This week, Northern Europe has been on high alert because of a mysterious #BeastfromtheEast — a storm of such magnitude that it has led to food shortages and general shut down across my home nation. Many businesses owners went to sleep on the watch for red alerts to see if employees could go to work that day, and remote working became the topic of the day.

This Wednesday morning, after grabbing some essentials at the shops, I got back to my desk by about 10 (yes I did throw a few snowballs — come on!) and got back to work. My newsfeed was full of how this is only the beginning of the cold snap and most businesses we have engaged with this morning are preparing to get back to work as normal by Monday. With the work we do at meetingRoom.io and our belief in remote work, we admit, we are biased to think this is just a crazy approach to work in 2018.

Our team lives and breaths the problems that doing remote work itself is addressing and the outcomes that sprout from it. The good news is that there is another way. A remote way. A realistic way for workers to do impactful work across the world.

The Benefits of Remote Work

Time: You can get everyone together quickly — react when the problem hits rather than when the next time everyone is in a room together — we didn’t miss a beat today because we were able to make our daily sync call.

Growth: All organisations are trying to grow, but when the expansion hits, can you find people in your location?

Culture: People complain about poor remote work cultures — we think that the benefits mean that it can be better than being in office. There’s some great insight in Harvard Business Review this month on collaborating remotely which we recommend checking out.

Robustness: We didn’t have to reschedule any of our internal calls so far this week, and we were able to get real meaningful work done between a group of 9 people from all over Ireland, from daily standups to 1 on 1 check-in, as well as customer calls. We were able to do it comfortably and warm while the country lost it over bread. Millions of people get to work like this every day, with a balance that suits them.

The State of Remote Work Released this week points to the top reasons why workers enjoy working remotely.

The Turning Point for Remote Working: Digital Enablement

If it’s not evident yet, I hold a personal bias on the subject at hand: remote work is a no brainer and exposing your business to the risk of Irish weather (or wherever you might be) is no way to work in 2018.

But not everything about remote working is perfect. Conference calls are often a huge barrier to productivity, so we at meetingRoom are building a tool to change that. We care and that’s what drags us out of bed every morning to make this possible. Ireland is on course as a world leader in terms of sustainability. We need to ensure we don’t just engage in making it a hub for business and the place to work, but the place to live and work.

If you’d like to try out the future of work we’re building at meetingRoom, you can request access to the software by clicking here below, we’d love to have you on board.