The forward march of remote work continues apace. Despite setbacks like Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! putting an end to their remote work program, researchers continue to gather evidence that remote work is a win for both employers and employees.
Over at Fast Company, Jessica Stevens argues that remote work is here to stay and will become the new norm. Of course, remote work isn’t for everyone and even those amenable will need support from their employer. Like all articles of this sort, Stevens has a list of things that the employer should do to help ensure success. Her list is:
- Employers should provide remote workers with the technology and infrastructure they need to do their job remotely in an efficient, low-friction way.
- Help the employee achieve “disciplinary excellence” by implementing systems to measure progress and provide feedback.
- Provide clear goals and instructions so they know what’s expected from them.
Stevens omits the item that most commenters feel is most important: Provide a robust communication environment so that remote workers know what’s going on in the company, know what other workers are doing, and don’t feel isolated. One could argue, I suppose, that that’s implicit in the three goals she lists but it seems orthogonal to me.
Remote work is becoming so ubiquitous that there’s almost no point in continuing to write about it but as I’ve said before, I’ve been fascinated by the subject for several years. When I first got interested in the subject, remote work was rare and confined to a small set of job types such as journalism. Now it seems to be everywhere and, in the tech sector at least, it’s unusual for a company not to offer some type of remote work program.