Remote is high risk, high reward. If you’ve built a great organisation filled with talented, motivated and trustworthy people who have autonomy then remote wor

Remote is high risk, high reward. If you’ve built a great organisation filled with talented, motivated and trustworthy people who have autonomy then remote work can be a fantastic boon to productivity because it’s an extension of the autonomy that helps the workers thrive… …if you’ve built an average organisation filled with people who are demotivated by bad management who have no autonomy and struggle to drag themselves through the day, then remote work will shred what little value you’ve managed to extract from a dysfunctional organisation. Remote work isn’t the problem, the problem is further upstream: if you work for a company that is restricting remote work, whether you love to work remote or in office, it’s a sign to leave. I love working in an office and do so every day, and consider in-office collaboration to be very valuable, however, autonomy is far more valuable. So, from a managers perspective: if your organisation is struggling with maintaining output while permitting remote work, you can either radically rethink your entire organisation and engage in a multi-year project to undo years of mismanagement… or you can just ban remote work. Of course, the latter is just kicking the can down the road, but kicking the can down the road is usually the only real option without buy in from the board.