Remote working doesn’t work! Let’s get everyone back in the office!

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.

There are absolutely no surprises in this WSJ piece entitled Companies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t so Great After AllCompanies Start to Think Remote Work Isn’t so Great After All. To have a highly effective (and efficient) remote workplace requires a new way of working and not many are prepared to put in the effort required to learn the skills.

Successful remote work environments don’t just happen they are DESIGNED. The pandemic-enforced remote working gave very few organizations the luxury of time to do that design work.

What we are seeing in this WSJ piece are examples of leadership teams and individuals that are used to years of synchronous work struggling to replicate synchronous work online. When attempting to do this you bring all the inefficiencies of synchronous working along with you and things get difficult really quickly. (You have heard of Zoom fatigue right?)

The magic of remote work, along with its many efficiencies will ONLY be experienced once you understand how asynchronous working works and fully adopt this as your default way of working.

Until such time, teams will continue to long for the days of office-based synchronous working because let’s face it trying to work synchronously remotely is highly inefficient and highly frustrating.