemic has made clear that virtually any knowledge worker can work remotely just as effectively as if they were in the office.
The article is partially a conversation with Chris Herd who started a financial-tech company in northern Scotland. He realized immediately that his location made finding local talent hard or impossible so rather than establish an office, he staffed the company with remote workers. Herd was so impressed with the results of his remote work force that he started a second company, Firstbase, a company that provides remote-work infrastructure.
Herd says that office work and its surrounding culture is a derivative of factory work where people had to come together to work on manufacturing machines and be closely supervised by management. Oddly, Herd does not believe in remote-only work. He feels that face-to-face contact is still important and says that teams should meet in person periodically—perhaps once a month. My first thought was that it would be prohibitively expensive to fly everyone to a central location for these monthly meetings but Herd notes that it would be cheaper than maintaining expensive office space for those employees.
Herd is a crusader for remote work and whether due to him or not, the message is getting out. Amazon just announced that corporate and technical workers can work from home indefinitely, backing off from their previous announcement that workers would have to return to the office at least 3 days a week. Remote work is a powerful idea that, apparently, won’t be denied.