| First of all, this is from my view as a freelancer that has been working remotely for about 4 years now. I realise full-time employees most likely feel differently. > Some of the managers and executives completely lost touch with the human side of the employees they no longer saw in person. As a remote worker I don't care too much about the human touch either. I have a business relationship with my client. I do believe most employers are reasonable however and if a remote worker /on average/ delivers good results, it'd be stupid for a company to refuse adapt around some incident in a remote workers' life. > It was too easy for them to fire off Slack messages that demanded last minute changes or crunch time because they didn’t have to look us in the eye to deliver the bad news. As long as the managers understand that change of plans might result in more time needed for deliverables, I think this is fine. This might be a point for the remote worker to communicate back to the manager though, just to prevent any misunderstanding to develop later on. I always try to be very clear with my clients that if plans change, my delivery schedule changes as well. > Full remote also created an environment where too many people just wanted to withdraw socially and stay hidden as much as possible. As an introvert I like to deal with other people as little as possible as well. I prefer people in a business relationship to mostly communicate work-related issues with me (not too much smalltalk). I'm fine with communicating every day on my work (sending out a Slack message, perhaps with a few screenshots or a build), but apart from that I like to keep communication limited. I am glad to say that my current and previous clients were happy with this mode of working as well. |
I’ve done a lot of remote freelancing as well. It doesn’t really compare to remote work as an employee. The dynamic is too different and the freelancing work is more isolated by design.