I have been working remotely a bit more than 13 years, first as a freelancer working with other businesses, and for the last 10 years running my own business. At Melapress we are a team of eight, and we have been fully remote from day one. So you could say I am all in favour of remote working.
And yet, scrolling through LinkedIn, Reddit, and news articles, I keep running into posts about remote working that somehow frustrate me. Like almost everything else nowadays, the discussion has become black or white. Remote working is the future and offices are evil, or remote working does not work and everyone should return to the office. No grey areas, no nuance.
Having lived on the remote side of this for a decade and a half, and also worked from an office for 14 years, I think I have enough years to have an opinion on this. Here is what I’ve actually seen.
The advantages of working remotely
Some of these are obvious, but they’re still worth listing:
- No commute. That alone saves you several hours per week.
- It’s much easier to disconnect, be on your own, and focus on your work.
- As a business, you don’t have the office expense.
- Employees get more freedom. It’s easier to merge life and work without drawing a hard line between “I’m working now” and “I’m running errands now.”
- As a business, you can hire from anywhere in the world, not just your area.
Trivia: At Melapress we are a team of 8 people from 8 different countries. We would never have found these people if we were limited to one city.
The disadvantages nobody likes to admit
Remote working also has real shortcomings, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
- Communication has to be a constant effort. Distance, culture differences, and the lack of casual contact mean you have to work much harder at it. In an office, you turn your chair around and ask a colleague. Remotely, that simple exchange needs a message, a call, or a meeting.
- It can get lonely. Often.
- Time zones. If your team is spread across a big gap, organizing meetings and coordinating work becomes very hard. There’s more friction, more operations involved, and things simply move slower.
The office “culture” memes miss the point
Lately I’ve seen a few memes on LinkedIn making fun of companies that want people back in the office “to preserve the company culture.” The joke is that office culture means putting on your noise-cancelling headphones so you can finally get some work done.
Funny, but it misses the point. The office culture is not the desk. It’s the personal contact, and that is something you can never replace. During the day you get a coffee from the kitchen, you go for lunch, you bump into someone from another department. You are constantly surrounded by people, and conversations happen that would never happen otherwise.
Whether we like it or not, face-to-face, in-real-life contact cannot be replaced by anything else. There’s a reason children learn at school and not remotely: they’re there with their friends, facing the teacher, and that makes a huge difference, not just academically, but also in terms of self-development. The same applies to work. When you work on your own, without wanting to, you end up a bit siloed.
I can speak from personal experience here. I’ve worked with some Melapress colleagues for more than five years. We talk online several times a week. Yet some things only come out when, once in a while, we organize an in-person meeting and sit down for a coffee or go for a walk and chat. Those conversations simply don’t happen in an online meeting.
I miss the office sometimes, and that’s fine
Before going remote, I worked for around 14 years from offices. As much as I like my remote work, and as convenient as it is, I must admit I sometimes miss working from an office.
You see your colleagues every day, and you get to know them better. You talk about children, family, that holiday someone just came back from. You can do that remotely too, but it’s very limited because of the nature of online meetings. Nobody lingers on a call to chat about their weekend the way they do by the coffee machine.
I also miss leaving the house. Not every day, because nobody misses driving or taking the train every single morning. But sometimes it’s nice to get out, go to a different place, work from there, and come back. Yes, you can work from a cafeteria from time to time, and that’s fine, but a cafeteria is full of random people. They’re not your friends who you see every day.
In my early days I worked at a company called GFI Software. Everyone was between 20 and 30, and we were so close that even on a day off we would visit the office during lunchtime, just to spend it with our friends. There was also a spontaneity to office life that I miss: a few of us heading straight out together for a pizza and a beer after being stuck in the office late in the evening. And on the practical side, when we had technical problems, it was much easier to sit down together, troubleshoot the problem, and come up with a solution. You work much faster like that.
So yes, I like the office too. There’s no right or wrong here.
If you want people in the office, make it worth
There’s another side to this. It’s up to businesses to facilitate remote working if that’s the setup they choose. But the same applies the other way around: if a business wants its employees in an office, it has the responsibility to facilitate that too.
Not every office setup helps the culture. A large warehouse with hundreds of people in cubicles is not office culture. Of course, I’m speaking from my own experience here. I’ve mostly worked for startups with up to 50 people, so I’m not used to cubicles. We always had nice small offices, or actually houses converted into offices, and that made working from an office quite fun.
And some of that fun is exactly what office culture is. When we were still young and our managers or supervisors went abroad, leaving us on our own, of course we made some practical jokes. They were fun, and those are the things you remember years later. In a remote culture, you don’t get that.
Which setup is better?
Neither. There are pros and cons to both, and I don’t think one is better than the other. It depends on the company, the type of job, the culture, and the people.
What frustrates me is that everyone seems to be pushing remote working as the only acceptable answer. And here’s the part many don’t want to hear:
Remote working is not for everyone
Based on my experience at Melapress, and before that at Netsparker and other companies where I worked remotely, some people genuinely thrive working remotely. Many others fall behind.
They get lonely. They’re used to being around people. Some need a nudge more often than others, get distracted more easily, or simply aren’t as disciplined. There’s also a difference between working remotely to find a better balance in your life and working remotely to coast. As much as there’s an anti-business, pro-employee sentiment around this topic, the reality works both ways. Remote working gives flexibility, but there’s also abuse, and it’s much harder to get people on board and moving, especially if they lack discipline.
The same applies to managers. I know managers who have never run a remote team and will tell you openly: “I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t even want to try.” That’s fine. Different people, different skills.
Choose what works for you, and don’t diss the rest
If a business has a vacancy without remote work and you want to work remotely, don’t apply. You don’t need to diss them. The same applies the other way around.
Every business is, in a way, a reflection of its founder’s or leadership’s character and management style. Some businesses are tailored for remote work. Some are not. Some people flourish remotely. Some don’t. Should we promote remote working? Yes. But companies that want their employees in the office shouldn’t have fingers pointed at them. It’s just different.
There is no right or wrong here. No perfect answer. Not everyone can work remotely, and not every business can operate remotely. Pick the setup that works for you, and let others do the same.
That’s it, really. Rant is over.
