Remote Work #Part1

When I first time heard about remote work in my workplace they told me that it's a nice idea, but it doesn't work. There was years before me joining the company one employee who had said to be working remotely, but actually was having a vacation. After manager had realised this, they fired that employee. And of course, because of this one experience, former employee, they decided to ban remote work.

After a while, people started asking about remote work again. And it was allowed again, but only once a week, if you plan it 2 weeks advance - and you should be able to do the work at home, which was not possible for everybody, because we had desktop computers and there was linsenced software that no one wanted to buy for their home pc.

Okay, so far remote work sucks. Company policy sucks. But I started to like the idea of being able to work from home, or anywhere.

Remote Work Doesn't Work

One leading idea behind this was that if you won't arrive to the office, how can anyone know if you are actually working at all. You must be at the office, so we know you work.

Actually, no one knows if you don't work at the office either. Browsing the web, chatting with people in the coffee room or chat room. You might look busy and doing something, but how could anyone know, really.

If you don't know that people are progressing in their work at the office, of course it will be frightening thought to let people work from home. First of all, it's not employees problem, and it's not about remote work. It's the company, the way of project management - or better yet, lack of it. Project management needs to be first thing to have in order before allowing remote work.

In a way, it's of course important to managers to know that progress is happening and work is getting done, but it's also important for others in the team to know that people around them are making progress, eventhough they might be working remotely.

Don't blame remote work, if you cannot trust your employees.

There is a lot to say about on this topic, but let's take a breath here and save something to the following parts too, stay tuned!