Working remotely, a new lifestyle?

Working remotely, a new lifestyle: the pros and cons!

For every change, a post full of reflections and open-hearted considerations is urgent! And since this year of changes we are facing so many as to send even the most balanced and healthy minds haywire, we decided to dedicate an entire post to one of the issues of this time, the working remotely.

What about the life to come after the lockdown?

After two months locked in the house and a couple of weeks lived with slow and gradual access to social life, are we ready to start taking the first steps? The first steps towards a new life and new responsibilities, new anxieties, masks, new strength and courage, sanitizer gel always at hand and a river full of thoughts about what our post-COVID-19 life will be like.

Starting over is not really as simple as we imagined, isn’ t it? How the school will be for children when they would wish to relate directly to their professors instead of a chat on their professional pages? How will companies behave towards workers? Will working remotely be the future or will it be part of the past? During this period we’ve asked ourselves many questions. We’ve observed, reflected, read a great deal, listened to the anxieties of friends, family members.

We’ve been working from home…

We’ve noticed a clear division between two categories: those who have experienced smart working as a positive event, as it would have avoided long and uncomfortable trips to reach their office for an indefinite time, and those who instead have found themselves in difficulty due to a clear detachment from their social life, creating a real emotional unease due to loneliness or to the excess of family members present at home and poor concentration to do their job.

Twitter, for instance, is one of those companies that has given its employees the opportunity to choose whether to return to work in the company or work from home forever. But this freedom of choice seems almost a dream. In the meantime, Facebook and Google will leave their employees free to choose until the end of 2020, while they are studying a suitable solution to facilitate everyone. By now it is clear, agile work is the future so we tried to imagine what the pros and cons could be and share them here with you.

Pros and cons of a working remotely job

By staying at home, you can organize yourself in the best way by taking advantage of that time lost for travel and the various delays of the vehicles. That precious time! At the same time, however, physical contact, confrontation, which is very important for growth, is lost. During the video conferences, we will not be able to find that understanding look of the colleague, that visual comparison possible only in person!

By working from home, we can afford a much more comfortable look and a clamp in our hair, breakfast at a slower pace, and balanced lunch. But we will gradually lose that sense of adaptation to others that allows us to question ourselves daily. We will also lose the stimuli that arrive daily from outside and from the people we frequent. In short, once again we will have to be gifted with great mental clarity to make the right choice for us.

According to a survey on Smart Worker managers, this way of working has a very positive impact on responsibility for achieving results (indicated by 37% of the sample), on the effectiveness of coordination (33%), on sharing information (32 %), motivation and job satisfaction (32%) and the quality of the work done (31%).

Furthermore, 30% of managers also report improvements in productivity, emergency management and autonomy during the course of their work. The only aspect on which few managers (11%) declare a negative impact is the sharing of information.

The introduction of innovative forms of work can also determine benefits in terms of reducing pollutant emissions. Furthermore, among the benefits of working remotely, there is also the possibility of achieving a better work-life balance, since it is possible to organize autonomously regarding time and space for carrying out the work, with a better balance of private and working life, in fact, and a consequent decrease in work stress.

Remote and smart work can also introduce risks such as, as mentioned: a reduced ability to transfer information between the workforce, the social isolation of the worker and the difficulty of separating personal and working life.

Fear of returning to normal after quarantine

This is one of the many reasons why in this period many of us have to manage an emotionally difficult situation. This has nothing to do with the anxiety of contracting the COVID-19 but is generated by the fear of returning to normal. A fear that does not arise suddenly but after long periods of hospitalization. Like the long period that we have all spent at home, safe from everything, from COVID-19 and from the responsibilities of those roles that we have been forced to represent, even though they do not belong to us.

The truth is that this forced quarantine has in some ways lightened our lives! Returning to normal, facing daily social pressures generates an emotional burden too heavy to manage. Probably giving workers freedom of choice could make this new beginning lighter.

Working remotely would help women forced to always choose between family and work while making huge sacrifices even during the quarantine. It would give the opportunity to those who have found themselves more fragile and anxious to gradually expose themselves to new life.

This incredible experience has moved us away socially for a long time but has allowed the world to move forward. It allowed us to live far but virtually close. Most of us would like to see even more changes! We don’t want to hope anymore but we want to see still other small steps that will lead us to new realities, new jobs, new figures in working remotely.

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