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I've worked remotely now for just shy of 10 years in a row and more like 15 years total out of a 25 year IT career. I have found the biggest hurdles to remote
by gregd 6y ago
I've worked remotely now for just shy of 10 years in a row and more like 15 years total out of a 25 year IT career.
I have found the biggest hurdles to remote work usually boil down to one thing, your clients or employer and fellow employees, who still "go into" an office, need to buy into the remote worker situation. This usually entails wrapping their heads around fewer meetings (even adhoc ones) and utilizing online tools exclusively...namely Slack, Teams, Skype, etc.
What has helped tremendously is that since most companies adopted a sudden and an across the board "work from home" policy, it's forced collaboration via different avenues. Those of us who already worked from home, now are included in meetings and discussions that we would normally be left out of because our face wasn't physically in an office.
I'm hopeful that we'll see a broader adoption rate even for those that still like the physical office, will be able to work from home on an as wanted basis..sick kid....sick spouse...deliveries expected...plumbing needs fixed..etc.
- Angostura 6y agoI've found that the biggest problem was missing those things that got discussed informally around the office. There would be interesting problems you could solve, but you rarely heard about them.
- Twirrim 6y agoI've become quite adept over the years at building up contacts across different parts of the business org, just through quick "water cooler" chats with people I meet while I'm making a cuppa. I'll even go to a different floor from time to time just to expose me to more people. The convenience factor of "Hi, how are you doing?" turning in to a little bit more of a conversation, in a circumstance when I know I'm not disturbing them in the middle of something. I don't get that with Slack etc. I'm really enjoying a bunch of the aspects of working from home, and picking up a strong preference for it, but I can't help but wonder about the impact less casual contact with other teams is having on overall performance. There's a lot you can get solved, much faster, by having friendly contacts all over the place (which of course, you have to be careful not to abuse or they'll stop being friendly contacts). That applies both to problems I'm dealing with, and problems they're dealing with that we'd never know about under other circumstances.
- rossdavidh 6y agoAll excellent points, and all things which I would expect to become gradually bigger problems over time, as the "water cooler" info you compiled, becomes less and less current.