Remote Workers Quotes

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Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
On the way out to the car, Philip turns to me. “How could you be so stupid? I shrug, stung in spite of myself. “I thought I grew out of it.” Philip pulls out his key fob and presses the remote to unlock his Mercedes. I slide into the passenger side, brushing coffee cups off the seat and onto the floor mat, where crumpled printouts from MapQuest soak up any spilled liquid. “I hope you mean sleepwalking,” Philip says, “since you obviously didn’t grow out of stupid.
Holly Black (White Cat (Curse Workers, #1))
That’s the great irony of letting passionate people work from home. A manager’s natural instinct is to worry about his workers not getting enough work done, but the real threat is that too much will likely get done. And because the manager isn’t sitting across from his worker anymore, he can’t look in the person’s eyes and see burnout.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
Maintaining high levels of authentic engagement with remote workers is key to the success of the teams
Henry Kurkowski (Remote Work Technology: Keeping Your Small Business Thriving From Anywhere)
This last benefit—flexibility of scheduling—is particularly invaluable for remote workers who have to negotiate the demands of work and family at the same time and is often touted as one of its more appealing benefits.
Tsedal Neeley (Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere)
The people who adjust best to remote work train themselves to be more proactive, entrepreneurial, and motivated. The best remote workers are uncomfortable with the status quo. They avoid complacency and are not afraid to disrupt themselves when necessary.
Rohit Bhargava (The Non-Obvious Guide to Working Remotely: (Being Productive Without Getting Distracted, Lonely or Bored))
TIDY UP YOUR WORKSPACE BEFORE YOU CALL IT A DAY. When you go to an office, you can leave your messy home, well, at home. Not so for remote workers. And this is a problem, because working in a messy space zaps your concentration. Research shows clutter can trigger the release of cortisol (the stress hormone). Messy homes are also linked to increased procrastination. Before you clock out each night, spend five minutes putting things away, organizing your papers, and removing dirty glasses. You’ll appreciate your efforts when you sit down to your desk the next morning.
Aja Frost (Work-from-Home Hacks: 500+ Easy Ways to Get Organized, Stay Productive, and Maintain a Work-Life Balance While Working from Home!)
More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins.
George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.
Rebecca Solnit (The Faraway Nearby)
If a worker’s motivation is slumping, it’s probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
Edmond persuasively described a future where technology had become so inexpensive and ubiquitous that it erased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. A future where environmental technologies provided billions of people with drinking water, nutritious food, and access to clean energy. A future where diseases like Edmond’s cancer were eradicated, thanks to genomic medicine. A future where the awesome power of the Internet was finally harnessed for education, even in the most remote corners of the world. A future where assembly-line robotics would free workers from mind-numbing jobs so they could pursue more rewarding fields that would open up in areas not yet imagined. And, above all, a future in which breakthrough technologies began creating such an abundance of humankind’s critical resources that warring over them would no longer be necessary.
Dan Brown (Origin (Robert Langdon, #5))
To start building your remote culture, establish and share some basic rules. The first and most important rule is mutual trust between the company and its workers. The rules after that? As few as possible. Tell your employees they will be treated like adults with the flexibility to get the job done however is best for them.
Larry English (Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture with Virtual Teams)
Feelings of sudden existential vulnerability now come upon the individual as if from nowhere, in the midst of indifference, in the banal space of work; at the customer service counter, in a warehouse or call centre, as s/he services the remote needs of the globalised professional class in an almost colonial fashion. And this fear also follows the unanchored worker out of the nominal workplace and into the home: it fills gaps in conversations, is readable between the lines of emails, seeps into relationships and crevices of the mind. The precarious worker is then saddled with an additional duty: to hide these feelings.
