Challenges and opportunities of remote work

Events of 2020 have changed the way many people work, and yet for some of us, particularly freelancers and students, the idea of working remotely is nothing new. In this article, we’ll be discussing some of the advantages and drawbacks of making your home your office (or your study space).

First of all, let’s look at opportunities.  

Being able to apply for work in a wider range of places

This is particularly true for freelancers and translators, especially if your clients are based in the country of your source language rather than your target language. Although by the same logic you're competing with a greater pool of people, you still have more flexibility. Interpreting, as opposed to translating, used to be more location-bound, but the rise of RSI and other forms of remote interpreting since the pandemic means that interpreters are better able to benefit from this freedom too.

International colleagues 

Even if you do an employed (but desk-based) role, the fact that more and more companies are outsourcing means that it's possible to work with a team of people from all over the world. And although accommodating multiple time zones can be challenging, there's something enriching about working with people with different accents, holidays, and even just background noises on Teams calls. Remote work can facilitate connections with people you'd be unlikely to encounter locally, and having access to this different set of insights can be not only professionally but also personally enriching.

More time with cohabitants/pets

Although this can be something of a double-edged sword, as we’ll get into below, if you are a cat or dog owner or otherwise responsible for human or animal family members, being able to work from home can be a godsend, not only because of being able to spend working hours at home, but also because of cancelling out the time that is needed to commute. By the same logic, if you have to attend or take somebody to a medical or other appointment that takes place during the day, it should be theoretically easier to arrange this than if you were spending your whole day at the workplace, and the same goes for keeping on top of basic home-making tasks.

A clean home and the ability to receive parcels

If you’ve worked long hours and struggled to keep on top of basic routine tasks like food shopping, meal preparation and laundry, it’s good to be able to schedule these for quieter times of the day when you’d normally be taking a break anyway. By the same logic, if you need to receive maintenance people or take receipt of parcels or anything else being delivered to your house, remote work can help you with this. Indeed, you can even look after parcels for your neighbours if they work outside of their home.

Get away from colleagues that you don’t like

One of the most talked-about benefits of remote working has been the prospect of avoiding challenging social interactions, from unwanted small talk with colleagues at the relatively benign end of the scale to persistent workplace bullying at the severe end. And if you’re the kind of person who does their best work on their own then remote work can provide you with an opportunity to complete all of your tasks in a quieter and more focused environment.

Now, having described some of the pleasures of remote work and study, let’s move on to the challenges.

Social isolation

One of the key problems of working remotely is the lack of context with other people, which in today’s digital age is often compounded by the rabbit hole that is the internet. If you work from home - and particularly if you do so and live on your own - you've almost certainly spent "break times" on your smartphone, which can often actually heighten our anxiety, whether that’s through being constantly exposed to carefully targeted news feeds, or accidentally encountering social media pile-ons.

Difficulty in taking breaks or switching off 

It’s a lot harder to take time out when you don’t have any of the natural distractions that come with working around other people. And while some people love this heightened sense of focus, for others it’s hard to take time out or wind down when there’s nobody around to chat to, and no opportunities for people-watching. There’s also no easy way of naturally winding down after you finish for the day, and if left unchecked, this can easily morph into ‘mission creep’ and further distort the boundaries between work and personal life.

Struggling to balance work and family/social life 

If you worked in a traditional office or other on-site environment, it's unlikely that family members or housemates would wander into your workplace to talk to you. But that tends to happen a lot when your place of work or study is your home. Sometimes endearingly and sometimes frustratingly, a lot of family members tend to think that if your work is remote then none of it is urgent, and that they’re therefore entitled to determine when you “need” to take a break to talk to them. If you work freelance and a lot of your deadlines have clustered together, forcing you to work unusually hard for a short period of time, you may well also be lectured by a non-freelance friend or family member who insists that "there's more to life than work”. 

Tunnel vision

The so-called ‘watercooler conversation’ argument has become one of the great clichés of the 2020s, yet while it has no doubt been dragged up far too many times now, many of us would agree that it’s harder to come up with great ideas when working in isolation, particularly if you work in creative industry. Remote communication platforms can help bridge this gap to a certain degree, but they’re much less spontaneous than real-life interactions, which means that our power to bounce around ideas can suffer. And if your job relies on working closely with other people, you may well have noted that the potential is much greater for people to work in silos, or for miscommunications to play out undetected for much longer than would be the case with in-person working, particularly when different time zones are involved. 

Living in an unsuitable environment for remote work 

Not everyone’s households are equally equipped for remote work. If you live alone or with close family members and you have access to a quiet environment, then remote work can be great. If you live in shared accommodation, as many students and young professionals tend to do, then your odds are a lot worse, particularly if there are several other people in your home environment that work remotely. Staying physically and psychologically healthy while dealing with cramped accommodation, ergonomically unsound furnishing and a lack of privacy can be really hard, and while flexible offices are on the rise in many parts of the world, they tend to be expensive for freelancers, meaning that the only other away-from-home options are libraries and cafés. 

What do you think about the great WFH/RTO debate? Has pandemic life altered your working environment, or did you already work or study remotely before Covid hit? Would you change the way you work (if you were able to)?

We hope this article has covered some of the more talked-about aspects of the positives and negatives of remote work, but we’d love to hear what the rest of you have to say on this still much-talked-about topic. Until the next time!