Thursday, May 21, 2015

Future of the Workplace

A little over ten years ago, the place I was working closed the San Francisco office and I became a work-from-home employee. It was a cool deal to be without a commute and I made sure that all my teammates in Denver, Boston, and Dehli had webcams so that when we did our meetings we could all see one another. I’ve pioneered making remote employees not be second-class citizens and three separate companies since then.

I thought highly distributed teams would be the future of working. Everyone will just work out of their home office, or a coworking office across the street, with their teammates throughout the world and when you need have meetings you’ll use video conference or holo-conference. It seems like that’s where we’re going to end, but I would have expected a lot more tech companies to already be there. In the real world, people are still pushing for offices.

If self-driving cars were a thing today I’d probably go into the office every day. I’d hope in the car at 8am and be hard at work on the phone, video, etc, rolling into my office around 11am. After a few hours doing the face-to-face, I’d jump back in the car at 2pm and be home for dinner putting in a full eight hour work day.