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Why the coronavirus could kill remote working
The novel coronavirus has catapulted tens of thousands of people around the world into the future of working from home. From high-tech giants like Google and Microsoft to your local bookkeepers many have been advised to work from home. Now office drudges get to experience the productivity, the flexibility, and the healthy living us teleworkers have long enjoyed. What a silver lining for remote working proponents. Or is it?
Being told with little notice to work from home for a few weeks is not remote working. At best remote working will see a surge of consultants, advice articles, evergreen jokes, and tooling and services sign ups. A more likely outcome is companies will see productivity plummet and have a remote working hangover for months to come. At worst remote working will be labelled a complete failure by many and set back years. They “told us so” because look nobody got anything done “working from home” in those two weeks in 2020. Sales didn’t close, code didn’t ship, people didn’t even put their pants on.
Issues of working from home unprepared range from the obvious through the mundane to the unforeseen and serious. Does your company even have Zoom or Hangouts? Do you have a quiet workspace at home? Do you even have a laptop to use from home? What happens when your kids get home from school? What is your commute like if you are…
