It wasn’t too long ago that asking your boss to work from home would likely stunt your career aspirations. And, while some companies still frown on the idea of employees working from home, there is no stopping this shift towards working remotely, a shift that has been taking place for the last several years.

Want further proof that remote work is on the rise, despite reluctance from some companies? Here are excerpts from an article, written by Valerie Bolden-Barrette for HRDive titled, Working remotely is now the norm for developers, new study shows

• Eighty-six percent of IT developers work remotely, with almost one-third working from home full time, according to a study by DigitalOcean, a cloud-based platform. Of the more than 4,500 respondents to the study, Currents: A Seasonal Report on Developer Trends in the Cloud: Remote Work Edition, 43% said that the ability to work remotely is “a must-have” when considering a job offer.
• Contrary to the belief that remote workers are isolated and disengaged from the workforce, 71% of respondents who work remotely said they feel connected to their organization’s community. However, the 29% of remote workers who feel isolated said they’re disengaged from their company’s culture and excluded from offline conversations with team members when working offsite. Seventy-six percent of respondents expected remote work to offer more work-life balance, but many reported working longer hours and that their work-life balance was only slightly better than their onsite colleagues.
• Although remote work is considered the norm for developers, a plurality (47%) started working offsite between one and four years ago. The study also found that on a scale of 1-5, a flexible work schedule was “very important” to many of the respondents (44%).

Despite the above-mentioned stats that shows an upward trajectory, that more companies are adopting a remote workforce mentality-you will have to build a compelling case on the benefits of remote work if your employer does not believe it in.

Here’s some additional stats from the article; “Remote work has swiftly become a norm, especially in a tight labor market with more specialized jobs. Since 2005, the number of U.S. employees who work from home at least half the time has more than doubled, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But employers have been comparably slow in outlining how such arrangements work for their companies; a majority of employers surveyed in a 2018 Upwork study lacked any official remote work policy”.

Bottomline: There are certain jobs like payroll and HR and in some industries  that require employees to be in the office or on a job site. On the other hand, other jobs like software programing or sales can be done remotely.  In the end, if you have presented a strong business case on the reasons why you should work remotely, and it does not match with your employers’ corporate culture, it might be best, in the end, to start looking elsewhere.

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