The Advantages of Remote Work and Wondering Why Some Places Seem to Resist It…

So I have been helping someone get into technical writing – paying forward what my late mentor Darrel did for me. She is a highly technical, former teacher who left teaching due to the cuts from our provincial government. (Reach out if you know a position that she would fit for.) However she lives in Camrose, AB and due to a situation beyond her control, she is stuck there for a year.

The bad thing is there is no work in Camrose. Especially not technical work. So for the moment she’s working at their local casino.

Now a lot of the push back I have seen to remote work is largely around the fact that office towers are empty and it’s affecting the businesses around the office towers. I feel bad about that for the businesses around the office towers, but not nearly as much for the leasing companies that are seeing companies downsizing their tower offices.

From the point of view of a fully remote worker, let me give you the reasons why I will never willingly go back to working in an office.

• I have mental and physical disabilities that make office work highly stressful and difficult for me that negatively affects my otherwise top notch productivity.
  
  After two strokes and cancer, I now walk with a cane and can not climb stairs. Even before the strokes, I found stairs extremely difficult to navigate and so when I worked at Enbridge I was on the ‘Wait for fire department to rescue’ list. All the times that I had to wait were practice runs BUT can you imagine the stress if it had been real?
  
  In the case of the mental disabilities, I am autistic. While my special interests make me extremely good at what I do (writing and computers), I have other autistic traits that do not fit in to a corporate space. My longest running job was with TELUS and there I had managers and a director who recognized the advantages of having me work for them so they helped smooth over whenever my autistic issues would have likely found me loosing my position.
  
  As an example of that, when I left TELUS, I didn’t hold a position for much longer than a year – except for Enbridge – where my manager there had been at TELUS before and MacEwan – where the position was more of a sequence of 3-5 month stints with breaks in between. I was contracting so turn over is always high, but I can’t help but think that my autism was contributing to that in my case.
  
  As a remote worker, I am always in my office at home. It is laid out to accommodate my physical disabilities and my mental disabilities like getting distracted by noise or folk coming around and talking to me, as well as the annoying need to have my back to a wall (cube farms don’t work well for me) – well, I have a door on my office at home.
  
• Money. Yes, remote work is good money wise. Not because we get paid more, but because I don’t spend as much. I am not tempted to eat out as much. No spending money for gas or for a bus pass.
  
• Again money. I lied a little. At least in Alberta, employers here do not value technical writing. I have been offered contracting jobs; which traditionally pay MORE than a full time job; which pay way LESS than what I make as a full time employee before I even get to the additional extras I get like RRSP matching, full healthcare benefits and the $100 a month the company kicks in to pay for the office supplies I need at home.
  
• Time. I don’t waste my time running back and forth to work. If I sleep in, I roll out of bed, pull on a t-shirt and jeans and don’t turn on the camera until I’ve brushed my hair instead of having to call my manager to explain why I’m going to be an hour late.
  
  I also don’t waste company time, chatting with people in the lunch room or at the water cooler. I also can work through boring meetings; turn off my camera, listen to what is being discussed if I am not directly involved and keep on working.
  
• Taxes. Yes, working from home helps my taxes (at least here in Canada). I can claim a tax credit for my home office. Since it is a separate room in my house, it’s an easy calculation and it does add up.

Now as I said before I am in Alberta and a lot of Albertan companies seem to be behind the times – which doesn’t surprise me in a way. They believe in this old way of thinking that unless the boss see’s you doing it, you aren’t doing your job.

Employers that is so much horse pucky. If I wasn’t doing my job, I wouldn’t have completely updated the Auvik knowledge base in the first three months of being there when they expected it to take me a year. Then I completely redesigned the knowledge base in the first year, as well as add a tonne of new functionality – did I mention I program too. And that’s not including that I am always adding new articles, as well as adding new documentation for the new products we are adding. At the end of the year, we started an internal knowledge base that I designed and have been helping to organize the content for.

And that is all from the comfort of my home office.