Ivor Southwood (Non Stop Inertia)
The Sarcophagus needed the strength to withstand Ukrainian weather for an estimated 20 years - time to develop a more permanent solution - and contain the astronomical levels of radiation within. Erecting the enclosure involved a quarter of a million workers, all of whom reached their lifetime maximum dose. In order for the Sarcophagus to be built, the radioactive graphite and reactor fuel first had to be cleared up and buried, so remote control bulldozers were brought in from West Germany, Japan and Russia to dig up the earth. Workers had originally piled up rubble at the base of Unit 4 and poured concrete straight onto it, intending to seal in the radiation, but that didn’t last long. “Geysers are starting to shoot up from the wet concrete. When the liquid falls on the fuel in the pile, there is an atomic excursion or simply a disruption of heat exchange and a rise in temperature. The radiation situation deteriorates sharply”, reported Vasiliy Kizima, chief of the construction project at the time.229
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
The geisha and the temple maiden of the Hindus, Persians, Mayas, or Inca present the sovereignty of idle beauty, completely withdrawn from the world of work. Living in idleness, she preserves those soft and fluid forms of the voice, of the smile, of the whole body, that captivate without resisting what they touch. Her beauty does not triumph in the endurance of stern physical tasks; it does not endure; it is as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom in the night and die when the sun rises. She makes herself an object by covering herself with brilliant and fluid garments, jewels, and perfumes. The working man is stopped in his tracks, contemplating a body set apart, remote from his laborious concerns, ostentatious and alluring. Her sumptuous dress, jewelry of precious stones, plumes of exotic birds, and perfumes made of fields of rare flowers represent values, represent the dissipation of human labor in useless splendor. This intense consumption exerts a dangerous fascination. She tempts the worker to the follies and excesses of passion and dispossession.
Alphonso Lingis (Dangerous Emotions)
Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day.
Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There)
How is he, Amelia?” she finally brought herself to whisper. There was no need for Amelia to ask who “he” was. “Merripen has changed,” she said cautiously, “nearly as much as you and Leo. Cam says what Merripen has accomplished with the estate is no less than astounding. It requires a broad array of skills to direct builders, craftsmen, and groundsmen, and also to repair the tenant farms. And Merripen has done it all. When necessary, he’ll strip off his coat and lend his own back to a task. He’s earned the respect of the workers—they never dare to question his authority.” “I’m not surprised, of course,” Win said, while a bittersweet feeling came over her. “He has always been a very capable man. But when you say he has changed, what do you mean?” “He has become rather … hard.” “Hard-hearted? Stubborn?” “Yes, and remote. He seems to take no satisfaction in his success, nor does he exhibit any real pleasure in life. Oh, he has learned a great deal, and he wields authority effectively, and he dresses better to befit his new position. But oddly, he seems less civilized than ever. I think …” An uncomfortable pause. “Perhaps it may help him to see you again. You were always a good influence.” Win eased her hands away and glowered down at her own lap. “I doubt that. I doubt I have any influence on Merripen whatsoever. He has made his lack of interest very clear.” “Lack of interest?” Amelia repeated, and gave a strange little laugh. “No, Win, I wouldn’t say that at all. Any mention of you earns his closest attention.” “One may judge a man’s feelings by his actions.” Win sighed and rubbed her weary eyes. “At first I was hurt by the way he ignored my letters. Then I was angry. Now I merely feel foolish.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.
