Cancel remote work at your peril

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

This is the headline making some news today

The story here is the same the world over. Many leaders think being in-office is better than working remotely.

Here was the sentiment of this particular CEO:

“Remote workers can’t participate in office life and associated activities like helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. As as result, their companies could be justified if they change their status to ‘contractor.'”

Of course that is absolute nonsense as there are extremely successful companies that have been working office-less for decades prior to the pandemic, all with great vibrant cultures.

The global work from home experiment has proven that this way of working is indeed possible. Those leadership teams that do the work to evolve their traditional in-office businesses into work-from-anywhere location independent businesses are going to be the BIG winners here.

Your employees may not go on strike like this team did, but you better be aware of the data that indicates they will likely vote with their feet:

1 in 3 workers would find a new job, or retire completely, if remote work was not an option.

52% of remote workers say they would leave their co-located company for a remote position.

GitLab 2021 Remote Work Report