Remote Work Isn’t New

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Updated March 23, 2023

You’re reading an excerpt of The Holloway Guide to Remote Work, a book by Katie Wilde, Juan Pablo Buriticá, and over 50 other contributors. It is the most comprehensive resource on building, managing, and adapting to working with distributed teams. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, 800 links and references, a library of tools for remote-friendly work, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Remote work is just work.Hiten Shah, co-founder and CEO, FYI*

Depending on whom you ask, remote or distributed work is The Future of Work—the biggest shift in the workplace since the industrial revolution; a trend that’s not going to last; or a phenomenon that’s been growing for decades. We embrace the latter view, noting that remote work as we know it now began back in the U.S. in the 1970s (when it was initially referred to as “telecommuting”), and has been on the rise in terms of popularity and reach slowly ever since.*

In 1973, NASA engineer Jack Nilles wrote The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff,* in which he posited that telecommuting was a way to reduce gridlock, sprawl, and reliance on fossil fuels (this was the era of OPEC oil embargoes). He saw a not-so-distant future in which “either the jobs of the employees must be redesigned so that they can still be self-contained at each individual location, or a sufficiently sophisticated telecommunications and information storage system must be developed to allow the information transfer to occur as effectively as if the employees were centrally collocated.”*

A big part of the rise of remote work is tied to technological advancements over the past decade or so. When Hiten Shah notes that remote work is “just work,” he also adds that it’s because “software is everywhere.” But while technology has greatly aided the expansion of remote work, it’s not why remote work will succeed (or fail) at any given organization. Nilles saw this truth early as well: “organizational—and management—cultural changes [are] far more important in the rate of acceptance of telecommuting.”

Remote Work Isn’t Feasible For Everyone

importantNot every job can be done remotely. Outside of physical jobs like healthcare work, construction, and service industries, every company may have a range of what’s feasible and some specific constraints. A hardware startup might have a mix of roles that can be done remotely, but the core product has to be built and tested in a physical space. Some industries (financial services, healthcare tech) have such significant security and compliance constraints that a remote workforce might be too much effort or risk to maintain.

Laurel Farrer, CEO of Distribute Consulting, assesses whether a job can be done remotely based on the following set of criteria:*

  1. The person uses a computer as their primary tool for at least 80% of the time.
  2. You’re reading a preview of an online book. Buy it now for lifetime access to expert knowledge, including future updates.
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