Ian Bremmer (The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World)
Gradually I came to learn what every great philosophy has been up to now, namely, the self-confession of its originator and a form of unintentional and unrecorded memoir, and also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy made up the essential living seed from which on every occasion the entire plant has grown. In fact, when we explain how the most remote metaphysical claims in a philosophy really arose, it's good (and shrewd) for us always to ask first: What moral is it (is he -) aiming at? Consequently, I don't believe that a "drive to knowledge" is the father of philosophy but that knowledge (and misunderstanding) have functioned only as a tool for another drive, here as elsewhere. But whoever explores the basic drives of human beings, in order to see in this very place how far they may have carried their game as inspiring geniuses (or demons and goblins), will find that all drives have already practised philosophy at some time or another - and that every single one of them has all too gladly liked to present itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive seeks mastery and, as such, tries to practise philosophy. Of course, with scholars, men of real scientific knowledge, things may be different -"better" if you will - where there may really be something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clock mechanism or other which, when well wound up, bravely goes on working, without all the other drives of the scholar playing any essential role. The essential "interests" of scholars thus commonly lie entirely elsewhere, for example, in the family or in earning a living or in politics. Indeed, it is almost a matter of indifference whether his small machine is placed on this or on that point in science and whether the "promising" young worker makes a good philologist or expert in fungus or chemist - whether he becomes this or that does not define who he is.5 By contrast, with a philosopher nothing is at all impersonal. And his morality, in particular, bears a decisive and crucial witness to who he is - that is, to the rank ordering in which the innermost drives of his nature are placed relative to each other.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
We’ve also sponsored the pursuit of a long list of hobbies and made sure that people get the time off to fit them in. Those hobbies include bicycle racing, whittling, trekking, motorsports, gardening, and many more. Sure, people working in an office have hobbies too, but few companies give their workers both the time off to pursue their hobbies and the financial support to make them affordable.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
But the very same taker tendencies that served Wright well in Fallingwater also precipitated his nine-year slump. For two decades, until 1911, Wright made his name as an architect living in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, where he benefited from the assistance of craftspeople and sculptors. In 1911, he designed Taliesin, an estate in a remote Wisconsin valley. Believing he could excel alone, he moved out there. But as time passed, Wright spun his wheels during “long years of enforced idleness,” Gill wrote. At Taliesin, Wright lacked access to talented apprentices. “The isolation he chose by creating Taliesin,” de St. Aubin observes, “left him without the elements that had become essential to his life: architectural commissions and skillful workers to help him complete his building designs.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s drought lasted until he gave up on independence and began to work interdependently again with talented collaborators. It wasn’t his own idea: his wife Olgivanna convinced him to start a fellowship for apprentices to help him with his work. When apprentices joined him in 1932, his productivity soared, and he was soon working on the Fallingwater house, which would be seen by many as the greatest work of architecture in modern history. Wright ran his fellowship program for a quarter century, but even then, he struggled to appreciate how much he depended on apprentices. He refused to pay apprentices, requiring them to do cooking, cleaning, and fieldwork. Wright “was a great architect,” explained his former apprentice Edgar Tafel, who worked on Fallingwater, “but he needed people like myself to make his designs work—although you couldn’t tell him that.
Adam M. Grant (Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success)
And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. (Deuteronomy 6) Our children become less important than our workers. We admonish our workers for our own financial benefit, but our children receive no instruction or correction, in effect being regarded as less valuable than our workers. But why even compare our children with other humans? We take better care of our cattle and horses than our children. Those who own a mule make sure to find the best driver for it, not some idiot who is a dishonest and inexperienced drunk. But if our child needs a teacher, we take the first person who comes along, haphazardly and without consideration. Yet no profession is more important than teaching. For what even remotely compares with guiding the soul and forming the mind and character of a young person? A teacher should be more skilled than a painter, and certainly more virtuous. But we completely neglect this. The one thing that matters to us is that our child learns to speak well — and just for the sake of money! In fact, if a person could become wealthy without being able to speak at all, we would not bother with our language lessons. Money exercises a tyranny over the world! It invades all of life and forces people to go where it chooses, like slaves. We make verbal attacks against it, but it defeats us by the sheer force of events. Nevertheless, I will not stop attacking it with my mouth, and if I achieve anything, you and I will both be better off. John Chrysostom
James Stuart Bell (Awakening Faith: Daily Devotions from the Early Church)
If you are serious about having a virtual company with excellent culture, you must have the discipline to develop a hiring process that screens for culture matches and for the attributes of successful virtual workers. You can’t just hire for skills—that never translates to great culture.
