I was talking with a fella a while back who was very pleased with himself. He had just landed a new job with a company that paid £10k more than he was currently earning. Just one snag – the company was based in Dublin. They were in North Dublin, so he reasoned he could do the commute in an hour and a half, plus he figured he could work from home a few days a week.
I caught up with him last week and asked him how it was going. He had the thousand-yard stare of someone who has just come back from the frontlines in Ukraine. The commute turned out to be 2 hours and 45 minutes each way! He hadn’t factored in the soul-destroying traffic around Dublin during rush hour.
The thing that is really breaking him, though, is the fact that when he gets to work, he’s just sitting in front of a computer – something he could be doing perfectly well from his house in Belfast. My advice was simple: ask his employer if he can go fully remote.
Some jobs genuinely require you to be on-site. You can’t exactly perform surgery or stock shelves from your living room. But if your job involves staring at a screen and sending emails, why not do it from somewhere more comfortable (and far less congested)?
One guy I know has absolutely nailed it. He’s got a fully remote job with a London-based company, pulling in a handsome London salary of £95k while living in cheap-as-chips Belfast. He only needs to fly over once a month for meetings and otherwise works from his living room.
Another chap works for an organisation in Frankfurt. He does a few days back and forth each month. Bit of a pain, but it’s the trade-off he’s chosen.
I foresee a trend where certain occupations start moving back to home-based setups. If I were a GP burned out by the NHS bureaucracy, it would be a no-brainer to offer private consultations from home. The same goes for physios, therapists, beauticians, hairdressers and a whole bunch of other professions that could quite comfortably shift to a home-based model. In some ways, we will go back to the past, 100 years ago, most GPs practised from home.
Sure, some companies are trying to drag staff back to the office, and I get that remote work isn’t ideal for everyone – especially younger people who want to socialise or get mentored. But one unexpected upside of the Covid pandemic is that it cracked open the door to new, more flexible ways of working.
One expected trend that has not materialised so far is the emergence of more co-working spaces around our towns and villages. But maybe I am wrong about this. Do let me know in the comments. I know there is the new Cushendall Innovation Centre, which revamped the old police station into a co-working space. It would be good to see more places use old buildings with this model.
Every organisation is different, so there’s no one-size-fits-all. Some will thrive with fully remote setups and occasional meetups; others will want people in the office three days a week. And some might still insist on the full five days on-site, for better or worse.
But if you’re spending more time on the road than you are with your family, or more money on petrol than you save with your pay rise… maybe it’s time to rethink things.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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