Why the 'Great Remote Work Experiment' may have been flawed

For reference, this is how my workplace at the time handled remote through the years:

2015-2019: "If you take a day to work from home, that's fine. Just don't make it a weekly thing. We don't allow remote work as a general rule. Working together in the office is a key part of our culture."

Jan 2020: "We've heard your concerns about coming to the office, but we assure you that we follow the government guidelines, installed sanitizer stations everywhere etc. Working together in the office is a key part of our culture."

Feb 2020: "OK so the government now officially recommends that all employees work from home where possible - we will look into that, but for now, let's all still go to the office. Working together in the office is a key part of our culture."

March 2020: "OK so now the government has made it illegal for us to ask you to come into the office. We are grateful to have this opportunity to embrace remote work! As we've always said, we are glad that we are now fully ready to allow remote work for the future!"

It was certainly a test under non-normal circumstances. People didn't know how long it would last, and may not have the option of going in to the office at all.

For example, a lot of people have put off moving out of expensive, bad accomodation near the office because they didn't know if it would last; working from home in an overpriced flat, where a significant other and handful of children are also all trying to work from home and nobody can go out, is a very different game to working from home in a nicer, bigger, cheaper house with a lot more room in a nicer area where people can go out and where people can go to the office as needed (which, I have to say, for me is basically never - I have sat at my office desk once since March 2020, and that was to empty the drawers and clear it, since I'm never sitting there again; I do have a strong bias in favour of WFH).

I now have someone on my team moving a couple of hours out of London, to live by the seaside in a house rather than in central London in a little flat, and one chap has moved all the way back to Yorkshire, where he is now near family and friends, back where he grew up. For them, now that they have the assurance from our big boss that this is a permanent option (with new contracts, no less, stating that the employee's place of work is their own home or other such suitable location) WFH has suddenly transformed in an enormous way that it hadn't really permanently done so during the immediate Covid response.

It was not flawed, it was new, it required to adapt, to do things differently and most people did it great. This is the future and being stuck in traffic I hope will be a thing of the past.

Working remotely has been the highlight of the pandemic - it was the perk I never knew I wanted until I had it. I’m hoping it doesn’t get pulled back now that the “great experiment” has proven that it works. The main thing irking me now is the few companies trying to tie wages to location as if my skill set is somehow less valuable because I live on the north side of the street rather then the south. Unfortunately they are major employers - supposedly progressive companies like Google and Facebook - so there is a real danger that could catch on if they are successful. Obscuring your location from your employer could be a thing. Slack tattletales your timezone, so you would need to make sure your computer’s clock is set to the right timezone. You might need a vpn running so things like smtp doesn’t record ip addresses that will betray your physical location, etc.