5 reasons why you are afraid of remote work

Introduction

Today's article will talk about 5 reasons why you are afraid of remote work, I will cover different positions in an imaginary company, the managers, and the employees. Given my experience during the COVID pandemic the reasons outlined here could be generalizations and not 100% scientific, please keep that in mind.

The 5 reasons

1. Not seeing what is being done (physically)

Since many of today's managers are aged between 35-60 they generally have less affinity to digital task tracking tools like ClickUp and are therefore relying on seeing the employees in the office and being convinced that their presence in the office automatically qualifies them as being productive.

2. Not talking/being in touch with colleagues (water cooler chats)

Many of us were and still are afraid that being remote completely annihilates intra-personal relationships with coworkers, which is true up to a certain extent. I feel like with remote work the role of a "Community Manager" becomes much more important in any company, not only big corporations. To keep everyone on the same page and entertained you (as managers or HR reps) need to schedule off work events on Zoom calls, trivia games, and many more things.

3. Collaboration/coordination with teammates

Some of my direct reports told me that initially, their concern was about how they would be able to communicate, exchange information, and work with the other members of their team. This proved to be a no factor during the pandemic up to this day, working with Slack and ClickUp has proven to be the right decision, we actually saw an increase in communication, documentation, and productivity.

4. Work-life balance disruption

Some reported concerns about how working from how would affect their relationship with it, I advised all team members to get ready as they normally would in the morning, go for a short walk before and after work in order to keep that mental separation since the physical one is nonexistent unless a separate room is used, which is not tied to relaxing or other non-business related activities.

5. Not being able to direct and manage the team properly

My biggest fear was that even with ClickUp and Slack I would lose some leverage and direct response while delegating and managing tasks. My concern was mainly due to the asynchronous nature of remote work, I am used to instant feedback from employees when talking about decisions, further actions and this had to drastically change with the introduction of work from home.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to say that remote work came with many assumptions and fears on the complete spectrum from the Board members, directors, managers, and employees. The big lesson I learned has been that even is such a tense and fast-paced change in habits we can apply the simple approach of "Learning by doing".

There have been a lot of things that we did not consider which turned out to be pretty important like how to manage federated access across platforms or how to share passwords between teammates. Other things were eye-opening, I was always used to synchronous work, if I needed something from someone it would block my work from proceeding until I would get what I needed, now things have changed, if I need something I try not to have that block my current task, I move on to the next step or next task, leaving the current one on the side.