Deskless and Stressless: Why working remote is our future

Many innovations up till now have been providing the means for remote workers to be successful. Materialism is getting replaced with experiences. Self-improvement requires a work-life balance. Working remote is on the rise and it’s definitely where the future of work is headed.

Working remote might be the most exciting shift that is happening in a long time, and it will change every aspect of our lives. Some of this article is based on my personal experience working remote at ServiceNow (which I will share another time), some are based on stats and studies, and some are optimistic predictions:

Workspaces: Working outside of office leads to creation of workspaces. Workspace is your home office, coffeeshop, hotels, libraries, restaurants or fully structured co-working spaces such as WeWork, KettleSpace, and so on.

Travel: Traveling in and out of office for meetings and briefs will become a thing of the past. No more red-eyes, expensive last-minute flights and hotel reservations needed for a meeting to be productive.

Housing: Smaller cities will thrive, since remote work opportunities no longer require people to live in metropolitan cities to pursue their dream, unless they still want the noise and bustle ;) This will lower rent and living expenses for people across the globe.

Presence: Contrary to the popular belief, remote workers tend to be more present via phone, email and messaging platforms as they’re where the bulk of work gets done. A quick message as opposed to setting up a face to face meeting will easily get the point across.

Stress: Emerging startups such as HeadSpacce and Calm were indicative of a serious mental decline and increasing stress level of the current work force. Long commutes, extended work hours and high cost of living have been directly linked to increased stress and anxiety.

Technology: Slack, Dropbox, Zoom have been knowingly or unknowingly laying the foundation for remote work. I used to have to fly out to the office for most of the planning and collaboration meetings with colleagues. I believe remote work culture will expand so quickly that the next set of innovations will have a hard time keeping up

Rejection: There will still be some jobs who cannot be done remotely. There will still be a mindset of output measured by presence of workers in an office. However, that will be forced to change as more companies take the remote work approach more seriously.

Diversity & Inclusion: The most inclusive teams will be remote teams as there is little emphasis on location which will include more communities and backgrounds There will be even higher competition on attracting top talent. Companies who don’t realize this change quickly will lose top people to their competitors

Result focused: Working hours will be replaced by the output and key measurements of getting the job done as opposed to coming in and looking busy.