Tech Talk: Tech in remote work

Since COVID, one of the most major changes in the lives of many people working in offices was a shift to remote work. Afterward, many companies mandated that workers return to the office, but some didn’t, allowing their staff to remain completely remote. What was amazing was how fast various types of technologies came to the forefront and how the culture around their use changed. While it varied from company to company, pre-covid, it was often customary to at least wear “business casual” during video conferences.

During and after COVID, that changed, and more and more people began wearing casual clothes, seemingly by dint of mutual agreement. Video conferencing and communication technologies and platforms underwent sudden evolutions and dramatically expanded their capabilities as they became completely essential for businesses to function.

Many companies had to adjust their infrastructure, adding private networks so workers could securely access resources, or mandating that everyone use specific collaborative or video-conferencing software, just to make sure everyone was on the same page.

Etiquette arose where, in the past it might be fine to not have your camera turned on, it could now be considered slightly impolite. Some people even invested in higher-definition webcams.

There was, of course, some controversy about remote work — and there still is. Many argued it reduced productivity, or degraded team cohesion. Others found that they had happier, more productive employees when they were able to work from home.

Some companies mandated that employees utilize productivity monitoring software on their work computers: it tracked when they were working and when they were away from their keyboard, so they could be sure that their staff was where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to do.

Demands on remote connectivity technology also skyrocketed — the ability of an employee to access the internet or have their devices be connected from anywhere they might be became extremely important.

For certain types of industries, it’s understandable that they want to have their employees reaching out to clients, or actively monitoring or managing tickets that come in or other kinds of software. For others, it really doesn’t matter whether said employee is sitting on a beach or on a ship somewhere as long as the work gets done on time.

At the end of the day, the explosion of remote work and it’s associated technologies did fundamentally alter work culture in America — and it’s still in the process of evolving.

As a macrocosm of how technologies are almost always a double-edged sword, this is a good one: teleconferencing and telecommuting have simultaneously freed people from the office — they can work from anywhere in the world – but it’s also chained them more completely than ever before — they can work from anywhere in the world. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been on vacation and still opened my laptop to get work done, or handled something on my phone that would previously have needed to be done in the office, or had an idea at 8 p.m. and gone to work on it while it was fresh on my mind. If you’re a remote worker, striking the balance of work and home life with the ever-encroaching advance of technology has become even more important.