I promised a whole post on why I’m bearish on remote work for the foreseeable future and here it is. Until very recently, I was very much bullish on remote work for knowledge workers. The remote working journey for me started way back in 2014. I had been working with the crew at Kogan.com in Melbourne for close to 3 years at that point, first via the CommonCode agency and then directly. I was confident that they were getting a good deal of value from my work and I was contemplating moving back to my hometown in India before settling down. It didn’t take a lot of convincing to strike an agreement with my manager to allow me to work remotely from India – however, I was the only person in the whole organization who would not be working from the offices, not to mention working from a different country and timezone.

It wasn’t easy. Because of the timezone difference, I was usually up at 4:30 am IST to work, which was torturous for someone who is a natural night owl. I did that for 3 years. It was a grind, but I was grateful for the arrangement and I didn’t want to let my team down. This also meant I had to adhere to Australian workplace professionalism while working from India – no taking half days off for funerals or weddings or whatever. Even though I was working as a contractor, I would clearly communicate any absence well in advance and plan my work accordingly. However, it was a lonely experience being the only remote worker on the team – decisions were sometimes being made without my involvement and towards the end, I was working mostly as a mercenary who was familiar with the domain and the codebase, ready to jump into a specific task with minimal notice, but rarely involved in any major undertakings. Unfortunately, this arrangement has a glass ceiling when it comes to personal growth.

In my next role, I chose a completely global remote organization. This time around, I got to see various levels of engagement & productivity for full time remote workers throughout the organization for close to 6 years. This ranged from people who had created dedicated spaces to work, had very little boundary between work and life, and gave more than 100% to their job. On the other end of the spectrum, this also included people whose productivity was non-existent and whose only goal was to coast along with minimal effort to collect their paycheck.

It’s during and after the CoViD lockdowns that I started spotting more workers who fell into the latter category. People who took meetings while partying, some who abused employer good-will by working as less as possible. I started to get more vocal taunts from folks on why I can’t just bring my laptop and work from the road for the duration of the trip when there were others who were perfectly capable in doing so. It’s then that I realized that the average remote worker has changed from a grateful individual who wants to make up for their lack of presence in the office, to a spoilt individual that wants to abuse a privilege for personal gain. In my subjective experience, out of 10 remote workers, 1-2 would be highly productive, 2 would be average and 6-7 would be below the baseline.

I do not see this trend reversing any time soon. I am able to spot the backlash though: companies are rightfully demanding workers be back in the office where the quiet quitters can be more easily spotted. The competition for fully remote work is more intense than ever before. I still don’t have a heuristic for spotting a remote worker that might fall in the former, highly productive category. A history of high performance in a remote setting is certainly helpful, but nothing beats spending time with an individual on a high intensity project in person (it can be as quick as a week). If I were starting a company today, I would not allow remote work, unless I’ve worked with a candidate in the past and know they would not abuse the privilege.