Remote Work: How It Started / How It’s Going

Once upon a time, remote work was rare. But now, it’s the norm. Let’s look at how we got here!

Just 3 years ago, if you told someone you worked remotely they’d have a bunch of questions for you. “How does it work?”, “don’t you miss being in an office with people?”, “how did you get that job?”. But since COVID hit, remote work has become so much the norm that “remote work is the new norm” has become an increasingly familiar headline at this point.

However, remote work has been around for much longer than you think. It all started back in 1970 with the “Clean Air Movement” which examined ways to reduce commute pollution, and in 1973 a NASA physicist called Jack Nilles published The Telecommunications-Transportation Trade-Off which earned him recognition as the father of remote work. Yep, that’s right, we’re talking back as far as the early 70s before the first PC was even put on the market or the internet was even a thing! Two years later in 1975, the personal computer did come on the scene and in 1979 IBM started allowing its employees to work remotely; with 5 at first and a total of 2000 remote employees by 1983. In the same year, the internet came into being and by 1987 there were1.5 million Americans working remotely.

After the invention of Wifi in 1991, funding was allowed for “flexiplace” office equipment for employees who worked from home and 1995 saw the first emergence of co-working spaces in Berlin called “Hackerspaces”. The next phase in co-working involved the setup of the co-working space as we know it now, and this was set up in San Francisco a few years later by a guy called Brad Neuburg. The Dot Appropriations Act was then established in 2000, which legitimized remote work and meant that all companies had to have telecommunications policies in place. As a result, all federal employees had the ability to work from home by 2004 as long as it didn’t impact their performance and productivity.

By 2010, over 59% of remote workers were employees rather than freelancers (which was initially more common). At this point, a loss in productivity in remote work was no longer a concern and studies were even proving remote workers to be more productive. A survey by Microsoft that same year, covered 36000 employees in 36 cities in the US who reported that they were more productive and efficient in a remote work capacity.

Which Brings Us To Now

According to a study by Getapp, the number of remote workers has increased by 400% in the past decade. The future of remote work has definitely had a push and many people who have had a chance to try it out want to stick with it for good. Which is likely why companies such as Twitter are offering employees the opportunity to continue working remotely long-term if they wish after the pandemic restrictions have eased. A recent Gartner survey revealed that over 74% of businesses plan to continue with permanent remote work positions after COVID-19 and Facebook is another one of them with expectations that over half of its workforce will be remote by 2025. Popular Q&A site Quora has also been quoted as saying that “all existing employees can immediately relocate to anywhere we can legally employ them”.

The good news for newbies who have been thrown into the remote work world is that those of us who have been doing it for years already have all of the systems and processes in place to make the transition seamless. The past 10 years have seen a significant rise in the development and use of online communication and collaboration tools such Buckets and Slack that ensure employees can be just as productive from their home office as anywhere else. In addition, Wifi companies are now constantly improving their offerings with increasing speeds and accessibility to stay competitive and meet the needs of the remote work market.

Using Buckets to manage work projects makes it easy for employees to work autonomously whilst also giving employers a way to instantly get up to date on their progress with a few clicks. Rather than sitting in a boardroom for hours discussing the setup of a project, employees can collaborate in real-time by creating the Project in Buckets and adding their own Notes, Comments, Checklists, and Deadlines to manage it from start to finish. Priority items can be highlighted or grouped using colored Labels and a Kanban workflow can be established to create a pathway from A to B that’s easy to follow for everyone.

Other communication apps such as Slack (which has been around since 2013 but really started taking off in 2016) make it easy to chat with colleagues and recreate that “office banter” and also discuss any work-related concerns. These apps work really well in tandem with task management apps such as Buckets to ensure no communication avenue is missing from alternative in-office setup. In fact, employers and employees have been using Buckets to manage Projects and tasks in-office for years to optimize productivity before remote work became “the norm”.

The New Norm

Regardless of how overused the phrase has become, remote work is indeed the new norm and it’s going to change our society for the better in so many ways. Less commutes mean less gas emission and a healthier environment, less time traveling to work and/or a more flexible work schedule leads to a better work/life balance (when managed properly), employers will make huge savings on office space, jobs will become more readily available to those living in more rural areas (and in addition, the talent pool for companies will dramatically expand), and productivity has been proven to increase in spite of initial concerns. Although it got an extra push for all of the wrong reasons, remote work is gaining popularity for all of the right reasons, and it’s here to stay.

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