Why working remote became a part of my life I don’t want to miss anymore
I went to a job interview and accidentally found out how
important being able to work remote is for me
In the past year I have worked from cafés, train stations and trains, airports and planes, a bench in the park, a rooftop bar, my parents house, in pretty much every room in our flat and last but not least the office. Don’t get me wrong, I like working in the office. The company I work for found a lot of nice and intelligent people I can chat with over lunch, laugh over silly jokes with, play foosball with and of course have a lot of fun working with.
The company I work for always allowed people to work from home, but it was more the exception than the rule when somebody actually did. This changed over the past two years. Today, I work at least 2 days a week from home, or let’s better say not from the office, mainly because I want to skip the 2 hours of commute every day and spend the time with something else. A lot of others also work from home, some only one day in the week, some the whole week and everything in between, for a widespread range of reasons.
Until a few weeks ago, if you had ask me if I could go back to only working from the office, I probably would have said “Yes, why not?”. But as you know, you only see the real value of something if someone wants to take it away from you. So, between then and today my answer changed to a definite “No. Are you kidding?”.
The mind-changer on this for me was a job interview which went pretty good until the point, when I asked about how flexible they were about working hours and if I could work from home if I wanted to. The answers were “9 to 5, but most people stay longer” and “No, we’d prefer people come to the office every day”. At that point, at least in my mind, the interview was over and I was more eager to leave the building than to continue the, up until then, pleasant conversation I had with the interviewers and my potential future coworkers.
Until that point I did not know how important working remotely had become to me. And not only because I can work in bed with my pyjamas on all day, which you shouldn’t. For me it’s mainly about being trusted by the people that hired me to do my work without actually seeing me do it and being judged by the outcome of my work rather than by the image of me sitting in a specific location Monday till Friday from 9am - 5pm.
Of course, there are reasons for not working remotely, but let me save my opinions on those for later posts. In the meantime, I’d ask you to share this story, but also your experiences as employee or employer with remote work and if you had a similar experience as I did.
