What You Might Not Know About Remote Work
As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the globe, offices began to shut down and more people entered the remote workforce. Careers were divided into two groups: the ones that could be done remotely, and those that could not be done remotely. Researchers have estimated that the pandemic accelerated the speed of remote work adoption by up to 10 years.
Many companies, particularly in the tech industry, have since stated that they plan to allow many of their employees to work from home or work remotely on a permanent basis, continuing the remote work trend even after their employees have been vaccinated and it’s safe to return to the office.
Remote Work Before The Pandemic
Before the pandemic, remote work was more of a rare occurance. Only some very forward thinking companies were ditching offices and allowing their employees to work remotely. They were almost exclusively in the tech industry. Pretty much all of the largest corporations were still working out of offices.
Remote Work Job Boards
There were a few job boards that exclusively advertised remote positions, such as flexjobs, and many of them required users to pay a subscription fee. Also, some sites offered some remote jobs, but mostly jobs that were location-dependent. To find the remote positions on these sites you had to filter the entire list of jobs. This meant that remote jobs were more difficult to find. Also, there were a few careers that offered the majority of remote work opportunities. If you didn’t work in one of those few careers, it was unlikely that you were going to have the opportunity to work remotely.
Remote Work Goes Mainstream
Now with some of the largest companies in the world indicating that they will allow most of their employees to work remotely on a permanent basis, all of the sudden there are many more remote work options. Working remotely is going more mainstream.
However, through the quick adoption of remote work policies due to unforeseen circumstances brought on by the pandemic, many people have accepted remote work policies and maybe even hope to work remotely well into the future, without necessarily understanding that there are different types of remote work with different levels of location independence.
Work From Home Vs Remote Work
First of all, there is a difference between working from home and working remotely. These terms seem to be being used completely interchangeably, when in fact, they have a slightly different meaning.
Working From Home
Working from home is exactly what it sounds like. If you are working from home, you are working in your own house, apartment, or wherever you live. If a company has a work from home policy, this allows employees to work from their home, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can work from somewhere else besides the company office (if there is one) or your home.
Working Remotely
Working remotely means you could be working from your home, but you could also be working from a cafe, a library, a WeWork, etc. Work from home means just from home, but remote work could be done from other places too. However, what is often overlooked is the fact that there are different degrees of remote work. Remote work opportunities are not all the same, and the different degrees of remote work are set apart from one another based on their level of location independence.
The Different Degrees Of Remote Work
If you look at a job application for a remote job, often times the application will just say remote, but the degree of remote work will not be specified.
Remote Within A Specific City
The first degree of remote work is remote jobs where the employee can work remotely within a specific city. In this case, the company usually has an office in that city so they don’t want their employee to be too far away in case they need to call them into the office, but they also recognize that the employees job doesn’t necessarily need to be done from the office, at least not every day.
Remote Within A Specific Country Or Region
The next degree of remote work is a remote job where the employee can work from anywhere within a specific country or region. There are a lot of jobs that are remote within the United States, remote within Britain, remote within North America, or remote within Europe.
Remote Within A Specific Time Zone
Another degree of remote work is the category of remote jobs that require you to work within a specific time zone. Theoretically, in this type of role if you liked to work at nights, you could work from a country in a completely different time zone as long as your working hours were in the specified time zone. For example, if the job specifies that you are supposed to work in the pacific time zone, but you like working at night, you may be able to live in Europe and work all night there, which would be regular 9am to 5pm in the pacific time zone. However, some of these time zone specific roles are more specific, indicating that they want you to work from a city that abides by that specific time zone, in which case they may not want you to live elsewhere, even if you can assure them that you will work at the specified time.
Remote From Anywhere In The World
Finally, there is the remote job category where the employee can work from anywhere in the world as long as they have an internet connection. This is a remote role with no fine print. Want to work from the beach? If you can find reliable internet from where you are, no problem! Plan on working in Tokyo this week, and Paris the next!? That might even be a possibility depending on your employer.
When most people think of a remote job, they envision one in this category, where they would have complete freedom to live anywhere in the world that they choose.
That’s why many job candidates may end up surprised when they apply to a job that is listed as remote but find out during the interview process that it has location restrictions. I see social media posts about this sometimes. In this way, job applicants are often in a position where they don’t know if they will have location restrictions or not. Where people are required to live can have a big impact on whether they would actually be able to accept the job or not.
Remote Work In The Future
As more companies have adopted remote work and some plan to continue the remote work trend after covid-19 lockdowns end, let’s hope that job descriptions continue to adapt and become even more descriptive. We could all use as much information as possible when considering the future.
