Without the pandemic, many office workers would still be in the office. Now, most of them work from home. But what will happen later on, after all this? This article discusses five levels of remote work.
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working in the office was 'the norm'?
We come from a world where it was quite normal to go to the office and work there for 8 hours in a row at a desk or in a meeting room. Most of us work from home now because we are forced to due to measures imposed on us by the government.
what do we want after all this?
Many of us have gotten a taste of working at home. Mandatory working from home is not ideal, especially if you have children who cannot attend school. But sitting in the office all day, every day is certainly not what many employees want. Probably we will transfer to some intermediate form, where you sometimes meet with your colleagues and sometimes work from home when it suits you.
There are many different forms of how you can do this. And it is essential to start thinking about this now. Later on, when the measures are being lifted, we need to know how we want to and can work at that time.
Best Practice: WordPress has never had an office!
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, WooCommerce and Tumblr, had more than 1170 employees in 75 countries before the first lockdowns in March 2020. And they had no offices. How did they do that? In a podcast, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg talks about what he calls the '5 levels of remote work'. We have summarised those below:
the five levels of remote work
level 1: the traditional office
An organisation/company has an office (or multiple offices) where each employee has their own desk. Ever since the industrial revolution, business hours have been from 9 to 5. Nothing is done, consciously, to support remote work.
If employees need to be home for a day, they can get some work done using their smartphone, email, and dial-up for a meeting. But working from home for a more extended period is more problematic, and almost everything is postponed until everyone is back in the office.
This is the level at the vast majority of the (office) organisations before the Covid-19 outbreak.
level 2: digitally rebuild the office
Employees use digital tools for video conferencing, instant messaging, and email. They try to replicate the way they work in the office using these digital tools. For instance:
- organising a 10-person Zoom meeting where two people would suffice
- having your work interrupted many times a day, not by colleagues coming to you with their questions, but by messages and phone calls
- opening your mailbox and responding to dozens of emails
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