I welcome the growing movement toward virtual work because I believe it is allowing work to be re-designed for greater human flourishing. Several years ago, Peter Drucker said, "The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself towards performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness." Virtual workers are primarily made up of knowledge workers, and by virtue of their distance from managers, they are self-directed.
The most frequent reason knowledge workers give for choosing remote work is because 
they want flexibility. Virtual work offers two kinds of flexibility, both of which increases human flourishing.
Autonomy
The first way virtual work is flexible is worker autonomy; "direct himself" as Drucker put it. 77% of millennials say they would quit their job for greater flexibility over where and when they work. Among workers of all ages, 74% say they would make that same decision. (Softchoice.com)
Virtual workers have a greater opportunity to do their work in a way that makes sense to them and their teammates because the close supervision that occurs is the office is not possible when workers are out of sight by virtue of distance. Also, virtual workers have less supervision because their managers lack the knowledge of customers and conditions that the remote workers acquire locally. A virtual team has the freedom to puzzle over how their task is going and to change course when something is not working as well as it should, so experimentation as well as the resultant learning, is significantly increased. Finally, if an organization functions in a way that goes against virtual workers' ethical or moral standards, they are more able to speak out about their concern or to leave. They are a part of the growing gig economy that is not tied to location or organization.
In my studies of virtual teams, one of the managers I interviewed, Kim Glover, the Global Manager of Knowledge Management at TechnipFMC, exemplified worker autonomy, as this quote from one of her team members illustrates. I feel like I've got my boss's support for anything, and that makes me just take a deep breath and get creative. Having the freedom to focus my energies on tasks that I feel are important is important to me, as is having teammates that will support me and vice versa. Such a sense of empowerment and commitment is consistently shown to be one of the highest contributors to employee job satisfaction.
Work-Life Balance
The second way virtual workers experience flexibility is through work-life balance. Working remotely allows employees the opportunity to balance family and work. It gives them a choice to live where they choose and thereby be more available to aging parents or the social and physical environment that fits their lifestyle. Research indicates that a lack of work-life balance and commute-related stress are two of the top factors that make people prefer a job with flexible options (FlexJobs Survey, 2018).
- 86% of people feel that working remotely reduces stress.
- 77% of people believe remote work improves general health because it allows for a better diet, more exercise, and a generally healthier lifestyle.
- 28% of people would even accept a 10-20% pay cut if it allowed them to work remotely. (FlexJobs Survey, 2018)
Pfeffer, in his book, Dying for a Paycheck, describes the stress that office-based workers too often experience. "The health website WebMD reported that work was the number one source of stress. The American Psychological Association's 2015 report Stress in America noted that the top two sources of stress were money and work, with almost one-quarter of all adults reporting extreme levels of stress. Sixty-one per cent said that workplace stress had made them physically sick, and 7 per cent said they had been hospitalized because of workplace stress and its physiological effects. There is the so-called Black Monday Syndrome, the fact that more people have heart attacks on Monday morning than at other times during the week, maybe because they are back at work after the weekend. The prevalence of heart attacks on Monday morning has caused hospitals to staff emergency rooms to correspond to the increased risk." It is this unhealthy level of stress that virtual workers reduce by working remotely.
Despite these alarming, but these well-documented facts, about office-based work, no workplace change effort in the last 40 years, has had much impact on the work culture, which produces such stress. This toxic culture has persisted even given numerous management theorists including Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Warren Bennis, Henry Mintzberg, Mary Follett and more recently Daniel Pink, all of whom have spoken about the need and benefits of worker autonomy. These theorists have explained that employees do their best work when they have the freedom to make choices about what they work on and how they do that work. They have advocated that employees need to bring their whole selves to work, rather than suppressing or playing down who they are outside of their work function, that is, that they are parents, caregivers of aging parents, homosexual, transgender, compassionate women, believers of less dominant religions, and on and on. But their voices have brought about only minimal change, perhaps because it is difficult to tie autonomy to productivity increases.
The productivity of knowledge workers is challenging to measure, even among those that are office-based. However, the few companies that have been able to track the productivity of remote workers have reported substantial increases in productivity.
- Best Buy's average productivity increased 35% through its flexible work program.
- British Telecom estimates productivity increased 20% through telecommuting.
- Dow Chemical estimates a 32.5% increase in productivity among its teleworkers
- Surveys and pilots conducted by IBM suggest that telework employees can be up to 50% more productive.
- Alpine Access, one of the nation's largest all-virtual employers, attributes a 30% increase in sales and a 90% reduction in customer complaints to its home-based agents.
- American Express telecommuters handled 26% more calls and produced 43% more business than their office-based counterparts
- Compaq Computer Corporation documented increased teleworker productivity ranging from 15 to 45% (TeleworkResearchNetwork.com, Kate Lister, April 2010)
Reports on other productivity indicators show:
- Companies allowing remote work have 25% lower employee turnover than those that don't. (Ultimate List of Remote Work Stats, 2019)
- Employers save an average of $11,000 per year, per remote employee. The savings accrue from not having to provide working space, hardware, electricity and internet bills. (State of Telecommuting, 2015)
- In 2017 companies that support remote work lost 9% of their employees, compared to 12% in companies that don't. (Owl Labs' 2017 State of Remote Work)
The remote movement is precipitating a much needed change in human flourishing in the world of work. As companies come to realize the economic benefits of remote work and as more and more workers choose to work for companies who provide this choice, it seems safe to predict that the future of work will bring greater human flourishing.
