Recode's How remote work is quietly remaking our lives provides a deep dive on the growing impacts of the shift towards working remotely. Key quote:
"The changes remote work has introduced have happened so gradually you may not have noticed. But its growing popularity is remaking how we work, the tools we use to work, how we communicate at work, and even the hours we work ... What was once a rarity among a select set of workers is quickly becoming a defining feature of the future of work."
The pros and cons of remote work are well known, but the article chart below nicely summarizes them. The underlying data comes from a remote worker study done by the social media marketing firm Buffer.
The big pro is, of course, flexibility.
We cover the importance of flexibility a lot (if you do a Google search on "flexibility "Small Business Labs"" you will find 3400 citations).
But it still needs reinforcing - it's a key driver of both the shift to remote work and the rise of independent work.
We also certainly agree remote and distributed work is a defining feature of the future of work.
And to better understand this trend, we closely follow two remote work edge groups - digital nomads and fully remote organizations.
Digital nomads can be thought of as remote workers on steroids. Because they're both remote and nomadic, they tend to have advanced methods for work remotely - including how they use technology.
Fully remote organizations are also on the leading edge of remote work because, well, all of their employees are remote.
While reading the Recode article we were struck that remote work is a great example of Amara's Law, which is:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Back during the first Internet boom in the 1990s one of the most common forecasts was that very soon everyone would work remotely. This, obviously, didn't happen.
But 2 decades later, it's starting to happen.
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