Remote working and working remotely

I have been reading a few articles and annoucements this week as companies publish their plans on how teams will work in the future, whether that is remote working, changes to office layouts, or a mixture of the two.

Changes to the way offices are designed and function

Twitter allows staff to work from home forever:

Facebook is also looking for remote working employees, and for those who are working away from the Bay area to be paid based on their physical location.

For a long time various areas of the UK, such as the Welsh Government, have been campaigning for jobs to move out of London to areas with cheaper costs of living, business costs, salaries.

Now that remote working is being shown to be viable, albeit with challenges and adjustments needed, it should add creditibility to those campaigns to reduce the focus on London.

For companies, and people, that need some closer interaction smaller, localised hub offices can provide the office space and interaction, with less need for transort and public transport. That provides a great opportunity for regional hubs.

More space in cities with lower populations. You only have to look at the skyline and building heights in London and Cardiff to see the difference. There are old industrial spaces that can be re-purposed into new workplaces designed to be compatible with the new ways of working.

Lower costs to running a business will help business to survive an economic downturn.

Not everyone can adjust to working remotely. Some people prefer more personal interaction, have more reliance on body language hints than are obvious on video conferencing, work better with visual tools such as whiteboard sessions. All these points still need to be addressed.

There are lots of things that can change, we need to take the opportunity to review what worked well and what will work well in the future.

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