Why do employers not like remote work?



    For a long time, I sincerely did not understand why employers as a whole have a negative attitude towards remote work and free schedule. It would seem that they are no less interested in minimizing costs than workers in saving time. By a free schedule, I do not mean at all coming to work when I like, but meetings with my boss and colleagues at a predetermined time.

    So, what are the benefits for employers in remote work?


    Firstly, there is no need to pay direct costs for the workplace and indirect costs for traveling to the office, renting housing and food at unacceptable prices.
    Secondly, a person is easier to hire, and easier to part with. In the simplest case, one letter is enough.
    Thirdly, there are fewer psychological problems with “joining the team”. If you come across a brilliant, but a little rude developer, he doesn’t have to allocate a separate office and orderlies team - you can just work with him in a virtual office.
    Fourth, you can hire people around the world without inviting them, and without paying for moving to your country. If you can’t do without an invitation, at least at first you can work remotely.

    With remote work, the boundaries between working and personal time are somewhat blurred. When I worked remotely, I did not divide time into working and personal. As soon as I had an interesting thought, I went to the computer and implemented it right away. When I needed to regularly go to the office, I missed a lot of good ideas simply because they came to my mind outside of working hours, and I safely forgot about them.

    Finally, different people have peaks of performance, generally speaking, at different times. Some are able to work only in the morning, while others only by noon acquire a meaningful expression on their faces.

    Of the minuses, perhaps the possible problems of employee control can be called. But everything is easily solved with the help of time tracking systems, although I do not consider them a good solution. In the end, paying an engineer for the time spent or the number of lines of code is somewhat strange. With this approach, projects will stretch for months. It is much more correct to control not the process, but the result - let’s say, regularly demand intermediate versions from employees and pre-negotiate deadlines. Moreover, how exactly he will manage his time - to stretch work for the whole day or fit into three hours - is his personal business. Discussions can be conducted using video conferencing. If the workflow is well formalized (while good does not mean too much), it is quite enough to carry out them every few days or even less often.

    Also, the reason is called a decrease in motivation among employees in the absence of continuous supervision by their superiors. But on the other hand, do you need such an employee if he works only from under a stick?

    And the remote work is much more profitable for the employee


    First of all, the ability to manage your time in a very wide range. You do not need to ask permission every time to go to the doctor, meet your mother at the airport or pick up the children from school.

    Also, you do not need to spend time and finances on the road - in St. Petersburg it took me an entire hour, but I lived in three stations from our office. This is especially important, because if financial expenses can be compensated, then they have not yet learned how to recover. Estimate in your mind how much time you regularly spend on the road per month. I'm sure you could find him the best use. You can, in other things, rent a house near the office, but this is not always possible for a number of reasons, especially if you already have an apartment in a good area, or you generally live in a green suburb. Just imagine the whole absurdity - to pay with your money and time only for the right to be in the office!

    In fact, very few people value their time. Those few who value it face serious difficulties. My colleague, for example, to spend more time with his family, worked in a company where he paid a third less than he could earn. The main reason behind it was the free schedule.

    Finally, not all offices are comfortable for work, especially if they are located in a hastily built business center or, as is customary in Russia, in a former factory. In summer, it’s too hot, in winter it’s cold, extraneous noise and the eternally evil old guard at the entrance. He remembered you by sight several years ago, but if you forgot your pass, it is useless to beg him. Many large companies have widespread huge offices for a hundred people and without any hint of profits. What personal space are you talking about? At the beginning of the essay, the photograph shows a Facebook office resembling a hangar or assembly shop.

    For workers, I do not see any special disadvantages.

    And in fact


    Despite the obvious mutual benefit - as our overseas colleagues say: win-win - the real situation is completely different. Most employers consider remote work and a free schedule to be some kind of special favor to a valuable employee or privileges that still need to be earned. In general, according to my observations, the attitude of employers to remote work is somewhat similar to the statements of a conservative public about people with a different sexual orientation or gender identity. Expression: “I am quite normal about remote work - once our employee moved, but we continued to work with him remotely” - the phrase reminds me: “I am quite normal with gays, I evena few gay friends. ”That is, it seems to be pretty decent, but at the same time it is clearly visible that in other circumstances a person would prefer not to deal with these categories.

    Apparently, the main reasons for the biased attitude of employers to remote work are psychological reasons. And first of all - the desire to control the process of work itself and the time of the employee. Probably, many bosses are calmer to see a person writing a code hunched over a computer than to imagine him sitting on the Neva embankment surrounded by seagulls. And they can be understood - in the first case, the process of work is visible, and the bosses have the false impression that they are in control of their employee. But in reality they control only his time, and not at all the work process.

    It is very difficult to program for eight hours, albeit with a lunch break, unless, of course, you do not encode using a pre-written pseudocode. Moreover, the load is not always evenly distributed: sometimes there is little work, but you still need to come to the office. If the boss does not understand this, then the workers are forced to imitate violent activity, and they communicate on social networks, play games or go about their business. If the management of the company understands everything, it still does not get much better: they will offer you regular breaks for tea, your kitchen or compensation for food in the dining room, soft chairs with massage, a relaxation room with Playstation 3, and other fashionable things designed to defuse the work the atmosphere. In general, a lot of things, except the right to manage their time. Amazing

    Personally, I do not need dinners in the factory cafeteria, cookies, and all sorts of group games. And I think it’s much better in the green park, and not under the knock of the keys of colleagues. Of course, live communication cannot be replaced with anything, but a few meetings a week are more than enough to satisfy all the needs for it.

    And in general, when the employer does not see the process itself, its assessment is more honest. When he looks at the employee in the office, he evaluates the process in addition to the result. How often does the employee go on a smoke break, how much time he spends on conversations, whether he performs the task ahead of time or stretches for the entire period. In the first case, it can still be loaded with work. If one employee completed the work in an hour, and the remaining time played games, and the other worked diligently all day, doing the same amount of work, the first is likely to be reprimanded.

    Freelance Note


    The reader will surely say that this kind of work already exists, and it is called freelance. But freelance is very different from distant work, first of all, by its irregularity and the absence of any official design. It would seem that in freelance you can work only one hour a day and get a modest pay for it, which you can live in Southeast Asia, and spend other time on yourself, but in reality your free twenty-three hours will be spent searching for new orders. And so every day. To engage in freelancing and be confident in your tomorrow, you need to have a special mindset that not everyone has. Freelance as a way of life is good when you have regular passive income, as an addition to your main job or if you have a customer base with regular large orders for long periods.

    In conclusion, I would very much like to hear the opinions of employers and employees themselves about remote work and free schedule.

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