Have you ever been on a train first thing in the morning on the way to work? Squashed in like sardines, everyone is too tired, too grumpy and too hot to do more than strap-hang on the commute to the office. You spend your morning getting ready and by the time you get to your station and get to the office, you’re a rumpled, wrinkled, sweaty mess. Sounds delightful – not.
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A big part of choosing to be flexible with how you work comes from hating the morning commute. Setting yourself up for the day is important and you can’t do that on a packed mode of public transport. Remote working is largely down to a huge shift in the culture of the workplace and the blessed development of digital technology. It’s so much easier to get online from the comfort of your home office and click onto a morning debrief from the boss about content curation in your own time, than it is to battle the crowds to the office. Management teams across companies that hire in remote workers are using technology to start the day and get everyone revved up, and the fact that people can tune in to a meeting from their own home means that the element of stress is taken out of the equation.
The biggest challenge about remote working is the distractions. It’s very easy to be distracted by your home life and it’s this reason that there are still companies not quite ready to get on board with flexible working. The thing is, the whole point of remote working is that you can balance your home life with your work deadlines. People are far more productive when they can get their work done but still spend time heading to appointments or seeing family. Flexible working means relying on yourself for motivation, but avoiding the commute, being in the comfort of an office that you decorate yourself and being able to take your workload at your own pace is a great way to stay motivated!
Getting a team together in meetings doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t matter how far away all your company members are, technology has made it possible for us to communicate at a level never seen before. We are constantly evolving with technology and so having regular communications with the people who work remotely becomes far easier than it used to be. It’s important to understand that every person who works within a company works in different ways. No two people have the same personality or work style, and remote working allows people to work in a way that they can flourish. They get a lot more say over their daily structure and as long as meetings are attended on time, the work is completed on time and you’re happy with the way the work is done, there’s never a need to turn down a remote working request. The reality of remote working is happier employees with less overheads for the management team: win-win, we think!