Larry English (Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture with Virtual Teams)
Many new remote workers worry they’ll be distracted by their home life and lack the discipline to get work done. Instead, the exact opposite usually occurs: remote workers become more productive once they’re freed from a traditional office environment. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, because working remotely means fewer distractions, no commute, and the opportunity to take real breaks. Instead of the dreaded afternoon slump, you can stay fresh and energized all day.
Larry English (Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture with Virtual Teams)
Most anyone can learn to be a great virtual employee. The top skills to learn are setting healthy boundaries between your work life and personal life and building relationships virtually.
Larry English (Office Optional: How to Build a Connected Culture with Virtual Teams)
If work is all-consuming, the worker is far more likely to burn out. This is true even if the person loves what he does. Perhaps especially if he loves what he does, since it won’t seem like a problem until it’s too late.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
One of the secret benefits of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance. When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away. Criteria like “was she here at 9?” or “did she take too many breaks today?” or “man, every time I walk by his desk he’s got Facebook up” aren’t even possible to tally. Talk about a blessing in disguise! What
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs. The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America. We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received. Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work. Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it. I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay. Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing. Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
That’s one of the key challenges of remote work: keeping everyone’s outlook healthy and happy. That task is insurmountable if you’ve stacked your team with personalities who tend to let their inner asshole loose every now and again. Even for people with the best intentions, relations can go astray if the work gets stressful (and what work doesn’t occasionally?). The best ballast you can have is as many folks in your boat as possible with a thoroughly optimistic outlook. We’re talking about people who go out of their way to make sure everyone is having a good time. Remember: sentiments are infectious, whether good or bad. That’s also why it’s as important to continuously monitor the work atmosphere as to hire for it. It’s never a good idea to let poisonous people stick around to spoil it for everyone else, but in a remote-work setup it’s deadly. When you’re a manager and your employees are far flung, it’s impossible to see the dread in their eyes, and that can be fatal. With respect to drama, it therefore makes sense to follow the “No Broken Windows” theory of enforcement. What are we talking about? Well, in the same way that New York cracked down in the ’90s on even innocuous offenses like throwing rocks through windows or jumping the turnstile, a manager of remote workers needs to make an example of even the small stuff—things like snippy comments or passive-aggressive responses. While this responsibility naturally falls to those in charge, it works even better if policed by everyone in the company.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies―the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a "free market," but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts―like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well. And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes―you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don't even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they're fascist, they're state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That's precisely fascism, it's not the free market. Now, that kind of planned economy "works," in a way―it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don't work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic―like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process.
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
At MySQL, there were 400 employees in 40 countries, with 95% of the development staff working from home. The challenges this model presented, from time zone differences to communication technologies to project coordination to legal and commercial logistics, were immense. But it offset these costs with hard savings on real estate, salaries, and improvements in productivity. Most importantly, allowing workers to work remotely is like selling from the Internet: you’re no longer limited by your local geography.
Stephen O’Grady (The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World)
In both situations, few companies find reason to recalibrate. If the work is getting done with fewer people, why change what isn’t broken? The problem, of course, is that the worker is breaking. It might take several years for that breakage to have measurable ramifications, but it will. The recent shift to remote work has offered a unique opportunity to discern just how much work you’re doing. Not “official” work done in the office versus furtive work done at home, but total work.
Charlie Warzel (Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home)
Having Tech that does not fully meet the needs of remote workers hurts morale, lowers job satisfaction, and increases the potential of burnout
Henry Kurkowski (Remote Work Technology: Keeping Your Small Business Thriving From Anywhere)
To minimize feeling siloed or out of the loop, remote teams depend on high levels of engagement, openness, and transparency. It cannot be faked or just done some of the time. That transparency must be ever-present in the actions of company leaders.
Henry Kurkowski (Remote Work Technology: Keeping Your Small Business Thriving From Anywhere)
For remote workers, team cohesion depends on two interrelated factors: the frequency of interactions with other team members, and the quality of relationships that these interactions form.
Tsedal Neeley (Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere)
professional isolation among remote workers was negatively associated with job performance.
