Remote work gave me freedom and better opportunities, but it took me years to understand its real cost.
I started working remotely by chance. I was moving to Barcelona and needed to find a job there. I was not really looking for a remote job. My plan was to find something in the city and move. We were going to Barcelona for at least two years, and I was not thinking much further than that.
I joined a company without an office and started working from home. It was a lucky accident. That job changed me as a professional and allowed me to live in a different way. Back then, I could travel around the country with my partner and visit my friends while still doing my job.
Later, I moved back to my hometown and saw another important advantage. I could live in a small place and still access global jobs, even work for a company in the United States. I felt lucky. Remote work gave me access to a life and a career I probably could not have had otherwise.
But I still did not understand the cost of not working in an office. Remote work also moved responsibilities onto me that an employer, and an office, used to absorb.
The Simple Problems 🔗
The first challenges of remote work are simple problems. They “only” require discipline and some money.
Your office. Find a place, do not improvise. You do not have one? Pay for a coworking space. Having a place is an investment in productivity. You need your own space: a desk, an external keyboard and mouse, a separate screen, a comfortable chair, and a quiet place people respect.
When I think about my office, I think about a small box where I can put my brain comfortably for a few hours and isolate it from the rest of the world. I bring the energy and the effort. My office preserves it. You need to be comfortable, and everything around you has to make work easier. The kitchen, the living room, or the bed can work in specific moments, but they are not a long-term plan.
For your office to be useful, it also has to be respected by the people around you. It is useless if you are constantly interrupted. Achieving that is not easy. It requires conversations, and sometimes rules.
I will share one of my tricks. In my house there is one unbreakable rule: nobody enters my office if I am in a meeting, except for an emergency. To make that visible, I installed a remote-controlled LED strip around the door frame. When I am busy, I turn the LEDs red. Everyone knows what it means, and everyone respects it. Most of the time I use it for meetings, but I also use it when I really need focus. It is cheap, simple, and respected. My daughters, who are 3 and 5 years old, know it and follow it.
Time. Work your hours and nothing more. From home, you do not see when your colleagues leave, and it is easier to work extra time. Working more than expected is a common problem with consequences. You are already giving away part of your home to do your job. Extending your working day at home carries a higher risk of stress and burnout than extending it in an office: the boundaries between work and rest become blurry, and your mind cannot isolate the problems from both sides so easily.
Working extra time hurts both the employee and the employer. My advice: use a time tracker, do not work more than 8 hours, or at least try not to work more than 40 hours per week.
Etiquette. Before COVID, when I said I worked remotely, some people asked me if I worked in pajamas or cooked while working. When I talk about etiquette, I mean something close to that: how seriously you take your job when your workplace is inside your home.
My advice is to build a routine as if you had to leave your house and go to the office: shower, breakfast, dress properly. It changes how you show up, from the way you look on video calls to the way you face work problems. It may sound strange, but it is necessary and it works.
The Human Problems 🔗
The practical problems appeared during the first months. I needed several years, and maybe the isolation during the pandemic, to understand the human problems.
Yourself. Remote work requires a higher degree of self-management and responsibility. The energy of the office helps with focus and work. At home, you have to create it. There are risks like procrastination, guilt, or impostor syndrome, and they can become worse when you are alone in your office.
But the hardest part, for me, is the loss of boundaries. In an office, there are signals that tell you the day is over. People leave. The space empties. You walk out. At home, those signals disappear. Work and rest happen in the same place, and finishing work becomes another decision you have to make by yourself.
Your colleagues. No more casual conversations while having breakfast. No more improvised lunches. It is easy to underestimate the power of those moments, but the time you spend with colleagues inside and outside work helps build the relationships that later make difficult situations easier to face.
A colleague with whom you have talked about the latest Spielberg movie is more likely to go the extra mile when you are in trouble. In remote environments, support between team members can suffer because many of those small shared moments simply do not happen unless someone creates them.
Your managers. Employees can be dehumanized more easily. Managers see less of your life, your context, and the small things that make you a person beyond the work you deliver. There are fewer opportunities to understand personal situations and fewer chances to build deeper relationships.
That distance matters. Firing someone you have never seen face to face, and video calls do not really count, is easier.
I have also seen companies try to replace genuine interest with rituals that only look like care. Remembering a personal detail is not the same as caring about a person. Asking about someone’s weekend does not mean much if it is only part of a script.
You can build good relationships remotely, but you cannot completely replace the social side of an office.
The Commitments 🔗
Remote work does not remove the cost of working with other people. It changes where that cost appears, and who has to manage it.
Relationships. This is the main commitment. You need to put more energy and care into them. In large companies, and especially in remote ones, you need to find your allies, help them, create bonds, and ask for help. In some places it is not possible to survive alone. Cultivate relationships and use them.
Communication. It has a similar cost. You need to make more effort, and often over-communicate, to maintain transparency and trust. It is not possible to fully replace face-to-face communication, but you can get close if you are intentional.
This cannot be solved only by the employee. A good remote company has to take part of that responsibility back.
Opportunities. The best remote companies I have seen do not leave this to chance. They create spaces where relationships can happen, not just work. Local meetups, conferences, social activities during work hours, visiting employees in their cities, and well-used yearly gatherings can help. The point is not to manufacture friendship. The point is to create opportunities that the office used to create almost for free.
1:1s. They are part of this. I do not think every company needs the same exact cadence, but every remote company needs some recurring, protected space for individual conversation. The best version of a 1:1 is not a status meeting. That time belongs to the employee. It should be useful to give feedback, ask questions, talk about problems, and improve their day-to-day work.
Active listening. It matters too. Listen and ask. Try to go a little further. Be interested in the person, not only in the task. Start meetings by asking about the weekend, the family, or whatever makes sense in that relationship. But be genuine. If you need a process to simulate interest, people will eventually feel the difference.
Yearly in-person gatherings. They are common, but often wasted. Too many of them become a review of the quarter, planning sessions, and more work conversations. Nothing that could not be done remotely. I am strongly against remote-company gatherings built around activities that can already happen remotely.
Use the time together for what remote work cannot do well: watercooler time, breakfasts and lunches, activities with your team, workshops, games, visits, retrospectives with actual boards, and shared experiences. More shared experiences.
Travel. At the same time, travel has a cost. I have often experienced the low work-life balance of remote jobs, starting with having to fly to other cities for several nights, several times a year.
The impact of remote-work demands can be higher than the impact of an office job. In an office job, you usually go back home at the end of the day. In remote teams, it is common to meet several times a year for several nights. It has happened to me: I have missed my daughters’ performances because I had to be in another city for a presentation that could have happened remotely.
That is the commitment. It is about knowing it and accepting it. Companies know remote teams have cohesion problems, and sometimes they try to solve them clumsily. Those trips should be kept to a minimum, because they damage work-life balance. But removing them completely also has a cost that tools and processes cannot fully replace.
Remote work can give you more freedom and better opportunities, but it does not automatically give you better work-life balance. Sometimes it gives you room to live differently. Sometimes it asks you to pay for that freedom in places you did not expect.