Why remote work requires taking personal responsibility | Friday.app

Remote Work requires taking personal responsibility

Posted by Luke Thomas

This is the final part of our series on remote work mental models. Read the previous post here.

Remote work doubles down on the belief that people are adults and that organizations should treat them that way. But this is a reciprocal relationship that requires personal responsibility and being intentional about the way that you work as an individual to maximize productivity and effectiveness.

For many years, the stereotype for people who worked from home was that they weren’t productive. The reality is that some of this was warranted and that’s because some people didn’t treat remote work seriously. Your grandparents who worked long hours in a factory would not be impressed with you.

Remote work isn’t perfect. There will be times when you feel social isolation. The key principle here is that taking personal responsibility means you don’t wait for your employer to create some type of policy to “fix” the situation. Instead, you come up with methods and strategies to improve things for you and your team.

Your work experience is different than your coworkers

It’s about being proactive about improving your situation, whether that’s social isolation, doubling down on allocating time when you are most productive, making sure leaders know what you are working on, and more.

There’s a lot of variance in each person’s work situation and it’s unreasonable to expect your company to come up with a perfect solution to these problems.

People run into issues working remotely because they offload responsibility to someone else. “I don’t like my boss constantly asking me about what I’m working on.” Ok, got it. But are you regularly sharing what you are working on?

Meet in the middle

It’s about meeting in the middle. Companies need to treat their employees like they are adults. But employees need to act like adults to make it work.

Wrapping up the series

We hope you enjoyed this series on remote working principles. If you have any high-level mental models that we should add, feel free to reach out!

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