Tsedal Neeley (Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere)
A January 2020 Gallup survey on remote work found that people working off-site 60–80 percent of the time were more likely than other workers to feel engaged, and to feel that someone was watching out for their development.
Laura Vanderkam (The New Corner Office: How the Most Successful People Work from Home)
Wise council, like that of Joseph Chamberlain noted above, has always been that placing essentials like our water supply in private hands is folly. But for forty years, greed has been trumping wisdom. The new Gekkos – or should that be ‘geckos’? – have slithered into every corner of our national life. Water privatisation has been perhaps the most difficult to justify on any moral or societal grounds. It’s difficult to square with the celebrated ethos of competition, that mythical beast beloved of the free-marketeer. The customer has no choice, can’t take their business elsewhere, has to pay the price set by the monopoly provider and thus loses on every count. So much for the benefits of competition. It is absolutely emblematic of what Frank Cottrell-Boyce spoke of when he excoriated the corrupt, effete version of capitalism that now holds sway in Britain. ‘The phase of capitalism that we’re in is not remotely competitive. Where are the dynamic venture capitalists? Who’s in the driving seat of our economy? Is it entrepreneurs? Is it customers? Is it workers? No, it’s hedge fund managers. Ours is an economy run by retired dentists in the Cotswolds. That’s not a lively virile capitalism.
Stuart Maconie (The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save it)
Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers. Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing. New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company. Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year. Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say. Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year. “There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts. Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee. But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.
That Vacation Home Listed on Airbnb Might Be Owned by Wall Street
Clock In Clock Out allows you to track workers to assure that during night shifts or at remote locations, they are where they claim to be at the right times. Through a powerful but simple technology, Clock In Clock Out helps to assure that people you are paying to be on the job during non-traditional hours of a day such as night shifts and/or at remote locations, were actually where they claimed to be. When they claimed to be there.
Clock In Clock Out
As with “remote learning,” Zoom rolled out everywhere as a cultural expectation without question or variation. It wasn’t as if some businesses met or polled their workers or created a hybrid model — no, the social norm was established almost overnight. Everyone suddenly knew how to navigate it, and a whole Zoom culture appeared at once.
Naomi Wolf (The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human)
Every business that pays for remote employees or service providers those they cannot see at work has to blindly make out payroll checks. Clock In Clock Out helps businesses track the locations and hours of workers, confirming they are actually where they claim to be. Finally, you can stop worrying about the night shift and employees that are working remotely.
clockinclockout
Clock In Clock Out helps businesses track the locations and hours of workers, confirming they are actually where they claim to be. When they claim to be there. Finally, you can stop worrying about the night shift and employees that are working remotely. Clock In Clock Out provides for a simple, completely automated way for workers to check in on the job and to verify when they are leaving the specified location.
clockinclockout
the physicist Michio Kaku. “Let’s say that a ten-lane superhighway is being built next to an anthill,” he says. “The question is: would the ants even know what a ten-lane superhighway is, or what it’s used for, or how to communicate with the workers who are just feet away? And the answer is no… If there is [another] civilization in our backyard, in the Milky Way galaxy, would we even know its presence?… There’s a good chance that we, like ants in the anthill, would not understand or be able to make sense of a ten-lane superhighway next door.
Colm A. Kelleher (Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah)
Given that workers compensation is denying high altitude worker claims for occupational disease, it is common sense to never work in the biologically toxic field of astronomical observatories atop remote mountain summits.
Steven Magee
Astronomers rarely visit the summit of Mauna Kea. They sit in near sea level offices and obtain their astronomical data remotely using very high altitude workers on the summit of the mountain to control the telescope and computers.
Steven Magee
High altitude workers are typically recruited from all over the world and relocated to the remote astronomical observatory area. The downside to this is that it isolates them from their existing friends and family.
Steven Magee
High altitude observatories are commonly on remote mountain tops that isolate workers from society.
