Rich Bello argues that remote work is largely a continuation of long-standing practices rather than a sudden departure: many employees already worked 'remotely' within offices by spending large portions of the day on email and phone calls. He cites a recent Adobe survey reporting an average of five hours per day spent on email, gives a personal commuting/anecdotal example (about two hours daily) to illustrate wasted travel for brief in-person ritual, and contrasts feelings about employees working offsite with the more comfortable attitude toward outsourced vendors.
Questions this video answers
Five hours per day.
About two hours each day.
Chapters
The first thing to realize about remote work, emphasizing the word work, is that, weirdly, it's not that much different than what we've already been doing for the past 15 or 20 years. The bottom line is that with technology, we were already working remotely in our own offices in large part anyway, but just not recognizing it or calling it that. Because we also came into an office where there were mostly other remote workers beside us. This is the biggest bias buster of them all. How much of your day do you spend on emails? The average is five hours per day, according to a recent Adobe survey. Does it really matter where you're emailing from? Your home office or your office on Madison Avenue? Right. Some days my business partner and I would send 20 or more emails to each other, even though our offices were a few feet down the hall. We would say good morning, go to our office, email away, grab lunch together, and then retreat to our respective offices, sometimes even to eat our lunch and then say goodnight at the end of the day. I was basically commuting over two hours each day to say good morning and good night. I lived an hour away from the office. He lived right down the block, so no big deal for him. Now, I'm being a bit facetious, but I think you get the point. So if you're lucky enough to get your own office, maybe you socialize briefly for a few minutes prior to entering your office. But it's also likely that you and your colleagues worked much of the day right from your own office without much social interaction other than some meetings, many of which were likely on the phone with somebody outside the office anyway. Right? So did it really matter if your office was in your home or in the city? And if you dare to step outside your office, get ready for the distractions, right? People are just clamoring to get your attention. And what about work that we outsource to our vendors, such as our lawyers, accountants, brokers, maybe even outsourced technology department? The work they do is crucial to the functioning of our business, yet we don't seem to have the same psychological issues that we face when we think about our own trusted employees working outside of our own office.
