As the work landscape continues to evolve, so does the terminology used to talk about it. In remote work, as in any other sort, professionals feel passionately about the words used to describe them and their working styles. Nuances in meaning have an impact on understanding, focus, and culture.
For example, experts in the field continue to debate the use and meaning of “remote-first” vs. “remote-friendly” or “remote-equal.” “Remote work” can feel polarizing to teams of hybrid employees. And terms such as “hybrid team” and “hybrid work” have multiple uses and interpretations.
At Workplaceless, we intentionally select and use words depending on the given situation. Here’s how we define and use some key terms involved in remote work.
What Does Remote Work Mean?
Remote work is a phrase with the fundamental definition of “work that is done outside a central office.” The term is expansive, covering situations in which individuals work from home or in coworking spaces, or while traveling for business or as part of a digital nomad lifestyle.
Remote work is in high demand since it affords flexibility in location—and often schedule—in a way that co-located work currently does not. It is at the root of a placeless mindset because it prioritizes location-independent, flexible, and autonomous work, and its appropriate use applies to both fully distributed and hybrid teams.
What does working remotely mean?
What does it mean to work remotely? Working remotely is a phrase used to describe when an employee is not working in an office. It can refer to someone who works remotely all of the time, or it can refer to the current situation of an employee who is on a hybrid schedule.
What are the benefits of remote work?
Remote work offers several benefits to both employees and employers.
For employees, remote work provides flexibility in their location and often their schedule, allowing for a better work-life balance. It can also eliminate the need for commuting, reducing stress and expenses associated with transportation. For most, this leads to increased job satisfaction.
On the flip side of the coin, employers can benefit from remote work by having access to a larger pool of talent, reduced overhead costs, and increased productivity and employee satisfaction. Remote work simultaneously allows for a more inclusive and diverse workforce, as location is no longer a barrier to employment.
What are the challenges of remote work?
While the remote working model can be beneficial for many, remote work also presents some unique challenges that must be addressed by both employees and employers.
With the lack of physical office spaces, communication, team building, and collaboration can become more difficult. Employees in remote positions may struggle with setting boundaries between work and personal life, leading to burnout.
Employers may face difficulties in monitoring the productivity and engagement of remote employees. To remedy this, it is crucial for both parties to establish clear expectations and communication strategies to overcome these challenges. Our page on asynchronous communication discusses solutions to these issues at length.
Now that we conceptually understand the remote work definition, let’s discuss the different types of remote work.
Remote-only
What does remote-only mean? Remote-only is a term specifically used to reference a company where all employees work remotely. In these organizations, remote-first must be the default because there is no central office location. These organizations are 100% distributed.
However, this doesn’t mean remote-only companies never see each other in person. Rather, they unite at retreats to build connectivity and a sense of belonging and community.
Fully remote
Fully remote is a type of remote work that means you only work remotely – you never go into a physical location for your job. While remote-only refers to a company that has an entirely remote workforce, fully remote refers to the work style of an individual employee. That said, fully remote can also imply that the company is not open to employees working from a central office location.
Remote-first
What does remote-first mean? Remote-first is an increasingly popular adjective used to address a company and cultural mindset about where and how work is completed. It is an intentional mode of working, communicating, and collaborating.
The term originally began to appear when remote workers were isolated and not fairly included in business conversations or decisions simply because of their geographic location. Shifting to remote-first language and practices was intended to ensure that professionals and teams were first thinking about how a work goal could be accomplished in a remote way that included remote coworkers, rather than defaulting to common in-office practices.
However, more recently, some hybrid teams have felt that the term remote-first favors remote professionals, even if the practices themselves are intended to be inclusive of all. The origin of the term was intended with inclusion in mind, not exclusion, so it’s particularly interesting to see how its use and interpretation has evolved.
Remote-equal
is an emerging term that is used to describe the status of professionals. The term is most commonly used among hybrid teams in an attempt to demonstrate that employees working within a centralized office and employees working remotely are equally valued and supported. However, the phrase lacks a cultural mindset or focus on how or where work is accomplished.
Remote-friendly
is a term most frequently used to describe a team or company dynamic that is open to allowing remote work. Companies use the term to varying degrees, but are not necessarily prioritizing work from a remote-first or digital-first mindset; often employees are working remotely only for a portion of the time or for a subset of their roles. Here’s Doist’s take on remote-first vs remote-friendly.
The hybrid working model
is a space that exists somewhere between remote-only work and in-office-only work. A hybrid worker may spend three days per week working from home, and two days in the office. Or, hybrid workers may have weeks or months where they work completely remotely, followed by periods of time when their job requires them to be on-site in an office. There are a variety of hybrid working models, and each is uniquely defined by how distant remote and co-located workers physically are from each other.
Another important aspect of hybrid working models is the use of technology to facilitate communication and collaboration between remote and in-office workers. This can include video conferencing, project management software, and other tools that help bridge the gap between physically separated employees.
Flexible work
has a broad definition that focuses jointly on the location of where and timing or when work occurs. Professionals are increasingly seeking flexible work as a way to achieve work-life balance. The term flexible work is most frequently used in relation to work arrangements where an individual chooses their work schedule and location, but can also include additional situations like job sharing, part-time work, etc. Remote work is a critical component of flexible work, since true flexibility is challenging, if not impossible, to achieve when constrained by location.
Async work
is work that is completed on one’s own time; collaboration and communication do not occur in real time. To understand async work, it’s helpful to first understand synchronous and asynchronous communication.
Beginning in 2020, interest in async work grew exponentially as professionals began to realize how important async work is to working remotely without burning out. Experienced and effective remote or hybrid teams often use remote work and async work interchangeably due to this critical linkage.
Async-first
is an approach that focuses less on the location of work and more on how work can get done independently, without requiring team members to always be working at the same time. Shifting to async-first refutes the idea that all work gets done in meetings, and gives workers more autonomy to accomplish work goals during the times most effective for them.
Async-first is about balancing and organizing work to allow for deeper focus and giving employees more flexibility over their own schedules. Learn more about the benefits of asynchronous communication. Async-first does not mean async-only—it can be used by both remote and hybrid teams. Async-first is truly the key to flexibility and autonomy for the future of work.
Digital-first
is an emerging work adjective that was previously more associated with marketing, technology, and business strategy. It is being adopted to address the same mindset as remote-first without the backlash from in-office employees since it focuses on the technology rather than the location.
Here, the approach is focused on how work can be accomplished in a digital way, independent of location. The term digital-first isn’t as common as remote-first, but as companies like Slack adopt its use, its growth will continue.
We often see teams struggle with the use of remote-first, digital-first, and async-first:
As you can see, all of these terms are related and their definitions are intertwined. The language of work is unstable, especially as organizations continue to invent their own words to describe what they envision to be the most successful future of work
Workplaceless is committed to continually learning and sharing our knowledge about the language of remote work in our remote work dictionary and within our programs.
