how do you explain the remote work culture to your...
# randoms
strong-evening-37474
11/14/2019, 9:43 AMhow do you explain the remote work culture to your friends and families? (Yes including those highly curious relatives haha 🙈) Been 2 years but I still don't think I am able to do justice with the explanation on why this culture is not popular in India or indian companies and why and how I work. Thought this would make an interesting question for our community here 😄
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loud-glass-33663
11/14/2019, 9:47 AMWhy its not popular?
It is hard to do partial remote work - which is what most companies choose to do in India with their WFH thing.
You need to work atleast 70-80% WFH and can go to the office 20% of the time. Then the culture of remote sets in.
If WFH is the the exception rather than the norm, people abuse it by chilling, watching TV, etc. i.e. Not working.
That is what most people think of when you say - you are working from home.
loud-glass-33663
11/14/2019, 9:49 AMThat is why it is hard to imagine that work even happens from home. Most of people working from home partially that I have observed tend to have lower levels of productivity. It is not only a matter of ethics - but also the fact that it is extremely difficult to get into the working mindset from a place where you don’t work.
Hence it is so amusing to people - still. As the only remote work they have heard about is when people are doing WFH on a few days in which they know - no work is happening 🙂
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strong-evening-37474
11/14/2019, 10:29 AMyep, makes sense. Seems like it will be hard to explain because of this same reason (i.e. people's assumption of wfh/remote = chilling at home) 😄
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worried-librarian-12856
11/14/2019, 10:44 AMGreat points @loud-glass-33663. Also, spam ads make it harder. Poster like Ghar baithe aasani se paise kaise kamaye (How to easily earn money at home?)
I recently noticed it is hard to explain about remote work to family relatives/non-tech people because everything we do is online and has no physical presence. It is easy for people to understand things when they can see it in real life. It is easy for my dentist friend to explain his profession because he has a dental clinic. Some doctors, lawyers also have home-office. They meet their patients/clients at home. But it is not common for engineers. It is expected for them to go to big cities like Bangalore after study. Things are slowly changing though.
Another reason I think is we remote developers do not post about it on platforms like FB where our non-tech connections are. We are active on tech twitter and communities like this. Recently I started posting about remote work on my FB and received comments/DM from my old friends who want to know more about it. Most of them like it and wish they can work remotely as well but their particular Job market does not allow.
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careful-petabyte-17641
11/15/2019, 4:29 AMI experience a similar issue. We work with a number of clients globally and turn up for work intheir timezones.
I've got it through to my parents now (how we work, not what we do as that's a totally different story) .
I explained to them that the alternative to hiring us (PM + Community/Content) is 2 full time members of staff, or expensive on-site contractors. We're a duo that aren't held within another 3 layers of leadership, travel costs, pension requirements etc.
We flex to provide worldwide coverage (one client today is in NZ, the other Peru and we have calls with each)
So it makes sense for some companies to employ us as we're more cost effective, we can flex in number of hours etc.
On top of that, this is the most suitable lifestyle for us as we can travel to wherever we want (within reason), do some work, and see the city
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worried-librarian-12856
11/15/2019, 6:15 AM@careful-petabyte-17641 I was wrong to think that the difficulty to explain remote work to parents/relatives/friends/non-tech connections is specific to Indians 😅