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There Were Reasons to Do Work From Home Before, Wonder if this Will Push it Even Further Permanently?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I know there are a lot of articles out there about working from home right now, and that makes a ton of sense given the number of companies now asking their employees to do just that during this pandemic.

I’m curious though, about remote work in general, and the push for it within many office environments.

Specifically when I see an article like this one:

5 reasons why remote work attracts & retains top talent

If you read their list, those reasons were perfectly valid last year, before any of us had even heard of Coronavirus.

Remote work offers better work-life balance, it opens up the talent pool available to you, and it is a way to get more productive. I know all of that first hand. I’ve known it for a while now.

I also know that it’s not for everyone. Some people truly don’t like it. Some have never tried it. And that, I suspect is where we are going to be a massive shift over the next few months.

There are going to be a ton of organizations trying out mass remote work for the first time, and a ton of people experiencing it for the first time. I suspect many of them will find that they like it. I suspect many of them will find that they don’t. I even suspect many of them will discover they like it, some of the time.

They will almost all, however, find that it is absolutely possible to do the work they do from anywhere.

That’s where I think the shift is coming. I run into a lot of people who hear that I work remotely and aren’t really sure how that works, or how it would be possible to do that. They are about to find out. They, employees and management, are about to experience the benefits. Yes, there are also some drawbacks, but I suspect many of them will go through the process of figuring those out and working around them in the next few weeks and see that it’s not as difficult as they imagined it would be.

So really, once everyone has had a taste of what they can do remotely, will they want to go back to a complete in-office workplace?

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