💸 WeBroke: WeWork files for bankruptcy

Good Morning,

Today marks a fun milestone: one year of weekly Remote Source emails.

Remote Source has taken on various forms in the last several years, but the newsletter wasn’t sent frequently until these past 52 weeks. And with that weekly cadence, it’s truly taken off.

So I’d like to give a huge THANK YOU! to every single one of you for reading, engaging with, and sharing this newsletter.

The mission has always been the same: to encourage and facilitate remote work, because remote work meaningfully improves people’s lives.

And now… it’s time to discover bigger and better ways to bring remote work to the masses 🚀

Looking forward to the next year with you all!

Remote Source Job Board

Featured companies:

Apex Systems: 107 remote jobs
1Password: 30 remote jobs
Kin: 17 remote jobs

🤝 Find Remote Jobs Here

Need to Know

🥊 An incredible RTO takedown: there’s no data to justify return-to-office
There’s still no data that could possibly back up the office push that so many organizations - like Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and more - are enforcing. The only studies that show office work being more productive are ones that are starkly different than a majority of office jobs in Corporate America.

In some cases, the return to office is a thinly-veiled attempt at reducing headcount. But in all cases, it’s eroding loyalty and showing that managers would rather return to what they know instead of moving forward and working to find ways to make their company stronger.

There is simply no data that justifies routine office work over remote work. If it existed, we would have seen it by now. (Insider)

💸 WeWork bankrupt amid glut of empty offices
In an expected move, WeWork has filed for bankruptcy. By the numbers, the company value has dropped from a peak of $47 billion to $45 million last week, and it currently has $18 billion in debt. The company was already in trouble before the pandemic, with a value that had dropped to $7 billion after a poor IPO roadshow. But with less people going into offices of any kind, WeWork has had far fewer memberships than expected and hasn’t been able to fill their offices as they’d hoped. (New York Times)

👨🏻‍💼 Nine home & office worker personas
It’s rare for people and their companies to have perfect alignment on remote and office policies. A study just published by Harvard Business Review defined nine personas that encompass all employees in remote-possible roles:

The study says that it’s essential for managers to understand their employee preferences and attitudes toward the location policy. Whether it leads to creating mini-office hubs for community-seekers, or shifting certain employees to individual contributor or management roles, it’s important to create as much alignment with each person as possible. (Harvard Business Review)

🏠 Converting offices to apartments is becoming more difficult
We wrote previously that the federal government is heavily incentivizing apartment conversion projects. But on top of the difficulty of these projects - one developer said “it’s like building a ship inside a bottle” - less than 1% of office space in major cities is eligible in the eyes of developers. Further, rental rates have dropped and construction costs have increased recently. So even though on the surface these conversions seem logical, they likely won’t take place as rapidly as many affordable housing advocates would like. (Wall Street Journal)

🧑‍💻 The best cities for digital nomads, ranked
A company called WorkMotion developed a comprehensive ranking system for “workations” in 85 cities, and found these ten to be the best:

1. Barcelona, Spain

2. Dubai, UAE

3. Prague, Czech Republic

4. Madrid, Spain

5. Melbourne, Australia

6. Amsterdam, Netherlands

7. Lisbon, Portugal

8. Sydney, Australia

9. Gran Carania, Spain

10. Reykjavik, Iceland

Saved you a click! But for those interested, the link has much more detail about the ranking criteria. (WorkMotion)

🙅 Most employees are willing to quit and take pay cuts for remote work
In a recent survey, almost two-thirds of employees said they would take a pay cut if it meant they could have more location flexibility in their jobs. As most surveys show, this one found plenty of workers still want to go into the office sometimes for various reasons - just not as often as they are required to today. (Fortune)

👏 Gable highlights best practices for developing remote strategies
The software company’s recent webinar featured successful remote leaders, and Gable summarized the takeaways:

1. Give employees guidance on how to work together, the best ways to collaborate, and why and when it’s essential to come together in person.

2. Base all your workplace decisions on data, and stay on top of qualitative and quantitative insights to plan for future workplace iterations.

3. Identify key moments for employees to meet in person and develop them into a deliberate strategy.

Whether companies want to be remote-first like Upwork, or destination-first like Harness, leaders need to evaluate many factors to ensure employees are able to produce their best work. (Gable)

Stuff We Like

The catch-all section for anything we find that could be useful for remote workers.

• The 4-Day Week Job Board

  I don’t currently have an opinion about the 4-day workweek, but it’s slowly been picking up steam across the world and is highly appreciated by those who have tried it. This job board only has jobs that are for 4 days a week, while retaining full pay. And like any good job board, they have a remote filter.

  
  

• Briefcase Coach: Interview Coaching and Resume Review
  We don’t have any association with this organization, but it can’t hurt to provide more resources for job seekers.
  
  

• The Secrets to Happiness at Work, from Harvard’s Arthur Brooks

  Brooks is a professor and co-author with Oprah Winfrey of Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier.

In addition to insinuating that workaholism is truly pathological, Brooks shares this nugget in the interview:

This weekend, Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” skit referenced the recent NYT article that declared the 5-day (in-office) work week dead, citing the desire for flexible work.

Incredible to hear, and it’s very promising for the future that this kind of language is now in the mainstream.

And speaking of language, keep an eye out for what Bloomberg has identified as the next acronyms in flexible & remote work, including my favorite, POTATO: “possibly on Tuesdays and Thursdays only.”

Cheers,
Grant

*Denotes a sponsored or affiliate link. Any paid sponsorships, products, or services are thoroughly vetted by us before we make recommendations to readers.