Remote Working: The New Norm

This pandemic is forcing remote working for a lot of companies, throwing a new set of challenges. We at Imagine are fortunate in that our materials science team based in Australia, and our Signal Processing team in Finland, we are well traversed in the tools and mentality needed for successful remote working.

 I recently listened to a the Making Sense podcast hosted by Sam Harris. He interviewed Matt Mullenweg, the developer of WordPress. The interview gives some fantastic insights into remote working, the advantageous and barriers ahead.

Remote work will become a 'distributed network' of sorts. Prior to this other companies worldwide (such as Microsoft and other SME's) had already started to promote flexible work arrangements and remote work with positive measures on output occurring. In my opinion the distributed network allows you to find efficiencies, especially through optimising in the way in which people work. For example if you are a morning / night person, require more physical activity throughout the day / pick-up drop off kids/ etc. This will ultimately allow for better synchronisation and accessing groups of people that would not normally get noticed (introvert vs extrovert / junior vs senior). The distributed network will allow companies to work 24/7 as tasks can be done at any time; overtime this should improve productivity because the work that you are doing will be more focused such that the decisions and insights that you come to should be much better. This distributed network also means that you no longer indexed based on time in the office, only on output which drives efficiency. 

The main barrier to all of this will be that there will be some / (or a lot) employers that will struggle with the fact that they cannot keep an eye on employees, so they will be much slower to adopt due to micromanagement bias and an unwillingness to change.

 Cheers everyone and stay safe during these once in a lifetime events!