Remote working has been on the rise over the past decade, and now it’s becoming more mainstream than ever. Remote working is a working style which allows someone to work outside of their corporate office. Remote working is closely linked with freelancers, as they don’t have to come to the office for the whole week, only if they need to. There are two types of remote working which are working-from-home (WFH) and working-from-anywhere (WFA). Both WFH and WFA speak for itself from the place of work. The precedent is WFH, but since a number of research and statements by managers said that working-from-home is not increasing productivity but instead it reduces it. Employees feel too comfortable when they are in their house, thus it has shifted to WFH now.
The current trend in Indonesia, with the rise of start-ups, remote working is becoming a mainstream alternative to work without or outside of the office. Remote working doesn’t have to be in one city, it could scale up as working with someone on the other side of the world. There are cases like that where the start-up is in a different country and each country head has to set the best time for a conference call.
Although remote working seems like the future of working for everyone, not every job position and every individual is right for remote working. The ideal positions that would fit best with remote working are jobs that only involve individual work such as web or graphic designer, freelance writers, translator, and programmer. If the work requires teamwork and/or collaboration with other people, then it is believed to be inefficient to be remote working.
Before you propose for a remote working position or ask your superior for a work-from-home job, you should consider some of the benefits and things to look out for. The advantages of remote working might be tempting such as working at a more comfortable space, you can work in your pajamas, no transportation cost to the office, you can find a cheaper place to live, autonomy over your work, and you might be more productive because of those things. What you should look out for in remote working is that first you’ll be lonely, there won’t be anyone to chat with and it could be quite stressful. Beside being lonely, a research by HBR found that most remote workers tend to leave the company they work for. The stress of no one that looks after you and you don’t see your colleagues for a long time affects the commitment of work in a company.