1. Understand that remote work has downsides

People often say that if you allow remote work, excellent engineers will come and everything will be great. But we need to understand the downsides clearly and prepare countermeasures.

For example, what should we do about training new graduates? New employees have endless questions when they first join. We need ideas for how to solve that remotely.

There is also the issue of slacking off, or conversely burning out. Because you cannot see other people’s pace, how do you prevent people from overdoing it or taking it too easy?

There are many other remote-work issues too: mindset, communication when delicate problems occur, and so on.

We need to prepare systematic countermeasures for these things.

2. Choose employees who can work remotely, and think in terms of remote-work ability

Some people can work remotely, and some cannot. That has nothing to do with whether they are talented. Some excellent people are not suited to remote work, and some newcomers can work remotely.

We need to recognize this clearly.

In other words, once you declare that you will use remote work, people in distant locations also become hiring candidates. But people who cannot work remotely need to be excluded from that candidate pool.

Which approach is better requires careful judgment. Remote work is a skill. We need to think about how to judge whether someone has that skill.

It may also be possible to improve this to some extent by continuously developing remote-work ability.

3. Introduce it for everyone, not only for some people

Remote work is a process. It is a process for how people should work so that a company organization can create products and customers.

Just as waterfall development and agile development cannot easily coexist even though we may need to take the good parts of both, remote work cannot coexist casually with office work.

If they are made to coexist too casually, the process becomes confused and the organization becomes divided. In principle, I think remote work should be introduced for everyone, not only for some people.

If this point wavers, remote work turns into something like a privilege or reward for people above a certain position. Remote work should be introduced as a process, not as compensation. As I have written above, remote work clearly has negative aspects, and raising productivity beyond those negatives requires understanding across the whole organization.

Remote work has many issues. When those issues are solved, there is also a lot to gain. Changing an existing organization will be even harder.

There may also be cases where someone pushes remote work simply because they do not want to commute. That will not pass. It has to be advanced from an organizational perspective.

Personally, my ideal is an organization where people gather in one place by project, can shut themselves in together when needed, and can work remotely overall.