Because of COVID, the company I work for switched to remote work.
It's a mid-sized venture, but the culture is relatively old-fashioned, so remote work wasn't even on the table until recently.
Saying "thanks to COVID" feels wrong, but without COVID this setup never would have happened.
So after about two weeks of remote work, I want to write about the effects — the pros and cons.
Bottom line: there were a lot of pros. At least for me, it fits extremely well.
I'd barely experienced remote work before, and I'm almost stunned by how good it is.
The simple upsides: fewer interruptions, and you can build an environment you like.
In an office, people interrupt you and noise gets under your skin. Put simply, there's too much information.
Phones ringing, people talking, how people move, smells — hearing, sight, smell are overloaded.
Remote or not, those three senses are probably more sensitive for me than for most people, and hearing especially wrecks my focus.
Since school, the sound of other people's pens often made it impossible to concentrate, and when friends visit my place I sometimes ask them to quiet their footsteps.
I worked in a shared office for a bit; one day a newly signed company nearby was loud, and I canceled my contract immediately.
Beyond hearing, offices have plenty of colleagues who check things with you verbally more than necessary, and bosses who give instructions that way.
Not only inside the company — outside people call the main line asking for you personally.
(※ I ask people I deal with outside to contact me by email or chat whenever possible, but surprisingly many still call the main line, and it exhausts me every time.)
Inside or outside, not many people feel like they're taking someone else's time. I don't think company productivity is possible without imagination toward each other.
Working remotely, phones almost never ring, and even internally there's little contact beyond checking task progress.
The problem is that even after going remote, inefficient company workflows get worse, not better, under remote work.
And people who never tried to fix those inefficient systems often still don't feel the pain once remote. That part is tough.
Concretely: process A is done through an electronic system, but for a similar process A' some department insists on paper without questioning it — so remotely you fill out paper or Excel, stamp it, scan it, and send it. Absurd.
(※ Seals should disappear from this world ASAP. That alone is a solid reason not to want to do business in Japan.)
It's not just that — paper filing, Google Drive folder hygiene, sharing information inside the company — things that should finish in the system often aren't treated that way.
After going remote, I got into arguments with a few people who didn't see inefficient flows as a problem, and we had a small mess in chat.
I don't pick those fights for fun, and they look ugly, but I at least want to focus on work that actually serves revenue and profit (not only the most direct sales). When that mindset is missing, I think it's professional laziness. It's draining, but for anything in my scope I have to keep saying it.
So I think the real benefit of remote work is that unnecessary and unpleasant things get cut.
At companies where smart people gather, that part is always under review. That's why good companies switch to remote smoothly and work quality doesn't drop.
"Working" is about raising revenue and profit, of course — but the "how" is also essential. This isn't about business models; internal systems should be reviewed to the extreme, continuously, and almost permanently.
Fewer unpleasant things is a kind of "negative upside." (At companies full of efficiency-minded people, the unnecessary stuff was never there.)
The "positive upside," I think, is that evaluation shifts more toward output than before.
Near the start of Plato's Apology, Socrates says something like: before I begin my defense, please judge what I say by its content, not by how I phrase it. I love that part — and remote work feels like that.
Work needs a certain amount of manners, but it should basically be judged by output and results. Labor cost isn't paid for "trying hard."
Remotely, attitude and effort aren't physically visible, so evaluation should lean harder toward how much good output you produce — quality and quantity.
Extreme take: someone who half-slacks at home and puts out 10 units of output in 1 unit of time should be valued more than someone who "tries hard" for 10 units of time and only produces 3.
When that trend strengthens, the people being evaluated are happier, and managers have an easier time. Management cost can drop a lot under remote work.
Conversely, if someone says managing people got harder after going remote, they may be admitting they were managing things other than pure output more than necessary.
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