“Remote isn’t for everyone.” is something I heard many times over the years. While I believe that’s absolutely true, I also believe that shared offices are not for everyone. Even offices with doors that close aren’t for everyone.
Open offices are considered the “one size fits all” of work environments. They’re advertised as a good default, but they only suit a portion of the population. We all pretend it’s both normal and okay to assume that everyone at a company has the same needs when it comes to their workspace and daily workflow.
Working remotely is not inherently harder than working from an office. Saying so implies that offices are “ground zero,” the absolutely neutral choice for a workspace. They aren’t. Remote work is hard, and so are offices. For some of you, offices are the easy choice. For others, remote work feels like a haven from the noise and distractions of the modern office environment. It’s not a universal feeling or choice.
Our work is challenging, and no amount of in-office collaboration will change that.
Healthy team dynamics are hard to create and maintain. They take a lot of work, they don’t just happen.
Dealing with performance issues is hard. It’s hard as a remote manager, and it’s also hard as a manager who shares an office.
Hiring is hard. It’s hard remotely, and it’s hard in person. You are making a difficult decision with limited information in a short period of time.
I don’t believe the future goal is to not have offices at all, but to have options. The key is to make it easy and normal to go remote; to have more companies who align with remote work and offer that experience; to have companies who think about whom they want to be when they grow up and have decided remote is for them. I believe the future includes hybrid setups too, even if I’m always wary of the complexity of hybrid work environments. I believe the future also includes some companies with an “office culture,” and that’s okay.
Remote work, much like offices, isn’t for everyone.
There will always be offices. Physical spaces where humans meet to collaborate are natural and needed. I just hope there are more remote-oriented companies in the future because it means more of us will get to work in spaces that make sense for us. But this will only happen if we allow ourselves to really think about what spaces make us feel productive and happy and stop worrying about how it will look for investors and customers if our employees don’t go into HQ each day. I genuinely think this re-orienting of how we view the workspace will come true.
@rowasc! 