# Remote Work 2020 | Introduction
Companies are always on the lookout for new levers to drive growth and profitability. In this context, innovation in talent management has always been amongst the most important levers. From 360-degree feedback in the 1950s, to offshoring business functions for cost savings in late 1990s, firms have constantly adapted themselves to the needs of the talent market. Now, it is time for them to embrace remote work wholeheartedly.
# History of remote work
Post the WWII, as the world economy started to gain momentum, large offices with cubicles started to appear. With phones, cars and planes becoming mainstream, international expansion started once again, with companies having presence across multiple countries. At this point of time, company offices were already working remotely to one-another.
But it wasn't until the advent of computers, which accelerated the growth of the knowledge economy, and later the internet, that "remote work" as we see today started to appear. These technologies allowed individuals to collaborate and contribute without the need to be in the same location.
Massive proliferation, improved reliability and easy access of these technologies has since made remote work evolve from an occasional employee necessity, to company-provided perk, to now, a serious way of working.
# Encouraging stats for remote work
- Let's just start with one of the most mind boggling stats released recently by The Economist - there could be one billion remote workers by the year 2035!
So, do we have to wait till 2035 to see a massive change in people's preferences. Absolutely not! In this next 2-3 years, an estimated 59 million people are considering the life of a digital nomad 😵
On the employers' side, 43% in the US said they plan to allow their employees to have more remote working opportunities in the next year 😍.
This increase in remote interest amongst employers can be observed in the steep rise in jobs posted on remote job boards & portals such as We Work Remotely & Flexjobs. The former is up from 317 jobs in 2013 to a whopping 2388 in 2018 📈. As for FlexJobs, it saw a 52% increase in telecommute-friendly jobs posted in the past two years.
# Important Landmarks in Remote Work 2020
- Gitlab's IPO in Late 2020
- Invision & Gitlab cross the 1000 employees mark
- Boston, Vermont, Tulsa, among other cities and states in the US, offer incentives to remote workers in the form of tax breaks and relocation subsidies
- Tokyo tests out a trial remote working policy to encourage individuals to work from home and unblock the public transport system in preparation for 2020 Olympic games
- Remote First Capital makes its first few investments
# Tweets and Quotes by top leaders
"If we were to start over I would have built Zoom fully remote. It's too expensive here now."
- Eric Yuan, CEO, Zoom
"If your output as a business is purely digital and there are knowledge-based workers, there's no reason why you can. The way I like to say it is - if most of your people come to work everyday and open/look at their computer and hours later go home, they could have done that from anywhere."
- Darren Murph, Head of Remote, Gitlab
# Exploring the Remote Work 2020 report
The Remote Work 2020 report is meant to be a combination of three broad sections:
- State of Remote Work 2020: Stats & figures based on our survey of 331 remote workers from Invision, Gitlab, Doist and many more distributed teams!
- Remote work guide: Our commentary on pressing topics around remote work based on learnings from interactions with leaders of distributed teams and successful remote workers.
- Podcasts & stories: The actual source of truth for us 😀. The collection of podcasts with leaders from Gitlab, Invision, Doist, Scrapinghub, FlexJobs, etc. and chronicles of remote workers - the people we have learnt the intricacies of remote work from!
Each of these sections has been further sub-divided into more focused topics that we have tried to uncover. Use the navigation on the left to choose specific narratives that interest you 😬!
Goes without saying - if you have any feedback, feel free to drop a mail to [email protected].
