Is it true that some businesses are going back to in-office policies? Is remote work over? Don’t panic! Luis has all the insights to share.
The truth is, there’s a readjustment going on. Several companies are slowly returning to their previous policies about remote working days, establishing two or three days a week for each employee.
But don’t misunderstand what you read on the news. Remote work is here to stay!
Watch the video to find out more about this!
Luis:
Is remote work here to stay? Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, lets answer this question in Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis. I am your host, Luis, and this is my coffee. I make good coffee. Nice.
All right. So, I talked earlier this week about Apple, and how Apple is curtailing the remote work policy post-pandemic. I talked a bit about this topic on that show, but just to reiterate, is the fact that some businesses are curtailing the remote work policies, halting remote work, is remote work here to stay?
Absolutely, right. There’s a readjustment going on right now. You’d have to be a fool, I repeat a fool, to think that everyone that was forced to remote would stay remote. That doesn’t make absolutely no sense at all. I’ve been doing this for many years, advocating for remote work for many years, helping people do it for many years, and let me tell you, at the start of the pandemic, I was very conservative. I predicted something about 20% of the companies that went remote would stay remote. Actually, I was grossly underestimating the response, it’s more like 40% are staying remote. That’s almost half of all the companies that went remote.
So, I really don’t think that you need to be concerned about remote work going away. Most big companies are now shifting to hybrid. Which is a good sign, not a bad one, right? The natural order of things, because companies and especially the bigger they are, the more resistant to change they are, the natural order of things, it would be that as soon as the emergency was gone, they’d go back to business as usual. Almost no one is doing that. All of them are almost adopting a flexible hybrid approach.
Some of my colleagues, they say that hybrid isn’t real remote work. I’ve already talked about that on a previous video, right? I disagree. I think that it’s really good for the option to be there. It’s not might be the full, free, hyper functional remote work that most people, that many of my colleagues advocate for. I agree with that. I agree that it’s harder, right? It’s not that it’s worse, but it’s much harder to make hybrid work properly. But, if the businesses want to take on that challenge, so be it. I think that some of them will be disappointed with the results, and they will blame remote work and not the hybrid model. That’s just the way things work.
But I do think that what this proved is that remote work is viable. If it’s viable, people will go to it, right? People will gravitate toward it, according to their preferences. It’s like standing desks, right? Standing desks. It’s been proven a long time ago that standing desks are much better for your health and they don’t empire productivity. So, it’s a net positive because guess what? Healthier people are more productive. Now I’m sitting here in front of you. I’m sitting for most of my work day. I couldn’t adapt to standing desks. I tried for a long time and I just couldn’t. So, I’m unhealthy old me. A lot of people are in that same boat, they know perfectly well that standing desks are better, but they’re not doing it. They don’t like it. That’s not how they do their best work. So, the same will happen for remote work. Some people won’t do it. That’s fine. Whatever works for you.
Now, one thing that I want to say is that, once you get into a job that’s remote right now, right now as companies are implementing their policies, companies are probably going to stick with whatever policy, right? Some will shift. Some will say, “Oh, hybrid wasn’t for us. Oh, remote doesn’t for us. Oh, you know what? This back to office thing is terrible. Let’s go back to fully remote.”
There will be some small percentage of businesses that will still shift. But I think that the workplace market, is getting steadier and steadier as each month rolls by. So, whatever is the arrangement that you sign up for when you apply to a company right now, you are very, probably staying that way. So apply to a company that has an arrangement that suits you.
I think that’s it. I think we’re done for today. I wish you all a lovely weekend and we’ll see each other again on Monday on the next Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis. If you’d like some reading goodness for your weekend about the latest remote work news, and how to get better with remote work, please visit think ThinkRemote.com. See you.
