This is really about "at home first" work rather than remote work. The prevailing model seems to be "don't come to the office unless we want you there" as opposed to "work from anywhere". I understand the reasons for why companies want you at home but local rather than remote, just saying it's very different that real remote working.
There are so many different flavors of remote (and remote-ish) work. Lots of people (especially those who don't do remote work) think of remote work as "work wherever you want, whenever you want", but in reality there are often limitations.
Employers generally care about what jurisdiction you live in so they can comply with tax law, etc. Some employers don't care where you're at as long as your long-term residence is in one of their approved jurisdictions. Some will keep tabs on your location and pay you differently depending on where you live.
Some employers mandate a set of core hours, while others limit employee home locations by time zone, wanting workers to be approximately on the same schedule.
I've heard of some US Government workers who are allowed to work from home, but only from home. Ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, they aren't allowed to work from hotels, cafes, airports, WeWorks, etc.
Then yeah, there's this sliding scale of hybrid remote/office work. "We're remote for now, but hope to get back to the office eventually". "We think 50/50 will be our new normal, but that's subject to change". "You can typically work from wherever you want, but we expect you to be available to come into the office for big meetings, etc".
> I've heard of some US Government workers who are allowed to work from home, but only from home. Ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, they aren't allowed to work from hotels, cafes, airports, WeWorks, etc.
I first thought that this didn't make so much sense, because you could just use a VPN. But this might be only partly because of network insecurity. It could be more because you have so little control over your neighbors and physical environment in public and semipublic spaces, and people who know you're there can easily arrange to be nearby you in order to try shoulder-surfing or higher-tech attacks.
For example, it might be challenging to get close enough to someone's home office to carry out an attack like this, but not so difficult in comparison in a café.
I have wondered about the idea of shared rent-a-workspace, and what that does to security and regulatory compliance and how many CIOs have conniptions over it.
Would you feel OK if you called up your bank to sort out a problem with your account, and they were opening all your account details on a laptop in a coffee shop or WeWork office shared with all sorts of people? If you were a normal employee raising an issue with HR and they were doing that? If you were Apple, or high up in a company behaving like them and trying to keep projects secret and your employees were doing that?
I've never heard of USG jobs where you had to work specifically from home, but I don't doubt they exist nor that the USG would be so asinine. I'd hate the condition of having to be specifically at home. Would probably set up a VPN to house or something just out of principle and then run away to hawaii for a week (assuming odds of being randomly called in were slim but you could always claim potential covid exposure, I guess).
I just spoke to somebody today and their strategy is to hire within a geographic region. Everybody will be default remote but they will be getting the team together 4-6 times a year on site for planning and social stuff. I could see this being the strategy for a lot of small and mid size companies.
Why do the reasons for it matter? There's an office for the company and you don't actually do work there. You work remotely for the company vs in-office. The whys do not matter in the definition of you working remotely from the office do they?
"Work at your home office" culture still expects you to be in a predictable location and working predictable hours. Very similar to showing up to an office everyday.
"Remote" is closer to, "your location doesn't matter as long as you can perform your job".
Even if you’re forced to go to the office 1-2 days a week that allows you to be much wider range of housing options. A 30 minute commute 5 days a week is the equivalent of a 100 minute commute 1.5 days a week. Granted that’s still a limited area, but it can easily make the difference between a high rise and having a yard.
It partially dictates how the company communicated with its’ employees. A remote first company is going to engage with its employee base differently, invest in benefits that respect that population more and create channels that enable an optimization of that environment. A non-first organization doesn’t need to necessitate any of that. Oftentimes remote work is the lesser of two evils; the other evil being less competitive in the job market place.
"don't come to the office unless we want you there"
I work full time remote but this is the approach I would take as a company. Once your team is distributed across timezones a lot of things get really hard.
