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Arlene's avatar

I'm married and have a child and flexibility is important to me for obvious reasons, the sort that companies will likely recognize first because companies recognize it's a good thing to tout you are good for working families. But I wish many companies would realize that for their un-coupled employees, singlehood can mean bearing the cost burden of expensive urban centers alone. Flexibility means a person relying only on their own income can maybe buy a house in a cheaper area or travel back to their aging parents for regular periods if they need care, for example. There are so so many reasons flexibility is good for ALL types of employees.

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Sarah's avatar

The thing I think about a lot is the infrastructure of work.

I work as a designer for one of the Big Tech companies. Theoretically I can work from anywhere, and my bosses really don't care where that is as long as the work gets done in a timely fashion. However, my productivity depends on being able to move stupid quantities of data around quickly and reliably. Pre-pandemic, I rarely worked remotely because finding someplace with the kind of internet connection I need outside an office building where the owners had invested in Serious Bandwidth is difficult.

Currently my housemate and I are trying to share one of the fastest connections available in this midsize city as she works for the Social Security administration, and I do my thing. I am trying to only move large files around when she's done for the day, because otherwise there isn't enough bandwidth for her to actually talk to the people she serves.

If remote work is the future (and I suspect it is), employers need to address infrastructure. the benefit of a work place is your workers having infrastructure to do the things they need to do.

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