The comfort of working from home, that is not the first thing I noticed about this remote job. But it was the silence that comes with it. There is nothing like waking up so early and rushing to get transport as not to be late. No office physical office environment building, no coworkers asking different questions and may be causing distractions.
I have experienced this because I have worked from the comfort of my home through my laptop enough to understand the attention. When we have the opportunity to do a work directly from our personal laptop, then spending extra money and time to sit somewhere in an office building and working from the same screen can just feel unnecessary.
When working for some of all these big firms and companies, I feel the attraction is something we can see, from the maintenance bills to the less office space, small daily expenses, low monthly electricity charges, and easy access to those who are staying very far from the office. And for those who are working for those types of companies, they go to work less, no stress of transport and they can easily control what they do over time. But when it comes to an office, there are more things attached than just the work desk they provide.
In each work environment, there is always human contact, knowingly or accidentally. A lot of discussion goes on and a new employee overhears how a senior employee handles the work load, difficult colleagues and other things. Some will casually or subconsciously learn new things that would help them just because they mix or sit with the right work partner.
Through a ordinary interaction and conversation, a newly employed person gets to know and learn the culture of the firm, and that will be something there can never learn on the internet or video calls. Unlike remote work where there's always frequent zoom or Google meetings which has the lack of giving ever small interactions between meetings. I know some will say they don't need the physical interaction, well, that is okay by them.
The important question we should be asking is that, outside the corporate screen, what goes on. I always think about those with physical work and their works cannot be moved into screens. People will the plumbers still have to physically be present in a building to fix the pipes and other things. The doctors still needs to be present in the hospital to attend to their patients. Talk of the cleaners, caterers, construction workers, electricians, market traders, nurses, farmers, carpenters, all these people still needs to be physically present at their work place because they can fix and give the solution using video calls. And when a lot of people opt in for the remote job, some of these jobs may even become more central. A world where a lot of people now works from their bedrooms still need people who will repair and fix their laptops, electricity, a pipe leaking in their apartment.
And that part, I find it so interesting. Remote work can possibly bring a difference to the corporate world, but what it can never do is to remove this dependency that we still have on the physical world. As an architect, my work feels virtually on the screen, but when I go to the site, the it gets stubbornly physical.
And just somewhere between the physical and virtual work, I see things differently in a way that not all the jobs that we attach values to needs a desk, and not all the necessary job can afford the luxury that comes with working from home.
Thank you for reading.
Images created by Gemini AI
