The countless advantages of Remote Working
The advantages of Work From Home (WFH), i.e. the Remote Working, are clear and demonstrated, both for companies and for workers, as well as for the environment and for social and technological progress.
With Remote Working, companies reduce costs and increase productivity at the same time, being able to benefit from more motivated workers, less stressed by the problems of commuting and family organization, and more aware of their individual responsibilities. Furthermore, they thus introduce a corporate culture that defines work as the production of a result and no longer as clocking in and out, punctuated by endless chats in the coffee areas and corridor gossip.
With Work From Home, workers reduce their travel expenses, given that going to the office is no longer necessary (absurd to have to travel kilometers and kilometers to switch on the same laptop that is switched on at home!) and are finally able to reconcile their personal and family life with work life, avoiding splitting oneself into different “parallel lives” (which do so much damage, not only to oneself and to the stability of the family but also in terms of failed education of the children). Furthermore, they avoid unnecessary waste of time in sterile chatting with colleagues (dramatically abundant in office work), benefit from greater focus and serenity in carrying out work, use time, even more than that used in office work, in profitable and result-oriented way: Woody Allen’s famous maxim according to which “80% of work is being there” is finally no longer valid.
With the massive use of Remote Working, the environment as a whole obtains great benefits, due to the reduction in traffic flows of all types of means of transport, with consequent reduction in polluting emissions, reduction in the consumption of fuels of all kinds and in the usage of energy, with less need to disfigure the planet with drilling, highly harmful for ecosystems, aimed at extracting these fuels. WFH, therefore, should be considered as a best practice for increasing environmental sustainability, both in urban and extra-urban and remote areas.
The universal application of Remote Working, then, increases and enhances technological progress, due to the greater and constant push towards the digitalisation and dematerialisation of processes. At the same time, society as a whole is progressing, as are companies, thanks to the greater possibility of internationalization of working contexts. International work teams can be easily organized without requiring any physical movement: every company, thanks to Remote Working, has the potential to be international in terms of the composition of its workforce, to the advantage of the company’s competitiveness and also of cultural exchanges between different nations. A very clear example is the employment of researchers of various nationalities in various European companies and research institutes, without requiring any travel to these researchers, who can continue to carry out their work and receive their income even if located in perhaps disadvantaged contexts (for example in Ukraine in this dramatic phase).
The big mistake of Amazon
We could continue endlessly with the description of the advantages of Remote Working, advantages of which, fortunately, the companies are becoming increasingly aware, all around the world, so increasingly implementing it in their organizations. However, unfortunately Amazon does not realize this (or, probably, pretends not to realize it!).
Amazon, in fact, in the last years really pushed for the digitalisation of processes and the modernization of the facilities and infrastructures, but it still does not massively use of Remote Working, which is the first and main method of digitalisation and modernisation. In the last days, Amazon decided to stop the two days a week Remote Working, at least in the United States (maybe in Europe it will remain). This is very surprising and clearly wrong, as it can be easiòy understood immediately from the “motivations” that Amazon management indicated: too many meetings, chaotic organization of work. These “motivations” are simply absurd and not related at all with WFM! Instead, these issues are related to poor ability of managers to manage, it is clear, and these issues are indeed even bigger with the work in presence than with WFM, as indicated already above in this article.
At this point, the truth is that Amazon is suffering from the competition with Chinese emerging and aggressive companies (like for instance Temu and Alibaba) and is trying to use very old and worst practices to tackle this competition: reduction of workforce. With the last decision of denying the Remote Working, Amazon is simply creating a toxic environment (it seems that already the work environment in Amazon was not idyllic indeed, since years), so to induce people to resign and reduce the workforce without using massive firing campaigns. This approach not only will weaken the competences of the Amazon workforce, because the smartest people will migrate towards competitors, for instance Aplhabet and Meta, but also will not solve the competitiveness problem, because it can be effectively addressed by Amazon only through innovation and introduction of new paradigms and not with barbaric reduction of cost!
Basically, the Amazon last move is simply a pretext: they are pretending that Remote Working is creating problems to them, whereas the problem is in the gigantic dimension of the company and ineffective management. They should maximize WFM, on the contrary, and reduce the totally useless costs for anachronistic huge offices, leading to a company facilities organization that is really flexible and smart.
From a marketing point of view, Amazon pretends to take to heart the environmental problems that afflict the planet, but with its last move it continues to allow and encourage the senseless use of useless and harmful commuting trips towards working on site, useless and harmful movements that destroy the environment with their polluting emissions and continue to contribute negatively to global warming.
They declare to use green vehicles for deliveries and pretends to want to emancipate world from fossil fuels and the related geopolitical problems, but imposing work in office and related commuting are forcing to waste these fuels for transport. It should be also noted that electric cars too use fossil fuels, albeit indirectly, because the large thermoelectric power plants, in which electricity is mostly produced, have such fuels as the primary source of chemical energy.
All this would not happen with a massive use of Remote Working: it is no coincidence that, during the COVID 19 pandemic, in which Work From Home was the ordinary working method for all jobs eligible for remotization, all the air quality indices in the urban areas had improved in a shocking way: the environmental problem seemed to be solved in the blink of an eye! It is clear that we need to change the way we think about work and remotize it to solve most environmental problems.
The last absurd move from Amazon seems similar to the one of Twitter (now X), which resulted in a disaster, with the social loosing indeed competitiveness and capitalization. Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and immediately asked people to go back working in the office, so leading to a lot of people quitting the company. One year later, Twitter, then renamed as X, was losing 70% of its value, active users reduced dramatically and the company is now in bad water, worse than before! So, was the WFH a problem or indeed an opportunity that the company, after the acquisition from Musk, was no longer able to exploit?
The benefits that Remote Working can bring to educational and cultural progress and in combating the demographic crisis
We also want to focus on another aspect, another indisputable advantage of Work From Home that the Governments, well before the companies, should have at heart and which instead many times is guiltily ignored. The Governments are complaining about criminality, hooliganism, the educational and cultural deficiency of the young generations and at the same time are boasting of wanting to increase births, in an historical period were the Western world is on the path to extinction due to the birth rate decline. Nevertheless, they hinder, or at least do not appropriately incentivize, a fundamental safeguard in this sense such as Remote Working.
Nothing is more effective in supporting a healthy education of children, their correct and complete cultural growth and, above all, a desire to conceive children than Work From Home! In fact, it allows parents, or future parents, to be able to establish themselves as a family wherever they wish, perhaps in their places of origin, where they can benefit from the support of their families, without having to move from one region to another or having to support a daily commuting which prevents the presence at home and the supervision of children.
Remote Working allows you to get to know your children, educate them through very small but continuous interactions during the day, follow them in their cultural growth.
Working From Home allows couples to save money on travel, to better organize their life and time and to look to the future with greater serenity and less stress.
It is all this that can encourage the birth rate, not the unlikely and ridiculous economic bribes that recall times gone by, in which countries were rural and medieval nations. Unfortunately, however, many governments remained at that time. A good sign is the one that the Labour Party is showing in UK, where they want to introduce the legal right to flexible (i.e. Remote of Hybrid) working for all people. Let’s hope this paradigm change will be implemented soon there and, then, will spread around the civilized world!
