Remote Work is a Trend with Staying Power: How Employees and Managers Can Succeed in this Brave New Word

Abstract

I have been working remotely—in one form or another—since 2005. My boss at the time allowed our team to work 1 day from home if we kept it hush-hush. It wasn’t until 2015 that my employer moved to a formal telecommuting policy, allowing 3 days of remote work. Suddenly, after 15 years of navigating the DC Metro traffic scene daily, I only made the trek to work 2 days a week. My quality of life improved in ways I couldn’t have imagined. The pandemic spurred an entirely new arrangement—starting in mid-March 2020, our entire company was fully remote, staying that way for the next 2 years. Things changed for me again in January 2022 when I became the managing director of Origin Editorial, a remote-only company. Finally, after more than 2 decades in the workforce, I had complete control over how and when I worked. In this article I’ll share with you the true value of remote work, how to maximize its effectiveness, and the best strategies for managing a remote team. A NASA Physicist Advocates for Telework In 1973, NASA physicist Dr. Jack Nilles coined the term “telecommuting,” which he defined as “the substitution of telecommunications and/or computers for commuting work.”1 Dr. Niles was particularly interested in how telecommuting could address several societal and business concerns such as commuter traffic, healthcare costs, and worker productivity. As a remote worker himself, he made a persuasive case for the arrangement in his 1994 book titled The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff. Despite Dr. Nilles’s […]