Steven Magee
foot soldiers with him, so he probably wasn’t bringing down a scale. When a scale came down the mountain, a captain would come himself and pick someone personally to bestow a “gift” in a display of yet another perverse power the army had over their lives. Caleb had seen the people around him throw themselves at the captains, any captains, to try to win their favor in case they found themselves in possession of a scale. He’d seen mothers send their daughters to flirt with captains; he’d seen children scrubbing boots; he’d seen old men with gnarled knuckles polishing armor. Caleb didn’t do that. He wasn’t clinging to his pride, no matter how many people accused him of holding himself higher than the rest of them. He didn’t believe in false hope; he’d seen the pattern too many times to think it made a difference. The captains would take all that adulation and desperation and use it all up, and then they’d choose whoever they wanted anyway. A few times, a favorite lover would win a scale, but the price wasn’t worth the reward. Besides, this time, the captain was clearly there looking for workers, not favors. He directed his men through the crowd, picking out a few kids (especially girls) for “kitchen staff,” according to the soldiers, though the worried looks on the faces of every mother in the camp had Caleb wondering which kitchen the girls would tend—the army’s or the dragons’. Caleb could see that the soldiers were looking for more than maids as they picked through the crowd, scrutinizing anyone who looked remotely able-bodied—though the refugees obviously offered slim pickings. Years
Shelby Hailstone Law (Scaleshifter (Scaleshifter, #1))
Since early 1964, I have frequented the remote villages of Vietnam, along with teams of young social workers, and it is from these visits that I interpret the mind of the peasant.
Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire)
By the same token, as a remote worker, you shouldn’t let employers get away with paying you less just because you live in a cheaper city. “Equal pay for equal work” might be a dusty slogan, but it works for a reason. If with regard to compensation you accept being treated as a second-class worker based on location, you’re opening the door to being treated poorly on other matters as well.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
great remote workers are simply great workers. They exhibit the two key qualities, as Joel Spolsky labeled them in his “Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”:fn1 Smart, and Gets Things Done.
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins.
George Orwell (George Orwell Complete Collection)
Coworking together is not just about welcoming remote workers. It is important for real estate because it benefits both companies and their employees equally. Collaborating takes up the most important business and expensive costs — the workplace — and renders the service. The space-as-a-service model introduces balance sheets and creates staff flexibility.
wish coworker
As author Brigid Schulte writes, “Unlike a century ago, when Americans showed their status in leisure time, busyness has become the new badge of honor. So even as we bemoan workplaces where everyone is busy and no one is productive, busyness has actually become the way to signal dedication to the job and leadership potential. One reason for this is that, while productivity is relatively easy to measure on a factory floor, or on the farm, we have yet to develop good metrics for measuring the productivity of knowledge workers. So we largely rely on hours worked and face time in the office as markers for effort, and with the advent of technology and the ability to work remotely, being connected and responsive at all hours is the new face time.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: 30th Anniversary Edition (The Covey Habits Series))
Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself. Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom.
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
It was a gift from her husband, Prince Albert--though he neglected to wrap it--in 1852, and soon Queen Victoria had dubbed Balmoral, a remote 50,000-acre Scottish estate, “my dear paradise in the highlands.” For generations since, usually in summer, the royals have immersed themselves in local culture: donning kilts, downing kippers and eggs and waking each morning to a lone piper playing outside the Queen’s bedroom window. Removed from many of their daily duties and the paparazzi, the royals are free to mix with the locals: e.g., playing in cricket matches organized by Prince Edward and showing off their Scottish folk-dancing skills at an annual ball for the estate’s workers. Sound like fun? You can do it too. For many years the Queen has rented out several historic cottages on the grounds--some within 300 yards of the castle--for up to $2,000 a week.
People Magazine (People: The Royals: Their Lives, Loves, and Secrets)
Remote workers aren’t trying to escape doing work. We’re trying to escape the Day Prison. We want to use technology to make better use of our time. We want to spend more time on things that matter to us and less time stuck in traffic.
Lisette Sutherland